I am not sure that the "cooked" turkey would actually be edible.
[...]
That wasn't the purpose of the question though. The submitter asked for the geekiest way. Not the most sensible way.:D
Does "geekiest" implicitly mean inedible? Because I reckon that if one is looking for geek methods for cooking a bird on turkey day, the obvious intent of the endeavor is to eat the results.
(Double-negative bonus points for being context-impaired.)
Shortly before serving I'd heat peanut oil and cook three pounds of bacon pieces. Then I'd put the still hot turkey into the hot oil for a short time, not to cook it further but merely to brown and crisp up the skin.
I want to watch you try to brown a whole proper Thanksgiving turkey in a few fluid ounces of pork fat. I want to do this so badly that I am willing to pay you to watch your attempt.
A counterpoint to all of this "yeah, just get an electric mower" drivel:
I got a push mower with a Honda engine more than half a decade ago. It mows about an acre every week or two.
Starting? I just give it one half-assed pull and it fires right up. Every time. *shrug*
Stink? Meh. It burns pretty cleanly. Any stink it produces is far enough below the threshold set by the odor of fresh-cut grass that I don't notice it.
Engine maintenance? Every now and then I knock the stuff off of the air filter and I try to remember to change the oil every year or two. It takes just a few minutes, and the used oil just goes into the containers I already have for the stuff I drain out of my cars. No big deal. One of these days I should pull the spark plug and replace it, but there's no indication yet that this is necessary.
Other maintenance is just usual lawnmower stuff: Sharpening the blade, clearing the discharge chute, fixing the deck as parts wear out...
Wrangling a couple of hundred feed of extension cord would be a huge hassle in comparison, especially since I have immovable objects in my lawn to mow around. And running gas through the lawnmower does a small part to keep the gasoline that I keep on-hand fresh for the other things I have that also use gas.
And besides, I probably pollute more in a few miles of driving an antique car with a Pontiac 301 and no cats than my whole neighborhood does in a year of gas-fired mowing.:)
Likewise, laptops also make fine servers, as long as you don't need much hardware expansion, and are willing to live with the fact that your once-portable computing device is now hard-tethered to a network (and whether that network consists of Ethernet or USB, it's still a net work of wires).
Come and see me when your Android tablet is doing realtime 1080p video transcoding -- by then, my desktop will be greedily munging 4k video with ease.
There is a place for pocket computers. And there is a possibility for them to actually supplant desktop computers. But not in 2013, and certainly not in 2014 either. Maybe not even before I die...
And I, for one, loathe using computers on my own 52" LCD. It's not any technological limitation (my TV has quite low latency and very good colorspace), it's just hard to focus on something that is either across the room or so close and huge that I have to turn my head to see the whole thing.
Mod parent up, please. There is generally nothing restricting me (as an individual, or as a business) from renting out anything that I own to others, from my DVD collection to my empty beer bottles, to the sad pile of VHS and Laserdisc movies that I still have.
(Except for computer software which, for some reason, has been declared special by an act of Congress. (And yes, I'm old enough to remember renting PC software from the "video store" before this happened.))
But if they wait until it's perfect, then they lose even more mindshare to two very competitive rivals: The domestic US smartphone market is running out of fresh non-preferential users, while the existing user base seems to have binary polarization between Android and iOS in ways that earlier competition between Symbian/Palm/Nokia/Blackberry never produced.
It's a tough market to get into, just now, and the longer they wait the tougher it gets...
So I think that in order to succeed, MSFT has to balance timeliness (as above) vs. hardware (wait too long, and your hardware turns stale), vs. software perfection.
In other words, were MSFT to be perfect at any one of these at the detriment of the other, it would be a far stronger nail in the coffin than a balance of the three.
And to be very clear: Their competitor's products (iOS and Android) are also far from perfect.
The question then, as I see it, is this: Did they balance it correctly to capture enough marketshare to sustain further development?
I personally hope not, given the extraordinary oppressiveness and money-grabbing nature of the walled garden that is Windows 8 on non-x86 platforms (the nature of which was apparently tried-and-tested with the Xbox 360), but I guess we'll see.
When I subscribed to U-Verse, it was made very clear to me that I was getting VOIP and a battery backup, and that the batteries would be my responsibility, and that it might not work if the power was out and I needed to make an emergency call. This was again made clear to me on the contract-looking form that I actually read before I signed it on installation day.
