It sure would be a sad day if it doesn't help. Unions are what got us the 40 hour (cough, cough--50 hour work week if you're in the tech sector) work week, minimum wage, benefits, etc.
With US corporations able to force employees to TRAIN their outsourced replacements to receive their 4 week "notice" period, someone|thing|group needs to be able to fight for employees rights. The best, though clearly not perfect, solution we have currently are Unions.
Mayhaps, us slashdotters could come up with a technological replacement:).
The fact is, the Europeans are living the "American Dream." I, for one, am tired of us Americans whining about it, when instead we can do something about it.
We lost our own "Dream" when we started electing politicians who pray to the God of Capitalism.
"The scientists, including 98 Nobel laureates, urged world leaders to adopt a strong treaty to fight emissions of carbon from burning fossil fuels that are changing the climate."
We can argue all day long as to what constitutes a "scientist," but suffice it to say, 98 Nobel laureates sounds like a pretty good sized majority of the *respected* scientific communities.
Well, if you do not believe in global warming, then you are in agreement the vast *minority* of scientists the world over. So, censuring a high level goverment scientist that comes out and blatantly supports the "wrong side" of the issue should be expected.
That does not make it right. Guys like Newton faced the same problems. The details (some very important ones, I might add) are different, but the basics are there. A goverment sponsored scientists comes out against the status quo (in our case the emerging status quo) and faces censure from his peers and benefactors.
There is no hard evidence that our excessive CO2 production is a cause of increasing global temperatures. Of course, logically it does make sense, and it would seem prudent to start curbing the output of it as a preventative measure. So, in this instance I think it is gross irresponsibility, and worthy of censure, for a respected scientist to write a book claiming that global warming is a farce.
I know this is going to seem like flamebait, but it really isn't meant to be. Has anyone ever been to a speedy Java based site? All the sites I've gone to that look like they're Java based seem painfully slow.
FreeBSD performance issues have been raised, which I understand run most of the yahoo web front ends. Further, I've heard of nothing but trouble in the form of memory leaks running apache/tomcat on linux. Of course, I've never seen anything resembling java work well on a linux box.
It's not as if Perl syntax is all that FAR from C/C++. In fact, when coded correctly, it looks amazingly similar.
I'm no PHP guru or anything, but the usability value of mod_perl and programming with perl modules in general would seem to outweigh pretty much any benefit PHP provides, unless of course they want to use the Zend IDE's.
1. It's lopsided journalism (surprised?). There's no *honest* attempt at balance, which is precisely what the author accuses the researchers of doing.
True. However, how much lopsided journalism and research has the low-fat diet seen over the past 25 years? The NIH hasn't even sanctioned a research project on anything else until now!
3. Atkins's program, as with other low-carb programs, work well initially but are extremely difficult to maintain. (The same is true of low-fat diets, incidentally.) This is acknowledgedby the research community.
I won't say untrue, however I do disagree. I've been on it in "maintanence mode" for the past year, without issue. People think that the Atkins diet is just a "cold-turkey" kind of deal. It's only that way for the first couple of weeks. After that you slowly ramp up your carb intake to something more inline with your fat and protein intake, still avoiding processed and bleached carbs (white bread, potatoes, etc.)
4. Some of the substantiations, such as that claiming that one's body sees all carbohydrates as sugars (page 5), is imprecise.
I think you're misinterpretting here. He's talking about simple/processed/bleached carbs, which indeed your body turns almost immediately into sugars.
5. An "Atkins diet without excess fat" (page 7) is a low-fat diet. Someone needs to get over himself.
Does without excess food mean a low food diet? No, it means food in moderation, just as "without excess fat" means fat in moderation. That does not mean a low-fat diet.
It only seems like "contradictory evidence or a change of opinion" if you're outside the research community. This is one research community that is not monolithic.
I will bow to your experience/background on that comment, however, so called legitimate research has never been done or released to the general public on anything but low-fat diets. In fact, not to long ago the "food pyramid" replaced the "four food groups" advocating an even starchier diet! The old "four food groups" diet was a much saner plan, and in reality is much closer to the "revolutionary" Atkins diet than you might think.
Remember, the Atkins diet is a crash diet only in the beginning. It's designed to get people who are overweight into ketosis so they can "eat themselves" and start losing weight right away. Once they get to a healthy weight it goes into maintanence mode, which is damn close to the old four food groups doctrine.
fruits have a lot of carbs, though they have fibre as well, which makes them better than just fruit "juice," but still, if you're quitting cold turkey, don't eat fruit.
