In the DC metro 6 years ago, I felt all alone reading from plucker on my PalmTX on a crowded train... everyone else just read their papers / books while maybe listening to their iPods. 3 years ago, more people were on their Blackberries, in addition to papers / books and the occasional iPhone. Nowadays I haven't been commuting on the metro, but when I do, I occasionally see a few more smartphones and maybe the occasional kindle out. But I kinda expect the DC area to be late adopters in matters both technological and fashionable.
Area airports seem to be about the same way. I don't go to coffee shops and bookstores much, but they still seem to be mostly laptops / netbooks and maybe the occasional smartphone... I find it kinda annoying when trying to actually get a table to enjoy a quick drink, and wish someone would make some sort of wifi park / lobby for that kind of thing.
Yay, does that mean I have built up a Snow-Crashesque immunity to Apple, Organized Religion, and Politics? That rules! Now how can I infect others with my immunity? (consults The Diamond Age) Underground glitter orgy party it is! Everyone meet me on my minecraft server!
As far as I can tell from the abstract, they weren't measuring any of the other fluid intake (which would be difficult, since you could get it from food as well). As the GP mentioned, it's "something other than caffeine". And as the study mentions, there's no significant benefit until people start drinking more than 6 cups a day, which seems like a lot to me (also corroborated by the study - the mean coffee consumption for the group was 1.9 cups per day).
I'm not going to rule out "something else" in the coffee, I'm just saying that before we all rush out and drop $30 a day at Starbucks(TM), consider that the "something else" may simply be water:-P
To respond to the AC above... thirst is not exactly an good mechanism to drive sufficient hydration. If you're thirsty, you're already dehydrated. And even all of the snopes and other "8 cups-a-day debunked" sites say "lol 8-10 is too many; the real number is 4-6" ^_^
Anyway, I'm not a big drinker of coffee or even water for that matter, and this news release, while interesting, sounds too much like marketing to change my habits:-P
According to the interview with one of the study's authors on NPR today, one of the very important factors is that decaf works as well. Which is to say, the measured benefit probably is not from caffeine.
Yeah... TFA says they adjust for "potential confounding by smoking, obesity, and other variables"... but I wonder what some of those other variables and more importantly control groups are.
I'd be curious if it simply works with water... 6+ cups of coffee sounds awfully close to the 8 cups minimum daily recommended servings of water daily. I'd suspect the people at risk of developing prostate cancer simply don't drink enough, period. (eww, there's a gross non-sequitur)
Meh, I've worked places with 4 of those monitors attached to one machine. It was sorta useful for monitoring several 1080p video streams and the audience and status displays, but I think it was still kinda slightly overkill. Just slightly, though.
Actually, regardless of how many physical monitors you already have, I'd say you could get even more benefit by organizing all your stuff across a few virtual desktops as well.
I kinda miss my WindowMaker setup with named workspaces and workspace-specific dock/clip. Also kinda miss the multi-desktop app thumbnailing I had with e16 (or to some extent the gnome 1.x panel)... useful to keep an eye on what the other virtual desktops were doing.
I wish they would include a "spectator" mode in more online games. I'm not very twitch quick, but I do enjoy *watching* a lot of FPS multiplayer (where you can see the really quick and clever guys pull off some amazing stuff). I wish there were more games with a mode that let me walk around as a "ghost" in the game, just watching without having to worry about getting killed and tea-bagged over and over again by 14-year-olds.
Heh, Left 4 Dead is good for that... actually it's sort of integral to the learning experience. When you die you're sort of forced to spectate so you can take some time out to watch how the rest of the team handles things.
It's also one of those games where there's much less stress on twitch reflexes, and more on learning the game mechanics and how to handle particular situations. Wish more games were like that... (Tribes 2 also comes to mind... where you can kinda see the opponents coming long before you're actually within practical range to do anything about it)
Can anyone provide any insight as to how physics would allow this? A near miss with another galaxy, or very dense object? A wandering black hole scooching by and "warping" it? Must take a lot of energy to warp a galaxy.
IANAAP, but a collision with another galaxy, such as the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, perhaps.
Heh, I don't think most of California qualifies as an example of fiscal responsibility by *any* stretch of the imagination.
And I'm assuming the rest of the US did not follow this rule of thumb, hence the mortgage-backed securities crash (yeah, I know a fair amount of that was also caused by speculators and fraud rings).
