I don't know, clean water seems to me like a worthwhile thing to spend money on.
Chlorine and fluoride seem like two pretty good reasons to not drink municipal "tap" water, never mind the horrid taste in many locations.
Now, if you've got clean well water, that's another story. Or he could be buying water from the store at $.25/gallon, or such.
From where I'm sitting, spending $3/day on bottled water is stupid, but not as stupid as spending $3/day on a sugar super-saturate with a higher concentration of fluoride and other nasties from the local bottling plant.
So because you have a problem you could not control on your own, you think the government should come in and save people.
This happens all the time: people have a fear, problem, or gripe, always about something they can not control, so they ask the government to come in and fix it for them. This is cowardly.
This is what you do: you take responsibility for your shortcomings, and you deal with them individually. If you see a problem in someone you care about, you talk to them about it. That is how social change is supposed to occur, not through the diktat of a gun.
Do you feed caffeine to your kids? I don't. They also get very little sugar. But I drink at least a (small) pot of coffee every day. I don't want it to be regulated. If you regulate something, you set that something up to have a grey market. If you ban it, there will be a black market. It doesn't reduce it's consumption, it juts makes it more covert.
The 'slippery slope' argument holds here. You don't like caffeine, so you say "regulate". Someone else doesn't like smoking, so they say "tax". Someone else doesn't like trans-fats, so they say "ban". Before you know it, we're living in the Orwellian "Demolition Man" world.
Drink your coffee until two or three in the afternoon, and start drinking liquor around 4pm. Then on to beer through the evening. You'll not get those coffee hangovers, and falling asleep at night is easier!
Kidding aside, I really don't think I experience the withdrawal like most people do. A pot and a half of strong coffee every day (call it around 34oz) is the norm, but there are days when I don't have any coffee (out, forgot to go to the store, etc.) and I don't get the cravings/headaches.
Though, I do miss the taste of the coffee/caffeine - I'm not denying that. But, for me (as with cigarettes and alcohol) I really don't get the "I'm going to rip your head off if I don't get some" even though they're all a regular part of my daily schedule.
ARM CPUs have been around for a while. They powered the last decade of handheld computers and PDAs (as well as some of the early "netbook" type devices, which didn't catch on due to their $1500-2000 "business user" price tags). There is probably one in your TV, alarm clock, digital camera, media player, stereo, and God knows what else.
ARM CPU are not "new to the market"; they're everywhere, and have been used in similar devices (as well as the big, expensive drool-over type servers and high-end workstations, back in the day). They just didn't advance in terms of core abilities as quickly as Intel (or should I say, Intel/Microsoft) did - due to a number of reasons.
That has changed, however. ARM processors are now at 800MHz on the low end, and mostly have specialized components built into the SoC for things like audio, video, etc. decoding and encoding - so it takes less actual power (in terms of watts and CPU MHz) to accomplish the same thing. On the high end, I believe we've got 4-core 1.5GHz ARM SoCs.
And if you want an older (arguably, a proof-of-concept, using fairly old ARM tech) netbook, check out the Alpha 400.
... "penetrate better with 150% better penis" or some such nonsense. It's got as much validity as what MS is spewing here. You expect us to believe you, when even your internal numbers don't match up? If they do "match up", then the only explanation is that MS is, essentially, giving away their OS for free for the netbooks, or charging a paltry fee.
I almost fell bad for the Executive level staff at Microsoft (and do feel sorry for the rank-and-file employees), because the $200 and even $100 netbooks aren't far off. Like, supposedly, April.
Yes, we've heard the "$100 laptop" fo a while now (a year or two) but this time, we really are pretty much there (if, for no other reason, the fact that prices do keep dropping, in one regard or another, and ARM hardware is cheap).
And yes, these low-cost netbooks will have ARM processors, because there's no other economic way to do it. And people will buy them - as long as Youtube, a modern browser, a decent word processor, and a chat client are there, 90% of users will be just fine.
Sorry buddy, that's just funny. Usually the only "policy" is "we want it cheap, we want it now, and the doctors get to decide", or something roughly approximating it in result.