That said: The battery backup works fine. We, along with much of the rest of the state, lost power for over a week at the end of June, and ran a generator for just a few hours a day to keep the beer cold and recharge batteries. The U-Verse connection never faltered according to its logs, and I was always pleasantly surprised to find that it was still running off of its little battery after 16 or 20 hours.
FFS: A bigger worry would be the lack of a corded, line-powered phone in a modern household.
AT&T had shiny corporate-branded trailer-mounted gensets at every VRAD in every neighborhood that was dark, which they seemed to be able to keep fueled for the duration. AFAICT, this is SOP for their U-Verse areas.
Meanwhile I turned the supplied 2wire router into an open access point for the duration of the power outage. The range was quite remarkably good once everyone else's access points ran out of juice, and it was amusing seeing people in their front yards with lawn chairs browsing the web.
It may be worth pointing out that, AFAICT, AT&T does not currently measure (by any means, proprietary or not) usage for U-Verse subscribers.
They've made various noises about doing so, starting at the same time that they actually did introduce a 150GB cap on DSL users, but don't seem to have actually done it to the U-Verse crowd at all.
Going back in logged history on my own Tomato router (which, according to TFS, is likely to be 20-30% low), I've exceeded 250GB of transfer on 9 of the previous 22 months, with the biggest month being 424GB.
Never a peep from AT&T.
AT&T's usage monitoring page for my account consistently reads as such: Note: Your usage is not yet available for display. You should not be concerned about your usage for billing purposes. AT&T will keep you informed about your data usage via email.
As to costs, I've been paying $48 for 12/1.5 for quite a while now (it started off being $45).
There are special issue government sim cards and phone numbers that get top priority and skip the cell queue. So even if the tower is "jammed" by people calling, those phones get priority and still get through. So important communication still happens.
Likewise, for emergency calls from consumer phones: Dialing 911 (or the local equivalent) skips all queues, and will forcibly drop other (non-emergency) calls if it must.
But by jamming the tower, none of that works.
Indeed. And it has been that case for as long as radio has been radio, and will continue to be that way forever. *yawn*
My analogy is about buying beef. The beef could be butchered and packaged, or could still be mooing.
The analogy doesn't care, because 1000 pounds of beef is 1000 pounds of beef.
To properly extend my analogy: If I buy a living, breathing beef that is said to weigh 1000 pounds, it had better weigh 1000 pounds.
If I buy a whole side of beef that is said to weigh 1000 pounds, it had better weigh 1000 pounds.
And of course I buy a couple of freezers' worth of processed beef (steaks, roasts, grind, etc) and it is said to be 1000 pounds, those goods had better actually weigh 1000 pounds.
Now, granted, if I'm having a side beef processed, there will be loss. This is a different thing entirely, and it doesn't apply at all. AT&T is not (at least, according to my own contract with them) processing my data -- they're just selling transport services and the unit they've chosen to measure those services is the gigabyte...not "a gigabyte plus or minus 20 or 30 percent."
As for for the original poster's question on law, I doubt there is any requirement, though if you challenge them in court, it would have to be revealed, or they have no evidence.
I'm not digging into the Uniform Commercial Code right now because, well, I'm just not doing that right now.
But I'm -pretty sure- that using an intentionally-different definition of a unit is illegal, whether someone is selling bushels of corn, heads of lettuce, pounds of rice, or gigabytes of data.
A bushel is a bushel, a head is a head, a pound is a pound, and a gigabyte is a gigabyte.
Any significant variation from these standards (and TFS's variation is certainly significant) should be carefully scrutinized, and either explained, corrected, or penalized as appropriate.
Plainly, if someone sells me 1000 pounds of beef and as far as I can measure I only receive 750 pounds then that someone has got 250 pounds worth of explaining to do. I cannot imagine any circumstance under which this would be different for data transport.
That's exactly what it is. It is literally a copy of Virtual PC and an XP disk image.
And it's actually licensed to work that way for free (IIRC on all but the grungiest cut-rate versions of 7), and seems to work quite well enough on hardware that it supports*, for applications that don't rely on strange accessories**.
*: Some magic virtualization technology thing was added to CPUs more than a half-decade ago, and it claims to require that. In a nutshell, P4 and Pentium-M are out, and anything after that works fine.