Personally, I raised my athletic activity a bit and went on the atkins diet for 2 months. I lost 20lbs (195 to 175). 1 year later I'm still 175. I still watch my carb intake and excercise fairly regularly, but I'm not a nazi about it anymore.
I wouldn't bet my life on it, but most modern performance cars aren't going to see much more than a 5-10 HP gain from a "chip" (even though they're really just piggy back computers on OBD-II).
My OBD-I 95 M3 can get 19 HP from a chip, but it's a well known fact that the 98 and earlier US M3's were very de-tuned compared to the 290+ HP European cars
There is some validity to this. There are all kinds of things going on in a motor that, in reality are only in the designer's head/computer.
An engine is designed based on certain requirements (high mileage, high horsepower, high low-end torque, emissions, various combinations, etc.) and based on those requirements, different designs are used in exhaust and intake manifold shape, along with camshaft profiles, combustion chamber design, all of which is designed to promote a particular flow pattern of fuel/air mixture at a designated optimum RPM range.
In a modern day car there are very few modifications to a motor that are going to result in huge HP gains, especially with motors already designed to put out a lot of HP (in most cases the major exception are on forced air induction designs, super/turbo-chargers). Manufacturing processes and engine designs have gotten so incredibly good there is little room left for the low to mid tier tuner. Hi-end engine blueprinting tuners will always exist, but the benefits of swapping intakes, headers and camshafts out are getting pretty marginal these days.
Of course, you can always do a lot with suspension and brakes, but even brake improvements on performance cars will usually only help at track days as they already come with plenty of braking horsepower.
On using CAE to help in designing suspension? Why bother? There are companies that do it for you... Bilstein, H&R, Eibach, BNG, Boge, etc. Tell them what sort of setup you're looking for and you're good.
If you're looking for "tuning" gains where slight modifications to roll bar stiffness or suspension settings are going to help you get better lap times at a track, well in all likihood you've already bought the $300-$500 worth of equipment to analyze track data.
Generally, the interfaces to the OBD-II computers are proprietary... thus forcing you to go to the dealer to get rid of that annoying "Check Engine Soon" light on post 1995 cars. Someone once told me the diagnostic "computer" for late model BMWs, which probably has all of the computational power of your average Palm Pilot, costs around $30,000 (note: could be totally wrong, this was a pretty old conversation I'm trying to recall).
personally, I see value in the ability to have a pretty top notch gaming system, that can run Linux to do various Internet related tasks, as well as perhaps code on a bit that compliments my laptop... especially for the paltry $500. Think about it a top of the line GeForce 3 will cost you $300 by itself, and all you can do is stare at it.
yeah, that's a good point. But, why can most computer CD readers (at least a while ago) not rip at full speed? Hell, I remember when a lot of CD readers were so bad you couldn't even RIP at 1x speed.
Also, I've tried using a computer CD player as a transport, assuming it would be really good, and it sucked ass.
There is certainly voodoo involved in all of this mess, but there's also something to it, somewhere.
Okay first off, I am your average Microsoft hater, for all of the usual reasons, but to the point that against my generally open-minded principles I tend to shudder everytime I hear the letters, "MSCE."
Anyway, with that in mind, is Microsoft doing anything that Apple and/or Sun haven't already done? Is this on such a large stage and with such hubris that no one can look at it against what other software and hardware vendors have done?
Example is as follows: Sun donates a whole pile of hardware to UC San Diego. UCSD agrees to switch to Java as their CS Departments core language over C/C++.
well, there have been "anti-jitter" components made by various manufacturers, and they all sucked.... however a good transport does add to the imaging in a system. Also, Genesis, renowned for their speakers made a device that was essentially just a big buffer with error control.
My guess is it was the same damn thing as in a cd burner. So, perhaps jitter does exist, at least a cd burner wouldn't work very well without a buffer.
I went through all of this stuff a while ago, and managed to settle down on a pretty good A/V system. The basic gist is this:
There is little in the way of technical innovation in this field. Mostly that's done by the big labs, like Dolby, who came up with AC-3 (our current standard of 5.1 digital surround sound). Basically there are some ASIC's that manufacturers put into their receivers and off they go. Sound quality differences come down to the individual components used, and how much a manufacturer pays attention to component noise in their designs. That is, you really, really don't want a big audibly humming transformer sitting right next to the output stage of your amplifier!
Basically, you want good quality transformers, capacitors, internal wiring, switches/binding posts and overall design. Switching and binding posts should be as far away from any sort of noise generator as possible, capacitors should seem obscenely large and a nice, big transformer, or two should be present. That doesn't always mean you're on the right path, but it's a good indicator.