The only actual 'policy' in most small/medium hospitals is "we don't change anything, even if we have to, unless the regulators say so". Ergo, you've got 15-year-old Windows with an ugly 17-year-old application port running on a single disk.
It is actually plausible that crime is higher by a PD. Consider that police operate effectively largely on the basis of force projection. Projecting force means they've got to spread out and, in part, create a perimeter within which they operate. The PD may have relied upon the force projection (ie the psychological influence the building would have) of the building, in part.
Also consider that a PD is more of a hub; police officers are coming and going to their respective patrol areas, going and coming off of shift. They are most likely not thinking "work" - ie, find criminals - at this time.
The PD may have been strategically placed where it was to dissuade crime in that specific area. I know that in the two largest cities in my state, the PDs are at, or near, the epicenter of low-income and crime (they're also just off the city centers). I lived near one of these PDs once, and it was indeed a higher crime area.
It's hard to say. I imagine it might be possible to run the same userland on top of two separate kernels, but there are certain packages in addition to drivers would need to target specific kernels - namely, Xorg packages, I think. Other than that, as long as the packages are built on the same libraries, and the libraries work with either kernel (or more accurately, there'd be multiple library versions per OS) it should be pretty straight forward.
Those who don't like to use recent technologies, do not deserve them.
They likely don't know what they like. They like what they're comfortable with, more than likely, and don't want to spend a lot of money: they likely figure that new = more expensive, because hey, it's a lot faster and more capable, right?
Also, systems of the vintage we're talking about don't use DIMMs. They used SIMMs. I have not seen a SIMM in maybe 5 years; the last time I saw them, they were very expensive when in working condition. I saw more used for jewelry - keychains and bag zipper pulls, mainly - than anything else.
There are a number of options; I would say that your least favorable option is remaining with dated hardware. Frankly, it's nothing short of a miracle that 2 15 year old systems have lasted as long as they have without failures.
1) remain using dated hardware. Not the best idea; eventually (possibly sooner than later, with such old rotational storage) you'll run into a situation where old, unused drives will die quickly due to the drying of the lubricants. 2) See if you can't figure out a way to run the same hardware with CF -> IDE adapters. In this case, you'd have a marginal cost increase. You'd still want to keep 1-2 systems' worth of old junk to replace things as they fail. 3) Virtualize on newer hardware. This is, IMO, the best option.
It would seem to me that the primary requirements are: a) prolonged system longevity b) static software
In these two situations, you'll have a couple of options, which I will address; but first let me mention similar experiences I've had.
I've dealt with this issue a number of times with my father, who runs a small business out of the home. Every 2-5 years he will get frustrated with how slow his computer is getting (in his case, because he installs a lot of crap) or his hardware starts to fail. Invariably, he will insist that his computing platform should remain static - until I forced him out of it, he was still using a (very crappy) program called Act! 2000 (and he'd still be using W98 and Office 97 if I hadn't forced him out of that years ago).
The fact is, newer hardware simply isn't supported by the older, abandoned Microsoft operating systems. There's no two ways about it. You can't keep using old hardware, even if your software is static, if you want to be certain the information will be available in the future.
If your father is like mine, a big part of the "make it keep working" reasoning is that he doesn't want to have to buy anything new. The reality is that you could replace his systems for a fraction of the cost of what he originally paid for one of them. It's a business, and $500 or so in cost every 15 years is NOT an unreasonable proposition. Cheap is one thing; technophobic to the point of disaster is another.
In my father's case, there was a very sound reason for upgrading his software: it was incompatible with newer file formats. If you've got a closed system (like a POS or accounting package that is the only software you use, as appears to be your case) there's not much of a need.
If you're looking to have systems run for a prolonged period of time, you will want to eliminate potential points of failure as much as possible.