**: USB devices tend to work natively within the VM but it's a pain to set them up like that. Other stuff, not so much. But that's not really different from other desktop VMs...
I remember an article, I think in a print copy of Wired from waaaaay back, about drug tests for ski lift operators.
The gist was this: They needed to make sure their operators were fit to do their job safely. Period.
To accomplish this, they did not introduce chemical tests, but instead electronic tests. The test (again, IIRC -- it's been a long time) measured response time and hand-eye coordination.
If you failed the test, you got the day off or went on lighter duties. If you passed the test, you got to work the ski lift that day and earn a better paycheck.
The theory was to measure people's state-of-mind at the time that they're getting to work, instead of punishing them for the things they did months ago, days ago, or (I dare say) hours ago.
People are fallible. We get sick, we get drunk, we do drugs, we fail to sleep, we sometimes worry about things too much, we get depressed... there's a lot of ways in which a person can fail to perform.
But there's no reason to discriminate: If Joe can't focus because he had to sit up all night with his girlfriend's dog at the vet, then that's really no different from Fred who can't focus because he did an 8-ball with his friends last night and didn't get any sleep. Either way, the best answer is to take some time to relax and come back and try again.
(And, of course: If Ted can manage to be drunk, stoned, and high, but still provably operate things safely, then so be it. I, for one, will gladly ride that ski lift over one operated by a sleep-deprived individual who only manages to punch a clock more-or-less on-time and pass a chemical drug test.)
I, myself, like this concept a lot. By measuring one's ability on a daily basis instead of analyzing one's past, safety can be improved, and nobody (usually) needs fired.
So, you are so intelligent that cannot live with your own thoughs?
I dont think Im brilliant, but [I] have a decent job, and [a] great family, [begin run-on sentence] and I would never smoke pot because I have seen what it does to people[.] [S]ince I was a kid, I have know[n] all kind[s] of junkies[.] and most of them started with pot and if they keep just on pot they would still do a lot of stupid things, and guess what? The few ones did rehave changed their way of life for better, the rest I knew from infance plus the cleaned ones are all dead, and I am 38, a few of them should be around still.
With the infirm grasp of English that you display, despite (apparently) being a native of the language, I am left to wonder: Are you even smart enough to participate in this conversation?
If I hadn't given up on correcting your prose once I was reminded of this, I might have caught more errors.
Maybe he's relaxed at work, and enjoys relaxing even more when he's home with a spliff (or a beer or a line or a bump or...)
Furthermore: Who are you to say what the proper state of relaxation is for someone else?
That all said, "work," almost by definition, isn't generally very relaxing for most people. If it were we'd all be working all the time, 112 hours every week.
But that's not how it tends to go. We call it work because it is work, and doing work is often not relaxing in comparison to other endeavors.
And yes, I agree. I myself own a somewhat fancy gaming mouse, and I don't see any merit to requiring online registration to enable useful functionality of such a device.
But there is a similarity: Different mouse settings for different games are not so dissimilar from different IR codes for different devices.
However, gamers (unlike Harmony users) are usually more than proud to show off their uber-l33t tricks, so forced registration is unnecessary: If someone wants to share what they've discovered, they'll do so (and they will).
The other idea is that Logitech have a database of pre-configured devices that can be uploaded to the remote which is continaully updated with newer models
And where do you think they got that cloud-based database of continual improvement? Oh, right: They crowdsourced it from folks who both had devices and were willing to use their Harmony remote to learn the IR codes from the original remote.
When accepting input from strangers, it's nice to be able to track its origins on a user basis. Hence, accounts.
(That's enough buzzwords from me for the rest of the week.)
Well, maybe that's it: Perhaps I just didn't feel like pushing an abused 25' box truck down the highway (full of my worldly possessions) any faster than 70-ish.
Ahh. Delivery groceries? Sign me up: It would be swell to take a walk to the store, shop, and then walk back and have the stuff delivered some time later.
Here in my town of ~40k in Ohio, we don't have such niceties. It's not suburban by any stretch of the imagination, as the next-biggest city is 45 miles away (with a whole lot of nothing between here and there). It's just a geographically-isolated small town, and everyone either drives or is driven to their destination.
