I think you're using the wrong distro of Linux if things don't "just work" for you with a Thinkpad.
Possibly. I'm using Fedora Core, mainly out of inertia. Last I tried Ubuntu, which was a while back, it was more of a pain for me. I'm going to switch my old laptop over to Ubuntu and see how it has improved in the meantime.
Just got a new Thinkpad. Nvidia graphics, Intel networking chipsets. Getting this working properly was a bunch of fucking around, and the wireless networking still isn't quite right.
I love to be able to tweak things endlessly when I'm building a server for maximum performance, so I love the openness and flexibility of Linux. But for a desktop or laptop, I want it to just fucking work, and I've never had that experience on Linux.
I think it's a bit of column A and a bit of column B. Plus an incredibly poor appreciation for their duties as citizens, which, in my view, come before duty to party or employer.
Glenn Greenwald, a lawyer himself, recently caught something very interesting. Gonzales actually referred to Bush as "my client". That's totally warped; the AG's client is the people of the United States, not the president.
This to me is symptomatic; a lot of the Bush appointees seem to value personal and party loyalty above all else, and lack any regard for the government as a public service. Which in effect turns us from a collection of self-governing citizens into an elected tyranny.
Maybe I'm just a traditionalist, but I think the America we had for a couple hundred years was a pretty good one, and I wouldn't mind going back to things like rule of law, separation of powers, and checks and balances.
Yes, of course -- since it is illegal to take political views into consideration for certain kinds of career non-political jobs. Federal law is very clear on this. Read the PDF linked in the story for more information.
Absolutely. The theory here is that the government is a mostly neutral organization charged with implementing the law, with a thin layer of somewhat political people on top.
Countries that fail to have this distinction are, by and large, third world banana republics where every change in administration brings a vast amount of hiring and firing, and is usually accompanied by patronage, corruption, and incompetence. Until recently, that was not how America's federal government was run. Now, I worry the major distinction is that we can't really grow bananas here.
The law, which the practice was violating [...], is, probably, unconstitutional in itself, because it tramples on the President's power to run the Administration however he sees fit.
So you're saying that the guy in charge of upholding the constitution and the rule of law can, at his option, ignore any law that he pleases and do what he wants because somebody, somewhere thinks it is probably unconstitutional?
Because my crazy idea was that we had some sort of checks-and-balances system where only the legislature can make the laws, only the executive implements them, and only the courts interpret them. Maybe I was reading about some other country, though.
not according to any court, BTW, but only to the new Justice Department
How is it that here you can recognize that only courts can authoritatively interpret law, but the rest of your jabber grants that power to the executive branch? I can understand making this mistake weeks apart, but you've managed to contradict yourself in the same sentence.
I do want to point out that human beings are typically very social creatures.
Compared with other animals, sure. Compared with each other, not always. You get a range, and this guy is toward one end.
dealing with introversion is a psychological issue that is beneficial to address due to the other benefits it brings (specifically mates and allies)
You're working here with the blank slate theory, the notion that the mind is infinitely plastic. It's not. An introvert may be able to learn to put up with the gym, in the same way they learn to put up with nosy parkers telling them that introversion is a psychological issue rather than a normal personality variation. But they may not learn to like it, and the last thing somebody trying to adopt an exercise program needs is having it be more challenging than it needs to be.
Actually - you're just wrong. Yes, the body has a number of low-calorie adaptations, but HORDING FAT isn't one of them.
Eh? The point of fat is to get you through lean times. E.g., the bear fattening up for winter hibernation. Then when food is scarce, the metabolism shifts into a lower gear (those low-calorie adaptations you agree exist) and your body lives more off of the stored fat. But that lower gear, by reducing calories burned, would have act to hoard fat.
he is a physical impossibility. It doesn't take a lab to have common sense. Or do math.
You know what you're doing math on? Numbers that come out of labs where they study people of normal weight. As you can see elsewhere in the thread, the popular resting energy expenditure formula intentionally excluded very fat people.
It could well be that this guy is giant because he eats a lot more than other people. People with eating disorders often have trouble confronting the truth of what they eat. (Not that accusing them of lying helps them get over that.) However, we are not bumping up against the second law of thermodynamics here; the human body is a complex and poorly understood system even for the normal case.
This guy isn't normal. He isn't within three standard deviations of normal. Unless you are senior faculty member whose field of study is the metabolisms of the morbidly obese, pretending that you know everything important about him based on one short paragraph from the guy plus something you read on a dieting site is a big scoop of arrogance, leavened with a pinch of cluelessness.