This is what I would do:
* Get two new Via Nano (or similar, such as this MSI Wind barebones for $150) systems with cheapest-possible LCD monitors. IE, on the very cheapest end of things, but newer and all-around better than what he's got. * Do not use rotational media for these systems. Get a 4Gb or so CF card with an SATA or IDE adapter for each. (yes, the CF will hold up to use just fine) * Stick 1G (or whatever's cheapest, really) of RAM in each. Get a couple extra sticks, just in case, and keep 'em on hand (because if htey need replacement, it'll either be immediately after purchase, or right around the time when DDR2 gets pricey due to lack of demand/manufacturing). * Buy an $80 UPS with line conditioning. This is necessary to encourage the hardware to not fail due to a spurious power brownouts and the like. * Buy an extra USB flash drive of twice the capacity of one of the systems to back up the systems and data - either automagically, initially, once a month, etc. - whatever is appropriate for his use patterns. At the very least, back up your initial install. * Get VMWare Server (either v1 or v2 - I'd say v1 would be preferable due to the console it has) and install your W95 machines on them. * Set up each machine to automatically boot, log into X, and launch the VMWare Server c
Yes, the TI and Snapdragon are indeed very, very cool; the only reason I mentioned the Tegra was because:
1) The GP mentioned the necessity of competing with the Atom's performance 2) Nvidia has a number of videos out there demonstrating the technical superiority of the Tegra over the Atom for large screen video playback: better performance, lower power use, etc.
It might not be tops for ARM, but the Tegra is - at least - comparable to the Atom for basic netbook uses.
Actually, we only started to coddle the stupid fucks around 1900 or so. It coincides with a number of social changes in Western culture; most notably the rise of communism and modern Western liberal thought/socialism.
It would appear that you're really not aware of what's out there on the ARM department right now. Marvell is not the end-all, be-all for ARM processors, and the (relatively ancient) StrongARM CPUs are not even remotely comparable to what's on the market, in terms of performance.
Look at the Nvidia Tegra for a perfect example of ARM walking all over Atoms - per clock, per watt, and per actual performance.
There are a handful of other notable ARM chips out there right now which, while not comparable to the Tegra directly, offer considerable options above and beyond the Atom. Snapdragon and Tegra are just two examples; there are many others.
The performance is there, and has been there for quite a while. ARM chips do a LOT of things which an Atom couldn't come close to doing effectively (that fanless set-top box that does digital to analog conversion, or the DirectTV dvr, for instance).
Without looking at the study, I'd say there's a mix of reasons for this.
One, if you actually need to concentrate on your work, a distraction every once in a while can be (and usually is) helpful, if your brain simply isn't working the way you want it to.
Two, people who take the 'internet breaks' likely spend a lot of their day simply thinking, anyway. People who don't surf the web, probably can't: their work is very linear, boring, work, but not something that they could not conceivably accomplish at a fixed pace.
Consider two people: one is a data entry clerk and the other is a programmer or sysadmin type. The first one works 40 hours, and does 40 hours of work. His or her productivity does not change from week to week, but it would drop (and they'd get in trouble) by roughly 20% if they started surfing the web for 20% of their day.
A programmer or sysadmin type don't have those problems, because most of what they do is related to solving problems: taking things apart, putting things together, and so forth. This is the kind of work which is performed better if the person is comfortable.
If you had a pack of wolves living in your house, you'd have a pack of socialized animals living in your house. You'd also have a pile of shit a foot deep before long, because they don't know proper, responsible social etiquette.
That's what being socialized in this society is like. Being an indoor, unbroken pack animal.
On the other hand, I think that if it were cured, competence be damned, I might be able to relate and interact with people sociably. IE, I'd be able to be employable.
It used to be possible (at least on Verizon) to call up a number from a phone and get a plain vanilla DUN connection - nothing too complex, but enough to get something like weather or news at 14.4kbps speeds.
However, when they went to 3G (EVDO) that became impossible. Trying to do so is now a data fee (because the old inverface is gone, and a lot of people used it).
But yet, there is still no way to reasonable get data onto a capable phone, short of paying $50 on top of the base phone service, and then likely half a dozen other hidden charges.
Can I please just have a "basic data" plan? You know, limit my data rate to something slightly tedious so I'm not tempted to put a bittorrent client on my phone.