As far as brands and what not drop me an email at justin@websocietyinc.com. I went through all of this so I have a pretty good idea and am happy to share...
I agree, which is why I made mention of SACD (Sony's 2 channel, uncompressed, higher sample/bit rate, DVD storage based, format).
I've heard SACD sounds better than DVD-Audio, but haven't listened to either in a good environment. I did just buy a cheap-o Sony DVD/SACD combo thing, but haven't played with it.
Another point in this whole mess is the fact that the rest of your audio system is analog... amplification and speakers. So, you have to have a DAC (digital to analog converter, for those that don't know) some where in the picture, generally integrated into the CD player. The DAC is where most of the sound quality can be made up in a CD setup. Any CD player with a digital out can be made to sound tons better with the addition of a $300 external DAC. What does that tell you? It tells me that a crappy DAC doesn't accurately reproduce the musical picture from the information stored on the CD. So... if you can take the DAC completely out of the picture and store the music in an analog format you've removed a "weak link" from the system.
No it wasn't a blind test, and yes, having been in and around the whole audiophile scene for a while, I'm well aware of the double blind testing stuff. That doesn't change the fact that when I did the testing for myself I, as well as others, some of whom don't even know what a tube amp is, let alone that "turntables sound better," liked the LP better. You don't need a blind test to tell if a color TV looks better than a black and white TV because the differences were obvious. That was the case here. Granted, this is an extreme case, in that the equipment used was all the way around incredible, and I promise that if anyone ends up going to Fry's and picking up a $200 Sony turntable and compares it against their $200, or hell $60 portable CD player their results will be vastly different, but CDs do not have the entire musical picture.
Think about it square waves vs sine waves. The area of the square wave may equal that of the sine wave, but that doesn't mean it looks (or sounds) the same.
Slashdot Mirror
It sure would be a sad day if it doesn't help. Unions are what got us the 40 hour (cough, cough--50 hour work week if you're in the tech sector) work week, minimum wage, benefits, etc.
:).
With US corporations able to force employees to TRAIN their outsourced replacements to receive their 4 week "notice" period, someone|thing|group needs to be able to fight for employees rights. The best, though clearly not perfect, solution we have currently are Unions.
Mayhaps, us slashdotters could come up with a technological replacement
Hey, don't knock it just 'cause you ain't got it.
The fact is, the Europeans are living the "American Dream." I, for one, am tired of us Americans whining about it, when instead we can do something about it.
We lost our own "Dream" when we started electing politicians who pray to the God of Capitalism.
What good is a textbook without a goddamn search function?
You have heard of an "index" correct?
Where is the "Chernobyl Disaster Veterans for Truth" post? :-D
http://www.cnn.com/EARTH/9709/30/environment.clima te.reut/
"The scientists, including 98 Nobel laureates, urged world leaders to adopt a strong treaty to fight emissions of carbon from burning fossil fuels that are changing the climate."
We can argue all day long as to what constitutes a "scientist," but suffice it to say, 98 Nobel laureates sounds like a pretty good sized majority of the *respected* scientific communities.
Or wait, no, they're all wackos! That's right!
I believe I was just called a racist by an "Anonymous Coward." Fantastic!
Well, if you do not believe in global warming, then you are in agreement the vast *minority* of scientists the world over. So, censuring a high level goverment scientist that comes out and blatantly supports the "wrong side" of the issue should be expected.
That does not make it right. Guys like Newton faced the same problems. The details (some very important ones, I might add) are different, but the basics are there. A goverment sponsored scientists comes out against the status quo (in our case the emerging status quo) and faces censure from his peers and benefactors.
There is no hard evidence that our excessive CO2 production is a cause of increasing global temperatures. Of course, logically it does make sense, and it would seem prudent to start curbing the output of it as a preventative measure. So, in this instance I think it is gross irresponsibility, and worthy of censure, for a respected scientist to write a book claiming that global warming is a farce.
I know this is going to seem like flamebait, but it really isn't meant to be. Has anyone ever been to a speedy Java based site? All the sites I've gone to that look like they're Java based seem painfully slow.
FreeBSD performance issues have been raised, which I understand run most of the yahoo web front ends. Further, I've heard of nothing but trouble in the form of memory leaks running apache/tomcat on linux. Of course, I've never seen anything resembling java work well on a linux box.
Really, this isn't meant as a flame...
-Justin
It's not as if Perl syntax is all that FAR from C/C++. In fact, when coded correctly, it looks amazingly similar.