Hookay, bub. It seems like I've been playing Whack-a-mole with morons recently.
The quoted value is calculated using the Mufflin equation, which is regarded as among the best in the business [...]
Listen up, my little douchenozzle. You're about to learn some science.
First, there is no Mufflin equation. If you are going to be a total prick, you should at least know a tiny bit about what you're talking about. I gather you're referring to the Mifflin-St Jeor equation. But hey, I'm sure you just mis-typed it. Twice. The same way.
Second, you're not "in the business". My guess is that you haven't gotten past a college sophomore science lab, and the most business you get up to is stocking cans in aisle 6. Otherwise you would know how people come up with numbers like this, and what they actually mean, rather than what self-important shitbag internet bullies think they mean on a casual reading of about.com. No, I didn't mean you there. I was thinking about... uh... somebody else.
Third, this is not an equation like E=mc^2 or F=ma. Those describe fundamental natural relationships that are baked into the structure of the universe. This is a curve fit. These guys, by which I mean Mifflin and St Jeor, got a few hundred points of data (to be precise, 498), drew some lines through their field of dots, and then came up with an equation for those lines. If you had bothered to read the original paper, you would find that they say flat out that there is, even by their calculations, a 30% error rate baked in to their equation based on normal human variability.
Fourth, they were studying normal people. They only got 40 guys who were more than 40% of the ideal weight, so at best you could say our anonymous big guy is rarer than 1 in 40. Worse, they specifically excluded anybody over 80% of their ideal weight. That's right: people anywhere near this guy's weight were intentionally left out of the study. So you are running your mouth in overdrive and being a jackass based on no data at all.
Fifth, people still don't really understand how stuff like this works. They are still doing basic, basic science on the relationship between diet and weight. That this guy weighs 380 pounds means that he is a complete outlier. Maybe he's just fat because he likes the pies a whole lot. Or maybe he's fat because there's something different about him. E.g., that his body's famine adaptations are stuck in overdrive due to some genetic condition. We already know that he's very abnormal, and your whole line of argument is based on assuming that he's perfectly normal in every aspect except one. Which, if you knew any science, you would know is shitty science.
So let's sum up here. You were a complete dick to some stranger on an internet forum based on nothing more than the heady fumes of your arrogance. plus maybe a quick Google search. If you'd bothered to think about it, you would know that anybody at 380 lbs has already taken plenty of crap about their weight. But did that slow you down? No. If anything, it made it easier for you to heap on the abuse. Nothing like picking on a fatty, eh? Then, when called on your ignorance, you tried to spin your way out of it, and failed.
My sincere hope for you is that you are some vaguely malodorous, poorly groomed 10th-grade dweeb who sneaks off to the computer lab at lunch to post on Slashdot and hide from the people picking on him. Because that would give you an excuse for being such a clueless, needless asshole to a stranger who's life is already filled with suck. And because eventually you will have the chance to grow up and become a real human eventually.
What I fear, though, is that you are already past the larval stage, and are writing missives like this from your elderly mom's basement while working a minimum wage job and creeping out the people who have to sit next to you on the bus. If that's the case, god help you, as you'll probably never change, and your life will be much sadder than some guy who is merely very fat.
The one thing I'd disagree with is your suggestion of cheap mats. A solid metal pad makes the game vastly more fun to play, and lets you move faster without having to develop all kinds of unhelpful skills to keep the pad from moving out from under you.
I think this is true for serious players, but you have to be pretty serious to buy one of those metal pads; they're pricey! I never would have started playing DDR if I'd had to buy one of those to get going.
For just starting out, the cheap pads are enough to let you know if you like the game. And given that they are like 10% of the cost of a high-end pad, there's nothing wrong with starting cheap and then trading up.
I have one of those, the Garmin Forerunner 305, and I love it. All that lovely data is just plain fun to play with. But it's also surprisingly useful. With a heart monitor, I found that I was often working out too hard. Once I started learning to keep my effort more even, I enjoyed my workouts a lot more. Which means that I actually did them more.
My yoga teacher claims that the origin of yoga is as preparation for extended meditation. The notion is that if you satisfy your body's needs, it will hush up and let you think. And really, what's programming but focused meditation with a bit of typing?
And yes, working out with the hot chicks is a nice bonus.
Re:Exercise in front of people anyway
on
How Do Geeks Exercise?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
So you're an introvert. Big deal! Exercise in front of people anyway.
Yes, I too find it completely effective to dismiss stated the preferences and core personality characteristics of others rather than taking them seriously.