FWIW, we live in an incredibly expensive area with decent jobs, located in a county with one of the highest public school rankings in the nation. We started with the 3x guideline and ended up in a 800sqft condo (converted from garden-style apartments built in the 50s), just before the peak of the housing bubble. Not the most comfortable place to raise 2 children, but we and a bunch of other young parents in the community make it work. Nowadays we're running at maybe 1.5x compared to our original mortgage, and even though we waste a lot on dining out and travel, we should still be able to pull together enough resources to migrate to a larger 3x house in a down market, while only losing maybe a few $10K on our house, vs. a few $100K for others in "real American Dream" houses.
Yeah, readahead is unnecessary overhead on SSDs... it takes a extra second or two to compile the list of inodes and reorder them to minimize disk head movement, which is completely unnecessary on SSDs so it's a waste of time. But on conventional hard disks, it can boost bulk reads from plodding along at 10MB/s to 100MB/s, which is a bit closer into cheap SSD territory.
Readahead might still be nice for preloading a lot of the desktop, so you're not sitting there waiting for icons to load when you're navigating menus. You should be able to just go into/etc/readahead.d/ and tweak exactly what you want loaded into RAM before and after bootup so it makes sense on your system.
I'm running eeebuntu 3.0 on my eeePC 901 w/ 1GB RAM... should be a bit better optimized for it out of the box. I am a bit crazy and have it running compiz so I can get all the eye candy, and it actually runs pretty snappily. Biggest change to my habits was running chrome instead of firefox to make web browsing more responsive. Also useful to replace the google earth static 3D libraries with symlinks to the system ones to fix a bunch of UI artifacts.
Oh, yeah, that would be awesome... 200x might even be enough to take care of property taxes and utilities too... but other than that, we might be out of "rule of thumb" territory and into creative accountancy.
Just do a "free -mto" or open up the perf monitor in taskman.exe . With all your common applications open, if you still have more than a few megs of free memory (instead of cached), then you probably have too much RAM.
These days, I would modify that to say RAM before SSD. You can typically load up on another 8GB+ of RAM for less the the cost of the cheapest SSD, and it will have a more profound effect on the apps you always have open. RAM is still more than 100x faster than even the high-end SSDs, but SSDs aren't necessarily more than 10x faster than a decent cheap hard disk, even with lots of small reads provided you use readahead to preload a lot of your HD data to RAM, and of course migrate/tmp to tmpfs or something.
If you never shutdown your laptop or desktop and just put them in and out of suspend, this cache is always maintained in RAM where most of your critical OS and applications never expire from, so you're kinda not benefiting from your SSD as much as you expect anyway. Maybe if you used your SSD for swap, but people don't tend to like to do that;-)
+1 informative. The first thing you learn as a tourist in Thailand is never touch someone on the head, and never ever touch or even point at people with your foot. So yes, if you touch someone's head with your foot, that's pretty much the worst insult imaginable.
That said, I've never quite heard about not stepping on coins during the four years I lived in Bangkok, but I wouldn't put it past them.
Not a very strange custom, though, since they don't wear shoes inside the house, and they wear flip-flops outside the house, feet can get very dirty and black on the soles during the day.
Of course, Thais find it very strange that Westerners walk in their homes wearing their dirty shoes, don't use a water sprayer when they wipe their asses after using the toilet, and kiss their dogs.
Good call... so in other words, something use something like http://www.wxwidgets.org/ for cross-platform development while still hooking into native widgets?
Ha, if you post anything to Facebook that you wouldn't post on your old skool Geocities public website or whatever, then you fail the internets.
People look at Zuckerberg like he's some kind of freak that doesn't respect privacy. And he's looking back at a whole bunch of people complaining that the stuff that they posted on the internet... is out on the internet.
If you really want to share something secret, use hushmail or something. Facebook, OTOH, is all about syndication... letting your personal thoughts and habits reach as many people as possible... people who wouldn't have given a rat's ass about what you were saying or doing otherwise. If your information is reaching a wide audience, then you're WINNING:-D
I do like some of the ubuntu derivatives, which seem to do a good job addressing the flaws in Debian and Ubuntu. Give Linux Mint a try... which is pretty easy since it's distributed as a LiveCD/DVD with an install to HD option. It's what I've been recommending to people for a while.