Or maybe make it so I can transmit only so much data per day, and then cut me off (like many ISPs would do back in the 1990s - though on a monthly basis). Enough of this "I'm sorry, I know your 5-year-old got ahold of your phone but we're still going to have to charge you the $45 in data charges. But we'll give you a $15 credit to next month's bill" bullshit. They all do it, because they know they'll get away with it: they're big and they don't give a damn, they want the profit. I'm not sure what happened in the last 15 years, but companies didn't have this much disdain for their customers back then.
The fact is, consumer bandwith providers are in the unenviable position of selling a product nobody understands. They might as well sell bandwidth in pints for all the difference it'd make.
That does not relate one iota to cellular.
Cellular has a different bandwidth problem than landlines: they only have to pipe bandwidth between distribution points (ie cell towers) or other major points of connectivity, and provide those cell towers. This bandwidth is trivially priced when you consider that it's being piped to a phone, and many people are paying close to $100 a month for a plan just to be able to get audio, video, basic pictures, and email on their phone for a couple tens of hours a month for when they're bored. (IE, in aggregate, less data than a person could pull down on dialup in '99 in the period of a month, for $10/month).
now, those cell towers are a sunk cost: they were paid for when they went in. Anything over and beyond their customer base on the day those new towers went in is gravy. Yes, they'd like to make money - and they will continue to make money if they at least maintain subscription rates.
The short of the long of it is that providers aren't selling bandwidth; they're selling phone service, data service, MP3s, software, etc. - and then charging you double for the ability to download said things. But you're paying for a lot more than you get.
Hell, satellite internet access in the late 1990s cost less than a "full" cellular plan does now, and was (iirc) comparable in terms of bandwidth. And that was a service people only got when they wanted to download a lot of stuff, quickly. I'm pretty certain if a company can launch a couple dozen or so objects into space that cell providers can handle better bandwidth.
I mean, shit. You've got cell providers in the darkest parts of Africa. If that's viable, they could at least make things viable here.
Are you saying that people who don't consume refined sugar or carbs don't have glucose in their bloodstream? Or that this invention would somehow rely on the body's supply of yeast to run?
No, I'm saying that people who are diabetic have to watch their sugar intake, and therefore -might- have a lower blood sugar level, reducing the amount of 'natural' yeast, and inhibiting the device's function. (Purely hypothetically speaking.)
I'm working on the assumption that this device, if it's ever used, would not use a "yeast additive", and that the use of yeast in the experiment was due to it being a substitute for human blood yeast/lack of available/controllable blood yeast. IE, in production, it would utilize human blood yeast which consumes sugars.
I'm a bit fuzzy on the details, but my understanding is that there are yeasts which do get into the bloodstream. This is more my wife's forte, but there are some people who think that blood yeasts, which thrive on sugars, are contributory to things like the development of diabetes, arthritis, and a couple other digestive auto-immune issues. Like i said, I'm fuzzy on the details.
Additionally, this holds true for all behavioral/mental norm divergence. That is, females have a very tight distribution in terms of mental characteristics: not too many savants, idiots, dolts, geniuses, masterminds, or anything like that. Yes, there are intelligent women (or stupid women), they're just usually not as drastically predisposed (call it polarized) as men, and there aren't nearly as many of them, either.
Men, on the other hand, are less like a hump and more like a recurve bow, when it comes to the distribution. IE, there are a lot fewer 'normal' men than there are 'normal' women, statistically. Men are more statistically likely to have mental disorders (if you consider the norm a lack of disorder) than women.
This is, of course, discounting the argument that women are weak, feeble-minded, and are prone to things like fear and flights of fancy. You know, how women used to be viewed.
Early work in the 1940s by a guy named Kanner indicated that, if anything, it correlates with high socioeconomic status.
In the 1940s, the indicators of poverty were different: I suspect vinyl flooring, smoking indoors (in the home due to social calls and more free time), indoor condensation was higher due to higher indoor temperatures during the winter, and so on. Granted, I don't know when vinyl came about, but it seems plausible to me.
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I don't know, clean water seems to me like a worthwhile thing to spend money on.
Chlorine and fluoride seem like two pretty good reasons to not drink municipal "tap" water, never mind the horrid taste in many locations.