I'm no PHP guru or anything, but the usability value of mod_perl and programming with perl modules in general would seem to outweigh pretty much any benefit PHP provides, unless of course they want to use the Zend IDE's.
-Justin
1. It's lopsided journalism (surprised?). There's no *honest* attempt at balance, which is precisely what the author accuses the researchers of doing.
True. However, how much lopsided journalism and research has the low-fat diet seen over the past 25 years? The NIH hasn't even sanctioned a research project on anything else until now!
3. Atkins's program, as with other low-carb programs, work well initially but are extremely difficult to maintain. (The same is true of low-fat diets, incidentally.) This is acknowledgedby the research community.
I won't say untrue, however I do disagree. I've been on it in "maintanence mode" for the past year, without issue. People think that the Atkins diet is just a "cold-turkey" kind of deal. It's only that way for the first couple of weeks. After that you slowly ramp up your carb intake to something more inline with your fat and protein intake, still avoiding processed and bleached carbs (white bread, potatoes, etc.)
4. Some of the substantiations, such as that claiming that one's body sees all carbohydrates as sugars (page 5), is imprecise.
I think you're misinterpretting here. He's talking about simple/processed/bleached carbs, which indeed your body turns almost immediately into sugars.
5. An "Atkins diet without excess fat" (page 7) is a low-fat diet. Someone needs to get over himself.
Does without excess food mean a low food diet? No, it means food in moderation, just as "without excess fat" means fat in moderation. That does not mean a low-fat diet.
It only seems like "contradictory evidence or a change of opinion" if you're outside the research community. This is one research community that is not monolithic.
I will bow to your experience/background on that comment, however, so called legitimate research has never been done or released to the general public on anything but low-fat diets. In fact, not to long ago the "food pyramid" replaced the "four food groups" advocating an even starchier diet! The old "four food groups" diet was a much saner plan, and in reality is much closer to the "revolutionary" Atkins diet than you might think.
Remember, the Atkins diet is a crash diet only in the beginning. It's designed to get people who are overweight into ketosis so they can "eat themselves" and start losing weight right away. Once they get to a healthy weight it goes into maintanence mode, which is damn close to the old four food groups doctrine.
fruits have a lot of carbs, though they have fibre as well, which makes them better than just fruit "juice," but still, if you're quitting cold turkey, don't eat fruit.
Personally, I raised my athletic activity a bit and went on the atkins diet for 2 months. I lost 20lbs (195 to 175). 1 year later I'm still 175. I still watch my carb intake and excercise fairly regularly, but I'm not a nazi about it anymore.
I wouldn't bet my life on it, but most modern performance cars aren't going to see much more than a 5-10 HP gain from a "chip" (even though they're really just piggy back computers on OBD-II).
My OBD-I 95 M3 can get 19 HP from a chip, but it's a well known fact that the 98 and earlier US M3's were very de-tuned compared to the 290+ HP European cars
No, I was speaking about the oversized box that they plug your car into, not the actual unit in the car.
There is some validity to this. There are all kinds of things going on in a motor that, in reality are only in the designer's head/computer.
An engine is designed based on certain requirements (high mileage, high horsepower, high low-end torque, emissions, various combinations, etc.) and based on those requirements, different designs are used in exhaust and intake manifold shape, along with camshaft profiles, combustion chamber design, all of which is designed to promote a particular flow pattern of fuel/air mixture at a designated optimum RPM range.
In a modern day car there are very few modifications to a motor that are going to result in huge HP gains, especially with motors already designed to put out a lot of HP (in most cases the major exception are on forced air induction designs, super/turbo-chargers). Manufacturing processes and engine designs have gotten so incredibly good there is little room left for the low to mid tier tuner. Hi-end engine blueprinting tuners will always exist, but the benefits of swapping intakes, headers and camshafts out are getting pretty marginal these days.
Of course, you can always do a lot with suspension and brakes, but even brake improvements on performance cars will usually only help at track days as they already come with plenty of braking horsepower.
On using CAE to help in designing suspension? Why bother? There are companies that do it for you... Bilstein, H&R, Eibach, BNG, Boge, etc. Tell them what sort of setup you're looking for and you're good.
If you're looking for "tuning" gains where slight modifications to roll bar stiffness or suspension settings are going to help you get better lap times at a track, well in all likihood you've already bought the $300-$500 worth of equipment to analyze track data.