The sidewalks tend to be pretty badly beaten up by the ancient (huge, and awesome) trees that line them, so small-wheeled carts are a no-go. And traffic is pretty hostile toward bikes if for no other reason than nobody seems to do much of anything practical with them in these parts.
Slashdot Mirror
[...]
Does "geekiest" implicitly mean inedible? Because I reckon that if one is looking for geek methods for cooking a bird on turkey day, the obvious intent of the endeavor is to eat the results.
(Double-negative bonus points for being context-impaired.)
I want to watch you try to brown a whole proper Thanksgiving turkey in a few fluid ounces of pork fat. I want to do this so badly that I am willing to pay you to watch your attempt.
Where do I sign up?
A counterpoint to all of this "yeah, just get an electric mower" drivel:
I got a push mower with a Honda engine more than half a decade ago. It mows about an acre every week or two.
Starting? I just give it one half-assed pull and it fires right up. Every time. *shrug*
Stink? Meh. It burns pretty cleanly. Any stink it produces is far enough below the threshold set by the odor of fresh-cut grass that I don't notice it.
Engine maintenance? Every now and then I knock the stuff off of the air filter and I try to remember to change the oil every year or two. It takes just a few minutes, and the used oil just goes into the containers I already have for the stuff I drain out of my cars. No big deal. One of these days I should pull the spark plug and replace it, but there's no indication yet that this is necessary.
Other maintenance is just usual lawnmower stuff: Sharpening the blade, clearing the discharge chute, fixing the deck as parts wear out...
Wrangling a couple of hundred feed of extension cord would be a huge hassle in comparison, especially since I have immovable objects in my lawn to mow around. And running gas through the lawnmower does a small part to keep the gasoline that I keep on-hand fresh for the other things I have that also use gas.
And besides, I probably pollute more in a few miles of driving an antique car with a Pontiac 301 and no cats than my whole neighborhood does in a year of gas-fired mowing. :)
I burn out my desktop...never, actually.
"OMG! It's so great that the battery goes flat every fucking day!" is not a feature, it's a curse.
Likewise, laptops also make fine servers, as long as you don't need much hardware expansion, and are willing to live with the fact that your once-portable computing device is now hard-tethered to a network (and whether that network consists of Ethernet or USB, it's still a net work of wires).
Come and see me when your Android tablet is doing realtime 1080p video transcoding -- by then, my desktop will be greedily munging 4k video with ease.
There is a place for pocket computers. And there is a possibility for them to actually supplant desktop computers. But not in 2013, and certainly not in 2014 either. Maybe not even before I die...
And I, for one, loathe using computers on my own 52" LCD. It's not any technological limitation (my TV has quite low latency and very good colorspace), it's just hard to focus on something that is either across the room or so close and huge that I have to turn my head to see the whole thing.
Mod parent up, please. There is generally nothing restricting me (as an individual, or as a business) from renting out anything that I own to others, from my DVD collection to my empty beer bottles, to the sad pile of VHS and Laserdisc movies that I still have.
(Except for computer software which, for some reason, has been declared special by an act of Congress. (And yes, I'm old enough to remember renting PC software from the "video store" before this happened.))
But if they wait until it's perfect, then they lose even more mindshare to two very competitive rivals: The domestic US smartphone market is running out of fresh non-preferential users, while the existing user base seems to have binary polarization between Android and iOS in ways that earlier competition between Symbian/Palm/Nokia/Blackberry never produced.
It's a tough market to get into, just now, and the longer they wait the tougher it gets...
So I think that in order to succeed, MSFT has to balance timeliness (as above) vs. hardware (wait too long, and your hardware turns stale), vs. software perfection.
In other words, were MSFT to be perfect at any one of these at the detriment of the other, it would be a far stronger nail in the coffin than a balance of the three.
And to be very clear: Their competitor's products (iOS and Android) are also far from perfect.
The question then, as I see it, is this: Did they balance it correctly to capture enough marketshare to sustain further development?
I personally hope not, given the extraordinary oppressiveness and money-grabbing nature of the walled garden that is Windows 8 on non-x86 platforms (the nature of which was apparently tried-and-tested with the Xbox 360), but I guess we'll see.
Some people might even enjoy it.
If you're 59 and already have artificial hips, then you are a zombie, and the NHC (New Healthful Race) does not care a whit for your needs*.