Now, if you've got clean well water, that's another story. Or he could be buying water from the store at $.25/gallon, or such.
From where I'm sitting, spending $3/day on bottled water is stupid, but not as stupid as spending $3/day on a sugar super-saturate with a higher concentration of fluoride and other nasties from the local bottling plant.
So because you have a problem you could not control on your own, you think the government should come in and save people.
This happens all the time: people have a fear, problem, or gripe, always about something they can not control, so they ask the government to come in and fix it for them. This is cowardly.
This is what you do: you take responsibility for your shortcomings, and you deal with them individually. If you see a problem in someone you care about, you talk to them about it. That is how social change is supposed to occur, not through the diktat of a gun.
Do you feed caffeine to your kids? I don't. They also get very little sugar. But I drink at least a (small) pot of coffee every day. I don't want it to be regulated. If you regulate something, you set that something up to have a grey market. If you ban it, there will be a black market. It doesn't reduce it's consumption, it juts makes it more covert.
The 'slippery slope' argument holds here. You don't like caffeine, so you say "regulate". Someone else doesn't like smoking, so they say "tax". Someone else doesn't like trans-fats, so they say "ban". Before you know it, we're living in the Orwellian "Demolition Man" world.
I had a friend in high school who put a coffee maker in their locker, batteries and all. That graffiti was our mantra.
Meh. You're doing it wrong.
Drink your coffee until two or three in the afternoon, and start drinking liquor around 4pm. Then on to beer through the evening. You'll not get those coffee hangovers, and falling asleep at night is easier!
Kidding aside, I really don't think I experience the withdrawal like most people do. A pot and a half of strong coffee every day (call it around 34oz) is the norm, but there are days when I don't have any coffee (out, forgot to go to the store, etc.) and I don't get the cravings/headaches.
Though, I do miss the taste of the coffee/caffeine - I'm not denying that. But, for me (as with cigarettes and alcohol) I really don't get the "I'm going to rip your head off if I don't get some" even though they're all a regular part of my daily schedule.
ARM CPUs have been around for a while. They powered the last decade of handheld computers and PDAs (as well as some of the early "netbook" type devices, which didn't catch on due to their $1500-2000 "business user" price tags). There is probably one in your TV, alarm clock, digital camera, media player, stereo, and God knows what else.
ARM CPU are not "new to the market"; they're everywhere, and have been used in similar devices (as well as the big, expensive drool-over type servers and high-end workstations, back in the day). They just didn't advance in terms of core abilities as quickly as Intel (or should I say, Intel/Microsoft) did - due to a number of reasons.
That has changed, however. ARM processors are now at 800MHz on the low end, and mostly have specialized components built into the SoC for things like audio, video, etc. decoding and encoding - so it takes less actual power (in terms of watts and CPU MHz) to accomplish the same thing. On the high end, I believe we've got 4-core 1.5GHz ARM SoCs.
And if you want an older (arguably, a proof-of-concept, using fairly old ARM tech) netbook, check out the Alpha 400.
... "penetrate better with 150% better penis" or some such nonsense. It's got as much validity as what MS is spewing here. You expect us to believe you, when even your internal numbers don't match up? If they do "match up", then the only explanation is that MS is, essentially, giving away their OS for free for the netbooks, or charging a paltry fee.
I almost fell bad for the Executive level staff at Microsoft (and do feel sorry for the rank-and-file employees), because the $200 and even $100 netbooks aren't far off. Like, supposedly, April.
Yes, we've heard the "$100 laptop" fo a while now (a year or two) but this time, we really are pretty much there (if, for no other reason, the fact that prices do keep dropping, in one regard or another, and ARM hardware is cheap).
And yes, these low-cost netbooks will have ARM processors, because there's no other economic way to do it. And people will buy them - as long as Youtube, a modern browser, a decent word processor, and a chat client are there, 90% of users will be just fine.
Healthcare IT policy?
HAH.
Sorry buddy, that's just funny. Usually the only "policy" is "we want it cheap, we want it now, and the doctors get to decide", or something roughly approximating it in result.