I've even migrated my main server to it from Debian (my one gripe is that the installer doesn't support software RAID configurations as readily, but I'm used to setting those up manually anyway).
The other one I like for netbooks is eeebuntu 3. Haven't played with their Aurora beta yet, but eeebuntu was pretty good with getting an nice fully-featured compiz-fusion environment on my eeePC with most of the hardware and powersaver features supported out of the box.
Heh, I have a hard time believing the Drudge Report generates any more traffic than http://fark.com/
At least I can tell what Fark is by looking at it... and I'm much more likely to click on the link just to try to figure out the punchline. Plus, Fark includes helpful analysis in the comments... with just about equal representation by loons from both the left and right... humorous (and actually quite civil) discourse I find lacking on most other sites.
If you keep up with Fark you can pretty much ace "Wait, wait don't tell me" at the end of the week.
How do we expect to continue increasing oil production when he's not approving permits? The fact is, people are not going to be able to afford heating oil and gas for their home this winter.
Looks cool, but still not due out for another month or so. And if it's like Compulabs' Fit PC2i, it may still probably suffer from lack of availability for a few more months afterwards. Hopefully I'll get to test one this year, though.
Not terribly excited about the state of Linux support from ATi GPUs... one of the nice things about the dual-core IONs we're using is that they can pretty much run the same 64-bit OS and nVidia drivers (either open or proprietary) that our full-size machines run, at some fraction of the size and performance.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose it depends on which area you live in.
In the DC metro 6 years ago, I felt all alone reading from plucker on my PalmTX on a crowded train... everyone else just read their papers / books while maybe listening to their iPods. 3 years ago, more people were on their Blackberries, in addition to papers / books and the occasional iPhone. Nowadays I haven't been commuting on the metro, but when I do, I occasionally see a few more smartphones and maybe the occasional kindle out. But I kinda expect the DC area to be late adopters in matters both technological and fashionable.
Area airports seem to be about the same way. I don't go to coffee shops and bookstores much, but they still seem to be mostly laptops / netbooks and maybe the occasional smartphone... I find it kinda annoying when trying to actually get a table to enjoy a quick drink, and wish someone would make some sort of wifi park / lobby for that kind of thing.
Yay, does that mean I have built up a Snow-Crashesque immunity to Apple, Organized Religion, and Politics? That rules! Now how can I infect others with my immunity? (consults The Diamond Age) Underground glitter orgy party it is! Everyone meet me on my minecraft server!
As far as I can tell from the abstract, they weren't measuring any of the other fluid intake (which would be difficult, since you could get it from food as well). As the GP mentioned, it's "something other than caffeine". And as the study mentions, there's no significant benefit until people start drinking more than 6 cups a day, which seems like a lot to me (also corroborated by the study - the mean coffee consumption for the group was 1.9 cups per day).
I'm not going to rule out "something else" in the coffee, I'm just saying that before we all rush out and drop $30 a day at Starbucks(TM), consider that the "something else" may simply be water :-P
To respond to the AC above... thirst is not exactly an good mechanism to drive sufficient hydration. If you're thirsty, you're already dehydrated. And even all of the snopes and other "8 cups-a-day debunked" sites say "lol 8-10 is too many; the real number is 4-6" ^_^
Anyway, I'm not a big drinker of coffee or even water for that matter, and this news release, while interesting, sounds too much like marketing to change my habits :-P
According to the interview with one of the study's authors on NPR today, one of the very important factors is that decaf works as well. Which is to say, the measured benefit probably is not from caffeine.
Yeah... TFA says they adjust for "potential confounding by smoking, obesity, and other variables" ... but I wonder what some of those other variables and more importantly control groups are.
I'd be curious if it simply works with water... 6+ cups of coffee sounds awfully close to the 8 cups minimum daily recommended servings of water daily. I'd suspect the people at risk of developing prostate cancer simply don't drink enough, period.
(eww, there's a gross non-sequitur)
Meh, I've worked places with 4 of those monitors attached to one machine. It was sorta useful for monitoring several 1080p video streams and the audience and status displays, but I think it was still kinda slightly overkill. Just slightly, though.
Actually, regardless of how many physical monitors you already have, I'd say you could get even more benefit by organizing all your stuff across a few virtual desktops as well.