Generally, the interfaces to the OBD-II computers are proprietary... thus forcing you to go to the dealer to get rid of that annoying "Check Engine Soon" light on post 1995 cars. Someone once told me the diagnostic "computer" for late model BMWs, which probably has all of the computational power of your average Palm Pilot, costs around $30,000 (note: could be totally wrong, this was a pretty old conversation I'm trying to recall).
personally, I see value in the ability to have a pretty top notch gaming system, that can run Linux to do various Internet related tasks, as well as perhaps code on a bit that compliments my laptop... especially for the paltry $500. Think about it a top of the line GeForce 3 will cost you $300 by itself, and all you can do is stare at it.
um, dude how does 67 + 40 + 10 = 60? I know my math is a bit rusty, but I get $117 everytime (and so does xcalc).
yeah, that's a good point. But, why can most computer CD readers (at least a while ago) not rip at full speed? Hell, I remember when a lot of CD readers were so bad you couldn't even RIP at 1x speed.
Also, I've tried using a computer CD player as a transport, assuming it would be really good, and it sucked ass.
There is certainly voodoo involved in all of this mess, but there's also something to it, somewhere.
Okay first off, I am your average Microsoft hater, for all of the usual reasons, but to the point that against my generally open-minded principles I tend to shudder everytime I hear the letters, "MSCE."
Anyway, with that in mind, is Microsoft doing anything that Apple and/or Sun haven't already done? Is this on such a large stage and with such hubris that no one can look at it against what other software and hardware vendors have done?
Example is as follows: Sun donates a whole pile of hardware to UC San Diego. UCSD agrees to switch to Java as their CS Departments core language over C/C++.
well, there have been "anti-jitter" components made by various manufacturers, and they all sucked.... however a good transport does add to the imaging in a system. Also, Genesis, renowned for their speakers made a device that was essentially just a big buffer with error control.
My guess is it was the same damn thing as in a cd burner. So, perhaps jitter does exist, at least a cd burner wouldn't work very well without a buffer.
Well, I'll have to get back to you on that one... :) like I said I haven't listened to it yet.
I went through all of this stuff a while ago, and managed to settle down on a pretty good A/V system. The basic gist is this:
There is little in the way of technical innovation in this field. Mostly that's done by the big labs, like Dolby, who came up with AC-3 (our current standard of 5.1 digital surround sound). Basically there are some ASIC's that manufacturers put into their receivers and off they go. Sound quality differences come down to the individual components used, and how much a manufacturer pays attention to component noise in their designs. That is, you really, really don't want a big audibly humming transformer sitting right next to the output stage of your amplifier!
Basically, you want good quality transformers, capacitors, internal wiring, switches/binding posts and overall design. Switching and binding posts should be as far away from any sort of noise generator as possible, capacitors should seem obscenely large and a nice, big transformer, or two should be present. That doesn't always mean you're on the right path, but it's a good indicator.
As far as brands and what not drop me an email at justin@websocietyinc.com. I went through all of this so I have a pretty good idea and am happy to share...
I agree, which is why I made mention of SACD (Sony's 2 channel, uncompressed, higher sample/bit rate, DVD storage based, format).
I've heard SACD sounds better than DVD-Audio, but haven't listened to either in a good environment. I did just buy a cheap-o Sony DVD/SACD combo thing, but haven't played with it.
Another point in this whole mess is the fact that the rest of your audio system is analog... amplification and speakers. So, you have to have a DAC (digital to analog converter, for those that don't know) some where in the picture, generally integrated into the CD player. The DAC is where most of the sound quality can be made up in a CD setup. Any CD player with a digital out can be made to sound tons better with the addition of a $300 external DAC. What does that tell you? It tells me that a crappy DAC doesn't accurately reproduce the musical picture from the information stored on the CD. So... if you can take the DAC completely out of the picture and store the music in an analog format you've removed a "weak link" from the system.
No it wasn't a blind test, and yes, having been in and around the whole audiophile scene for a while, I'm well aware of the double blind testing stuff. That doesn't change the fact that when I did the testing for myself I, as well as others, some of whom don't even know what a tube amp is, let alone that "turntables sound better," liked the LP better. You don't need a blind test to tell if a color TV looks better than a black and white TV because the differences were obvious. That was the case here. Granted, this is an extreme case, in that the equipment used was all the way around incredible, and I promise that if anyone ends up going to Fry's and picking up a $200 Sony turntable and compares it against their $200, or hell $60 portable CD player their results will be vastly different, but CDs do not have the entire musical picture.
Think about it square waves vs sine waves. The area of the square wave may equal that of the sine wave, but that doesn't mean it looks (or sounds) the same.