The only actual 'policy' in most small/medium hospitals is "we don't change anything, even if we have to, unless the regulators say so". Ergo, you've got 15-year-old Windows with an ugly 17-year-old application port running on a single disk.
I wonder if there's a doughnut/coffee shop or cafe around the corner from the PD that would attribute to this statistical anomaly.
It is actually plausible that crime is higher by a PD. Consider that police operate effectively largely on the basis of force projection. Projecting force means they've got to spread out and, in part, create a perimeter within which they operate. The PD may have relied upon the force projection (ie the psychological influence the building would have) of the building, in part.
Also consider that a PD is more of a hub; police officers are coming and going to their respective patrol areas, going and coming off of shift. They are most likely not thinking "work" - ie, find criminals - at this time.
The PD may have been strategically placed where it was to dissuade crime in that specific area. I know that in the two largest cities in my state, the PDs are at, or near, the epicenter of low-income and crime (they're also just off the city centers). I lived near one of these PDs once, and it was indeed a higher crime area.
It's hard to say. I imagine it might be possible to run the same userland on top of two separate kernels, but there are certain packages in addition to drivers would need to target specific kernels - namely, Xorg packages, I think. Other than that, as long as the packages are built on the same libraries, and the libraries work with either kernel (or more accurately, there'd be multiple library versions per OS) it should be pretty straight forward.
Technically, it hasn't, as Gentoo is a source distribution system not a distribution, and does not officially 'support' anything. ebuilds, maybe.
Those who don't like to use recent technologies, do not deserve them.
They likely don't know what they like. They like what they're comfortable with, more than likely, and don't want to spend a lot of money: they likely figure that new = more expensive, because hey, it's a lot faster and more capable, right?
Also, systems of the vintage we're talking about don't use DIMMs. They used SIMMs. I have not seen a SIMM in maybe 5 years; the last time I saw them, they were very expensive when in working condition. I saw more used for jewelry - keychains and bag zipper pulls, mainly - than anything else.
There are a number of options; I would say that your least favorable option is remaining with dated hardware. Frankly, it's nothing short of a miracle that 2 15 year old systems have lasted as long as they have without failures.
1) remain using dated hardware. Not the best idea; eventually (possibly sooner than later, with such old rotational storage) you'll run into a situation where old, unused drives will die quickly due to the drying of the lubricants.
2) See if you can't figure out a way to run the same hardware with CF -> IDE adapters. In this case, you'd have a marginal cost increase. You'd still want to keep 1-2 systems' worth of old junk to replace things as they fail.
3) Virtualize on newer hardware. This is, IMO, the best option.
It would seem to me that the primary requirements are:
a) prolonged system longevity
b) static software
In these two situations, you'll have a couple of options, which I will address; but first let me mention similar experiences I've had.
I've dealt with this issue a number of times with my father, who runs a small business out of the home. Every 2-5 years he will get frustrated with how slow his computer is getting (in his case, because he installs a lot of crap) or his hardware starts to fail. Invariably, he will insist that his computing platform should remain static - until I forced him out of it, he was still using a (very crappy) program called Act! 2000 (and he'd still be using W98 and Office 97 if I hadn't forced him out of that years ago).
The fact is, newer hardware simply isn't supported by the older, abandoned Microsoft operating systems. There's no two ways about it. You can't keep using old hardware, even if your software is static, if you want to be certain the information will be available in the future.
If your father is like mine, a big part of the "make it keep working" reasoning is that he doesn't want to have to buy anything new. The reality is that you could replace his systems for a fraction of the cost of what he originally paid for one of them. It's a business, and $500 or so in cost every 15 years is NOT an unreasonable proposition. Cheap is one thing; technophobic to the point of disaster is another.
In my father's case, there was a very sound reason for upgrading his software: it was incompatible with newer file formats. If you've got a closed system (like a POS or accounting package that is the only software you use, as appears to be your case) there's not much of a need.
If you're looking to have systems run for a prolonged period of time, you will want to eliminate potential points of failure as much as possible.
This is what I would do:
* Get two new Via Nano (or similar, such as this MSI Wind barebones for $150) systems with cheapest-possible LCD monitors. IE, on the very cheapest end of things, but newer and all-around better than what he's got.