Are you an extrovert who needs to spend time with people? Suck it up and just work from home.
Have a speech impediment? Don't let that stop you from a career in broadcast journalism.
Are you caucasian? Don't fall for that sun-block jazz. Just go out in the sun and you'll adapt. Tall? Sure, buy that Smart Car. Short? No, you won't look silly in that H2. Enjoy coding? Ignore that and get a sales job. Dyslexic? The career for you: librarian!
The only kind of exercise program that people stick with is one that suits them, one that they enjoy. Introversion is not something that you shake off or get over; introverts find it draining to be around strangers, and will no matter how much they practice.
I second this. It's especially good if you have to travel a lot. You can get a roll-up dance mat, put DDR or the open-source StepMania on your laptop, and then just do 20 minutes of DDR in the morning at your hotel.
The minimum caloric needs of your 380 lb corpulence are ~2700 calories/day.
I've seen other people make similar reports. You're quoting an average number, but I've never seen good data on the outliers, which this guy could well be.
Also, data like that you quote is generally taken from people on normal diets. The body has a number of low-calorie adaptations do deal with times of famine.
Although the AC you reply to is not typical, you won't be able to know that he's actually wrong until you get him in a lab for a week. Which, given that you feel confident enough to be a total dick about it, I'm sure you've already done, right?
On the other hand, MathML was never designed [w3.org] to be easily human writable, and when I read that years ago, I immediately lost interest - what's the point?
No XML-derived language is really meant to be human-writable, not in the way you're thinking. XML is made for program-to-program exchanges of data in a way that's meant to be kinda human-readable, but mainly easy to parse and durable. On top of that, the various *ML domain-specific formats are meant to be common agreements on representing particular kinds of data.
The real point of XML was so that people didn't have to write low-level parsers over and over again, and instead could argue about more interesting problems than how to represent a string. In an earlier era, XML would have been both pointless (because people didn't exchange documents much) and wasteful (because it's relatively expensive to parse). But with the rise of the Internet, an open standard that took advantage of increasing processor power was just the right thing to solve problems that plagued people throughout the 80s and 90s.
A human-writable math language wouldn't be in XML. Humans are pretty smart, so you could make the language much more information-dense and take advantage of a lot of implicit structure. You could also provide a lot of nice shortcuts, and much richer constructs than are allowed in XML. But the price of that is a complicated custom-built parser with a lot of custom user-friendly error messages.
My guess is that they weren't trying to replace LaTeX, but were instead solving the same data interchange problems that other XML people were solving, so it's no surprise it doesn't meet your personal needs.
The sad truth of the matter is that the servicing of highly technical writers just isn't a very big market
I know bupkis about TeX, but I do know a little about the business of software, and I can think of three things that make it even worse than the market size would indicate.
First, the high end of anything is likely to have a lot of divergence of needs. McDonald's can serve 80% of America with the same products, but you'd never be able to satisfy the top 1%, let alone the top 1% of that, with a single restaurant.
Second, all of those people, given that they are dedicated professionals and masters of their domains, will be very fussy, wanting any program they use to be well tailored to their needs. Look at programmers and the great variety of tools we use, even though the tasks are are pretty similar. So even for the same set of needs, you'd have a hard time making a product that a sufficient chunk of people liked.
And third, since everybody is used to TeX, you need to support a big swathe of what people are used to there to make people happy. Putting a modern face on that isn't easy, or somebody already would have done it.
And a bonus fourth reason: there's no money in it. It's not like most of the people writing science papers are swimming in dough, and they're used to getting TeX for free. Most of the market just wouldn't pay much for a replacement, even a better one.
So yeah, I agree; I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for a good commercial solution, not until it's a cheap mod of some existing technology.
But the point is, branching and merging are EASY in git, and not in the least harmful unless you've got problems in your project management flow in the first place.
Oh, well if git only good for places that don't have any problems, actual or latent, then recommending it to everybody on Slashdot certainly makes sense.
Very interesting! Thanks for taking the time to post that.
The teams I've seen that have this problem mainly have solved it in other ways, like pre-commit automated testing and distributed build tools. Or they're working with languages that do more of the work at run-time, so the cost of change isn't as severe. But it's great to hear that you folks have the branch-heavy approach working pretty well for you; every one I've seen personally has always been a terror.
I take it we're talking a C++ code base here? Can you say roughly how many developers you're talking about? And how often you release?
You're talking about culture and technology as if they're two separate things, but they aren't at all; each influences the other.