*: Because without modern medicine, you'd have already failed, and even in the best case driving a car would not be an option for you.
Perhaps. But would you be able to tell the difference?
When I subscribed to U-Verse, it was made very clear to me that I was getting VOIP and a battery backup, and that the batteries would be my responsibility, and that it might not work if the power was out and I needed to make an emergency call. This was again made clear to me on the contract-looking form that I actually read before I signed it on installation day.
That said: The battery backup works fine. We, along with much of the rest of the state, lost power for over a week at the end of June, and ran a generator for just a few hours a day to keep the beer cold and recharge batteries. The U-Verse connection never faltered according to its logs, and I was always pleasantly surprised to find that it was still running off of its little battery after 16 or 20 hours.
FFS: A bigger worry would be the lack of a corded, line-powered phone in a modern household.
AT&T had shiny corporate-branded trailer-mounted gensets at every VRAD in every neighborhood that was dark, which they seemed to be able to keep fueled for the duration. AFAICT, this is SOP for their U-Verse areas.
Meanwhile I turned the supplied 2wire router into an open access point for the duration of the power outage. The range was quite remarkably good once everyone else's access points ran out of juice, and it was amusing seeing people in their front yards with lawn chairs browsing the web.
*shrug*
It may be worth pointing out that, AFAICT, AT&T does not currently measure (by any means, proprietary or not) usage for U-Verse subscribers.
They've made various noises about doing so, starting at the same time that they actually did introduce a 150GB cap on DSL users, but don't seem to have actually done it to the U-Verse crowd at all.
Going back in logged history on my own Tomato router (which, according to TFS, is likely to be 20-30% low), I've exceeded 250GB of transfer on 9 of the previous 22 months, with the biggest month being 424GB.
Never a peep from AT&T.
AT&T's usage monitoring page for my account consistently reads as such: Note: Your usage is not yet available for display. You should not be concerned about your usage for billing purposes. AT&T will keep you informed about your data usage via email.
As to costs, I've been paying $48 for 12/1.5 for quite a while now (it started off being $45).
Draw your own conclusions.
Likewise, for emergency calls from consumer phones: Dialing 911 (or the local equivalent) skips all queues, and will forcibly drop other (non-emergency) calls if it must.
Indeed. And it has been that case for as long as radio has been radio, and will continue to be that way forever. *yawn*
My analogy is about buying beef. The beef could be butchered and packaged, or could still be mooing.
The analogy doesn't care, because 1000 pounds of beef is 1000 pounds of beef.
To properly extend my analogy: If I buy a living, breathing beef that is said to weigh 1000 pounds, it had better weigh 1000 pounds.
If I buy a whole side of beef that is said to weigh 1000 pounds, it had better weigh 1000 pounds.
And of course I buy a couple of freezers' worth of processed beef (steaks, roasts, grind, etc) and it is said to be 1000 pounds, those goods had better actually weigh 1000 pounds.
Now, granted, if I'm having a side beef processed, there will be loss. This is a different thing entirely, and it doesn't apply at all. AT&T is not (at least, according to my own contract with them) processing my data -- they're just selling transport services and the unit they've chosen to measure those services is the gigabyte...not "a gigabyte plus or minus 20 or 30 percent."
I'm not digging into the Uniform Commercial Code right now because, well, I'm just not doing that right now.
But I'm -pretty sure- that using an intentionally-different definition of a unit is illegal, whether someone is selling bushels of corn, heads of lettuce, pounds of rice, or gigabytes of data.
A bushel is a bushel, a head is a head, a pound is a pound, and a gigabyte is a gigabyte.
Any significant variation from these standards (and TFS's variation is certainly significant) should be carefully scrutinized, and either explained, corrected, or penalized as appropriate.
Plainly, if someone sells me 1000 pounds of beef and as far as I can measure I only receive 750 pounds then that someone has got 250 pounds worth of explaining to do. I cannot imagine any circumstance under which this would be different for data transport.
That's exactly what it is. It is literally a copy of Virtual PC and an XP disk image.
And it's actually licensed to work that way for free (IIRC on all but the grungiest cut-rate versions of 7), and seems to work quite well enough on hardware that it supports*, for applications that don't rely on strange accessories**.