* Do not use rotational media for these systems. Get a 4Gb or so CF card with an SATA or IDE adapter for each. (yes, the CF will hold up to use just fine)
* Stick 1G (or whatever's cheapest, really) of RAM in each. Get a couple extra sticks, just in case, and keep 'em on hand (because if htey need replacement, it'll either be immediately after purchase, or right around the time when DDR2 gets pricey due to lack of demand/manufacturing).
* Buy an $80 UPS with line conditioning. This is necessary to encourage the hardware to not fail due to a spurious power brownouts and the like.
* Buy an extra USB flash drive of twice the capacity of one of the systems to back up the systems and data - either automagically, initially, once a month, etc. - whatever is appropriate for his use patterns. At the very least, back up your initial install.
* Get VMWare Server (either v1 or v2 - I'd say v1 would be preferable due to the console it has) and install your W95 machines on them.
* Set up each machine to automatically boot, log into X, and launch the VMWare Server c
Yes, the TI and Snapdragon are indeed very, very cool; the only reason I mentioned the Tegra was because:
1) The GP mentioned the necessity of competing with the Atom's performance
2) Nvidia has a number of videos out there demonstrating the technical superiority of the Tegra over the Atom for large screen video playback: better performance, lower power use, etc.
It might not be tops for ARM, but the Tegra is - at least - comparable to the Atom for basic netbook uses.
Actually, we only started to coddle the stupid fucks around 1900 or so. It coincides with a number of social changes in Western culture; most notably the rise of communism and modern Western liberal thought/socialism.
It would appear that you're really not aware of what's out there on the ARM department right now. Marvell is not the end-all, be-all for ARM processors, and the (relatively ancient) StrongARM CPUs are not even remotely comparable to what's on the market, in terms of performance.
Look at the Nvidia Tegra for a perfect example of ARM walking all over Atoms - per clock, per watt, and per actual performance.
There are a handful of other notable ARM chips out there right now which, while not comparable to the Tegra directly, offer considerable options above and beyond the Atom. Snapdragon and Tegra are just two examples; there are many others.
The performance is there, and has been there for quite a while. ARM chips do a LOT of things which an Atom couldn't come close to doing effectively (that fanless set-top box that does digital to analog conversion, or the DirectTV dvr, for instance).
Without looking at the study, I'd say there's a mix of reasons for this.
One, if you actually need to concentrate on your work, a distraction every once in a while can be (and usually is) helpful, if your brain simply isn't working the way you want it to.
Two, people who take the 'internet breaks' likely spend a lot of their day simply thinking, anyway. People who don't surf the web, probably can't: their work is very linear, boring, work, but not something that they could not conceivably accomplish at a fixed pace.
Consider two people: one is a data entry clerk and the other is a programmer or sysadmin type. The first one works 40 hours, and does 40 hours of work. His or her productivity does not change from week to week, but it would drop (and they'd get in trouble) by roughly 20% if they started surfing the web for 20% of their day.
A programmer or sysadmin type don't have those problems, because most of what they do is related to solving problems: taking things apart, putting things together, and so forth. This is the kind of work which is performed better if the person is comfortable.
Socialized?
If you had a pack of wolves living in your house, you'd have a pack of socialized animals living in your house. You'd also have a pile of shit a foot deep before long, because they don't know proper, responsible social etiquette.
That's what being socialized in this society is like. Being an indoor, unbroken pack animal.
Same here.
On the other hand, I think that if it were cured, competence be damned, I might be able to relate and interact with people sociably. IE, I'd be able to be employable.
Exactly.
It used to be possible (at least on Verizon) to call up a number from a phone and get a plain vanilla DUN connection - nothing too complex, but enough to get something like weather or news at 14.4kbps speeds.
However, when they went to 3G (EVDO) that became impossible. Trying to do so is now a data fee (because the old inverface is gone, and a lot of people used it).
But yet, there is still no way to reasonable get data onto a capable phone, short of paying $50 on top of the base phone service, and then likely half a dozen other hidden charges.