I kinda miss my WindowMaker setup with named workspaces and workspace-specific dock/clip.
Also kinda miss the multi-desktop app thumbnailing I had with e16 (or to some extent the gnome 1.x panel)... useful to keep an eye on what the other virtual desktops were doing.
I wish they would include a "spectator" mode in more online games. I'm not very twitch quick, but I do enjoy *watching* a lot of FPS multiplayer (where you can see the really quick and clever guys pull off some amazing stuff). I wish there were more games with a mode that let me walk around as a "ghost" in the game, just watching without having to worry about getting killed and tea-bagged over and over again by 14-year-olds.
Heh, Left 4 Dead is good for that... actually it's sort of integral to the learning experience. When you die you're sort of forced to spectate so you can take some time out to watch how the rest of the team handles things.
It's also one of those games where there's much less stress on twitch reflexes, and more on learning the game mechanics and how to handle particular situations. Wish more games were like that... (Tribes 2 also comes to mind... where you can kinda see the opponents coming long before you're actually within practical range to do anything about it)
Can anyone provide any insight as to how physics would allow this? A near miss with another galaxy, or very dense object? A wandering black hole scooching by and "warping" it? Must take a lot of energy to warp a galaxy.
IANAAP, but a collision with another galaxy, such as the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, perhaps.
http://www.astro.virginia.edu/~mfs4n/sgr/
(videos at the bottom should provide more than enough detail)
Meh, XP was OK as StarcraftOS, at least until Starcraft started working well under wine. I'd still be running XP for games if it wasn't for DX10.
Heh, I don't think most of California qualifies as an example of fiscal responsibility by *any* stretch of the imagination.
And I'm assuming the rest of the US did not follow this rule of thumb, hence the mortgage-backed securities crash (yeah, I know a fair amount of that was also caused by speculators and fraud rings).
FWIW, we live in an incredibly expensive area with decent jobs, located in a county with one of the highest public school rankings in the nation. We started with the 3x guideline and ended up in a 800sqft condo (converted from garden-style apartments built in the 50s), just before the peak of the housing bubble. Not the most comfortable place to raise 2 children, but we and a bunch of other young parents in the community make it work. Nowadays we're running at maybe 1.5x compared to our original mortgage, and even though we waste a lot on dining out and travel, we should still be able to pull together enough resources to migrate to a larger 3x house in a down market, while only losing maybe a few $10K on our house, vs. a few $100K for others in "real American Dream" houses.
Yeah, readahead is unnecessary overhead on SSDs... it takes a extra second or two to compile the list of inodes and reorder them to minimize disk head movement, which is completely unnecessary on SSDs so it's a waste of time. But on conventional hard disks, it can boost bulk reads from plodding along at 10MB/s to 100MB/s, which is a bit closer into cheap SSD territory.
Readahead might still be nice for preloading a lot of the desktop, so you're not sitting there waiting for icons to load when you're navigating menus. You should be able to just go into /etc/readahead.d/ and tweak exactly what you want loaded into RAM before and after bootup so it makes sense on your system.
I'm running eeebuntu 3.0 on my eeePC 901 w/ 1GB RAM ... should be a bit better optimized for it out of the box. I am a bit crazy and have it running compiz so I can get all the eye candy, and it actually runs pretty snappily. Biggest change to my habits was running chrome instead of firefox to make web browsing more responsive. Also useful to replace the google earth static 3D libraries with symlinks to the system ones to fix a bunch of UI artifacts.
It's a hardware problem, not a software problem:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/03/dude-wheres-my-4-gigabytes-of-ram.html
Just run 64-bit Windows / Linux and you'll be fine.
Oh, yeah, that would be awesome... 200x might even be enough to take care of property taxes and utilities too... but other than that, we might be out of "rule of thumb" territory and into creative accountancy.
Old RAM advice is old.
Just do a "free -mto" or open up the perf monitor in taskman.exe . With all your common applications open, if you still have more than a few megs of free memory (instead of cached), then you probably have too much RAM.