*: Some magic virtualization technology thing was added to CPUs more than a half-decade ago, and it claims to require that. In a nutshell, P4 and Pentium-M are out, and anything after that works fine.
**: USB devices tend to work natively within the VM but it's a pain to set them up like that. Other stuff, not so much. But that's not really different from other desktop VMs...
See also: Edgeworth price cycle, which explains the sawtooth shape of retail gasoline price trends.
I remember an article, I think in a print copy of Wired from waaaaay back, about drug tests for ski lift operators.
The gist was this: They needed to make sure their operators were fit to do their job safely. Period.
To accomplish this, they did not introduce chemical tests, but instead electronic tests. The test (again, IIRC -- it's been a long time) measured response time and hand-eye coordination.
If you failed the test, you got the day off or went on lighter duties. If you passed the test, you got to work the ski lift that day and earn a better paycheck.
The theory was to measure people's state-of-mind at the time that they're getting to work, instead of punishing them for the things they did months ago, days ago, or (I dare say) hours ago.
People are fallible. We get sick, we get drunk, we do drugs, we fail to sleep, we sometimes worry about things too much, we get depressed ... there's a lot of ways in which a person can fail to perform.
But there's no reason to discriminate: If Joe can't focus because he had to sit up all night with his girlfriend's dog at the vet, then that's really no different from Fred who can't focus because he did an 8-ball with his friends last night and didn't get any sleep. Either way, the best answer is to take some time to relax and come back and try again.
(And, of course: If Ted can manage to be drunk, stoned, and high, but still provably operate things safely, then so be it. I, for one, will gladly ride that ski lift over one operated by a sleep-deprived individual who only manages to punch a clock more-or-less on-time and pass a chemical drug test.)
I, myself, like this concept a lot. By measuring one's ability on a daily basis instead of analyzing one's past, safety can be improved, and nobody (usually) needs fired.
With the infirm grasp of English that you display, despite (apparently) being a native of the language, I am left to wonder: Are you even smart enough to participate in this conversation?
If I hadn't given up on correcting your prose once I was reminded of this, I might have caught more errors.
I have no hope for you, drugs or not.
Kindest regards.
Maybe he's relaxed at work, and enjoys relaxing even more when he's home with a spliff (or a beer or a line or a bump or...)
Furthermore: Who are you to say what the proper state of relaxation is for someone else?
That all said, "work," almost by definition, isn't generally very relaxing for most people. If it were we'd all be working all the time, 112 hours every week.
But that's not how it tends to go. We call it work because it is work, and doing work is often not relaxing in comparison to other endeavors.
Yes, that's my suggestion.
And yes, I agree. I myself own a somewhat fancy gaming mouse, and I don't see any merit to requiring online registration to enable useful functionality of such a device.
But there is a similarity: Different mouse settings for different games are not so dissimilar from different IR codes for different devices.
However, gamers (unlike Harmony users) are usually more than proud to show off their uber-l33t tricks, so forced registration is unnecessary: If someone wants to share what they've discovered, they'll do so (and they will).
If you keen enough to fuck with EDID over audio issues, then you're keen enough for a Crestron or AMX system.
Except for the cost, of course...
And where do you think they got that cloud-based database of continual improvement? Oh, right: They crowdsourced it from folks who both had devices and were willing to use their Harmony remote to learn the IR codes from the original remote.
When accepting input from strangers, it's nice to be able to track its origins on a user basis. Hence, accounts.
(That's enough buzzwords from me for the rest of the week.)
Well, maybe that's it: Perhaps I just didn't feel like pushing an abused 25' box truck down the highway (full of my worldly possessions) any faster than 70-ish.
Ahh. Delivery groceries? Sign me up: It would be swell to take a walk to the store, shop, and then walk back and have the stuff delivered some time later.
Here in my town of ~40k in Ohio, we don't have such niceties. It's not suburban by any stretch of the imagination, as the next-biggest city is 45 miles away (with a whole lot of nothing between here and there). It's just a geographically-isolated small town, and everyone either drives or is driven to their destination.
The sidewalks tend to be pretty badly beaten up by the ancient (huge, and awesome) trees that line them, so small-wheeled carts are a no-go. And traffic is pretty hostile toward bikes if for no other reason than nobody seems to do much of anything practical with them in these parts.
So, for now, it is car.