Can I please just have a "basic data" plan? You know, limit my data rate to something slightly tedious so I'm not tempted to put a bittorrent client on my phone.
Or maybe make it so I can transmit only so much data per day, and then cut me off (like many ISPs would do back in the 1990s - though on a monthly basis). Enough of this "I'm sorry, I know your 5-year-old got ahold of your phone but we're still going to have to charge you the $45 in data charges. But we'll give you a $15 credit to next month's bill" bullshit. They all do it, because they know they'll get away with it: they're big and they don't give a damn, they want the profit. I'm not sure what happened in the last 15 years, but companies didn't have this much disdain for their customers back then.
The fact is, consumer bandwith providers are in the unenviable position of selling a product nobody understands. They might as well sell bandwidth in pints for all the difference it'd make.
That does not relate one iota to cellular.
Cellular has a different bandwidth problem than landlines: they only have to pipe bandwidth between distribution points (ie cell towers) or other major points of connectivity, and provide those cell towers. This bandwidth is trivially priced when you consider that it's being piped to a phone, and many people are paying close to $100 a month for a plan just to be able to get audio, video, basic pictures, and email on their phone for a couple tens of hours a month for when they're bored. (IE, in aggregate, less data than a person could pull down on dialup in '99 in the period of a month, for $10/month).
now, those cell towers are a sunk cost: they were paid for when they went in. Anything over and beyond their customer base on the day those new towers went in is gravy. Yes, they'd like to make money - and they will continue to make money if they at least maintain subscription rates.
The short of the long of it is that providers aren't selling bandwidth; they're selling phone service, data service, MP3s, software, etc. - and then charging you double for the ability to download said things. But you're paying for a lot more than you get.
Hell, satellite internet access in the late 1990s cost less than a "full" cellular plan does now, and was (iirc) comparable in terms of bandwidth. And that was a service people only got when they wanted to download a lot of stuff, quickly. I'm pretty certain if a company can launch a couple dozen or so objects into space that cell providers can handle better bandwidth.
I mean, shit. You've got cell providers in the darkest parts of Africa. If that's viable, they could at least make things viable here.
Are you saying that people who don't consume refined sugar or carbs don't have glucose in their bloodstream? Or that this invention would somehow rely on the body's supply of yeast to run?
No, I'm saying that people who are diabetic have to watch their sugar intake, and therefore -might- have a lower blood sugar level, reducing the amount of 'natural' yeast, and inhibiting the device's function. (Purely hypothetically speaking.)
I'm working on the assumption that this device, if it's ever used, would not use a "yeast additive", and that the use of yeast in the experiment was due to it being a substitute for human blood yeast/lack of available/controllable blood yeast. IE, in production, it would utilize human blood yeast which consumes sugars.
I'm a bit fuzzy on the details, but my understanding is that there are yeasts which do get into the bloodstream. This is more my wife's forte, but there are some people who think that blood yeasts, which thrive on sugars, are contributory to things like the development of diabetes, arthritis, and a couple other digestive auto-immune issues. Like i said, I'm fuzzy on the details.
Additionally, this holds true for all behavioral/mental norm divergence. That is, females have a very tight distribution in terms of mental characteristics: not too many savants, idiots, dolts, geniuses, masterminds, or anything like that. Yes, there are intelligent women (or stupid women), they're just usually not as drastically predisposed (call it polarized) as men, and there aren't nearly as many of them, either.
Men, on the other hand, are less like a hump and more like a recurve bow, when it comes to the distribution. IE, there are a lot fewer 'normal' men than there are 'normal' women, statistically. Men are more statistically likely to have mental disorders (if you consider the norm a lack of disorder) than women.
This is, of course, discounting the argument that women are weak, feeble-minded, and are prone to things like fear and flights of fancy. You know, how women used to be viewed.
Early work in the 1940s by a guy named Kanner indicated that, if anything, it correlates with high socioeconomic status.
In the 1940s, the indicators of poverty were different: I suspect vinyl flooring, smoking indoors (in the home due to social calls and more free time), indoor condensation was higher due to higher indoor temperatures during the winter, and so on. Granted, I don't know when vinyl came about, but it seems plausible to me.