These days, I would modify that to say RAM before SSD. You can typically load up on another 8GB+ of RAM for less the the cost of the cheapest SSD, and it will have a more profound effect on the apps you always have open. RAM is still more than 100x faster than even the high-end SSDs, but SSDs aren't necessarily more than 10x faster than a decent cheap hard disk, even with lots of small reads provided you use readahead to preload a lot of your HD data to RAM, and of course migrate /tmp to tmpfs or something.
http://trumblings.blogspot.com/2010/11/using-readahead-to-speed-up-disk.html
(and for recent Fedora, Ubuntu/Debian, etc. your OS is already using readahead to boot fast)
If you never shutdown your laptop or desktop and just put them in and out of suspend, this cache is always maintained in RAM where most of your critical OS and applications never expire from, so you're kinda not benefiting from your SSD as much as you expect anyway. Maybe if you used your SSD for swap, but people don't tend to like to do that ;-)
"Don't buy a house more than 3x your annual income."
Probably could have saved us some troubles back there.
+1 informative. The first thing you learn as a tourist in Thailand is never touch someone on the head, and never ever touch or even point at people with your foot. So yes, if you touch someone's head with your foot, that's pretty much the worst insult imaginable.
That said, I've never quite heard about not stepping on coins during the four years I lived in Bangkok, but I wouldn't put it past them.
Not a very strange custom, though, since they don't wear shoes inside the house, and they wear flip-flops outside the house, feet can get very dirty and black on the soles during the day.
Of course, Thais find it very strange that Westerners walk in their homes wearing their dirty shoes, don't use a water sprayer when they wipe their asses after using the toilet, and kiss their dogs.
Good call... so in other words, something use something like http://www.wxwidgets.org/ for cross-platform development while still hooking into native widgets?
Ha, if you post anything to Facebook that you wouldn't post on your old skool Geocities public website or whatever, then you fail the internets.
People look at Zuckerberg like he's some kind of freak that doesn't respect privacy. And he's looking back at a whole bunch of people complaining that the stuff that they posted on the internet... is out on the internet.
If you really want to share something secret, use hushmail or something. Facebook, OTOH, is all about syndication... letting your personal thoughts and habits reach as many people as possible... people who wouldn't have given a rat's ass about what you were saying or doing otherwise. If your information is reaching a wide audience, then you're WINNING :-D
Yeah, I'm pretty much in the same boat.
I do like some of the ubuntu derivatives, which seem to do a good job addressing the flaws in Debian and Ubuntu. Give Linux Mint a try... which is pretty easy since it's distributed as a LiveCD/DVD with an install to HD option. It's what I've been recommending to people for a while.
I've even migrated my main server to it from Debian (my one gripe is that the installer doesn't support software RAID configurations as readily, but I'm used to setting those up manually anyway).
The other one I like for netbooks is eeebuntu 3. Haven't played with their Aurora beta yet, but eeebuntu was pretty good with getting an nice fully-featured compiz-fusion environment on my eeePC with most of the hardware and powersaver features supported out of the box.
Heh, I have a hard time believing the Drudge Report generates any more traffic than http://fark.com/
At least I can tell what Fark is by looking at it... and I'm much more likely to click on the link just to try to figure out the punchline. Plus, Fark includes helpful analysis in the comments... with just about equal representation by loons from both the left and right... humorous (and actually quite civil) discourse I find lacking on most other sites.
If you keep up with Fark you can pretty much ace "Wait, wait don't tell me" at the end of the week.
There's not much rail traffic between the americas and Russia, nor will there be in the forseable future...
Heh, apparently Slashdot users pay as little attention to past articles as the editors do.
http://news.slashdot.org/story/07/04/18/2240257/The-Worlds-Longest-Tunnel
Ah, the dreams we used to have, back when we thought we had had money :-P
an even-keeled response
How do we expect to continue increasing oil production when he's not approving permits? The fact is, people are not going to be able to afford heating oil and gas for their home this winter.
Yeesh!
Better stock up on insulation!
http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=tax_credits.tx_index
Lets get tax credits for every mile that we ride on a bicycle. That should help solve these problems.
Mark
Already done since 2009: http://www.bikeleague.org/news/100708faq.php
Ask your employer about it!
Looks cool, but still not due out for another month or so. And if it's like Compulabs' Fit PC2i, it may still probably suffer from lack of availability for a few more months afterwards. Hopefully I'll get to test one this year, though.
Not terribly excited about the state of Linux support from ATi GPUs... one of the nice things about the dual-core IONs we're using is that they can pretty much run the same 64-bit OS and nVidia drivers (either open or proprietary) that our full-size machines run, at some fraction of the size and performance.