Take the modern American lifestyle, which people openly call an automobile culture. That technology has deeply shaped the culture, and that culture shapes the technology. The recent rise in American cities of a cycling culture also has a symbiotic relationship with technology. Improvements in clothing, cycles, and locks started things out. Now we have things like Internet-enabled carshare and innovation in maintaining bike lanes and traffic management.
Telling me you need to optimize for stupid project managers reeks of fail as well.
I think stupidity isn't the only reason people make bad choices. Sometimes it's because they're inexperienced, busy, tired, desperate, curious, or just optimistic. If the DVCSes are being sold as making branching and merging much easier, then you can bet that many people will say, "Great! More branching will solve all of our conflict problems." I've seen entire companies of otherwise smart people make this mistake.
So far, my take-away from this thread is about what I came in with. DVCSes are great for the sorts of dispersed teams that created them. But I'm not seeing a compelling need for them for more typical commercial teams. If you're not branching and merging a lot, then they apparently bring no upside but do have a downside risk of misapplication.
The main reason that people don't use branching more is because it has been very painful to merge the branches together again. The current generation of DVCS tools were all designed to mitigate this as much as possible.
Are the tools really the problem?
The major merge problems I've seen sure weren't helped by the tools. But the essential problem seems to be managing complexity. With a single trunk and frequent checkins, you have one true version, plus a bunch of tiny variations whose differences get hammered out daily. Branching creates a lot of opportunity for conceptual drift. Keeping track of one main line is hard enough; keeping track of what a bunch of other teams are doing in their own branches seems a lot harder.
Further, my experience is that the pain of merges grows exponentially with the duration of branches, not linearly. No matter how good the tools, I don't see that core fact changing.
Maybe he does realize he works for the stockholders and maybe he also realizes they can't fire him just because he won't show them the medical records. The shareholders don't have a choice here. They may ask, but they can't demand. Because Steve Jobs is Apple.
I don't think you realize that you've made my point for me. If he's running the company to suit himself rather than his shareholders, then he's failing to do his duty.
I'm having trouble following both your answer and your question, so let me try again.
The best single teams I work with almost never branch. They all sit in the same room, talk frequently, check in every few hours, and don't go home with work uncommitted. Except for occasional very rare production issues, they don't branch; they always work off trunk.
For people in a good team-of-teams situation (e.g., 30 engineers in the same office, working on the same code base, in 5-10 teams) I see slightly more branching, but even those shops try very hard to avoid it, generally because they've tried it and find it too painful to manage the complexity.
However, I've seen a number of bad teams that just wallow in the complexity, where a dozen developers might have 30 active branches for different features and releases and lord knows what else. And then the spend a lot of their time trying to merge the right bits together to get stuff out the door.
The distributed VCS tools make sense to me when you're dealing with a large open-source project with a dispersed team, and I'm fine with them in that context. But for a team of full-time pros working together, I'm suspicious of the DVCS approach; every team I've seen like that is a rollicking clusterfuck of branch confusion. When somebody tells me they want to use git in their office because it makes it easier to branch, it gives me the fear.
Thus, what I'm trying to ask is: have you been using your DVCS with a dispersed team?
Anyway, I do believe ease of forking/branching/merging to be the killer feature of a VCS and I think git has got it completely right. I've never tried mercurial (hg) but I've heard great things about it as well...but I have zero dissatisfaction with git, and a project I'm working on has even adopted the short-hash conventions git uses with much success.
I take it you're working with a distributed team? For teams that are all in one spot, I see more of them them moving away from branching. The notion being that if you have a lot of people trying to collaborate tightly, branches let them run off in all sorts of different directions, which gets painful.
So that a VCS makes branching easy is not always a plus for me; when something's dangerous, I like it to be hard.
When everybody on the NYT Board of Directors posts their full medical histories in an NYT op-ed, I will read this article.
If you lose a member of a board of directors, you have a bunch of other directors. I don't ever recall an incident where a director died and substantially affected the stock price.
However, Steve Jobs's health is an important component of Apple's stock price. Saying he doesn't need to disclose it because it's private is implying that it isn't somehow material, which is patently false. I can't think of a major company that is more closely identified with a single person. It's his fiduciary duty, and that of his board, to ensure that he had a good succession plan, especially if there's any reason to be concerned about his health.
Not that Jobs will care one whit. Even though he owns only a tiny fraction of the company, I don't have the impression that he realizes he works for the owners.
Would you be able to make an arguable case in court on the premise that the state in which you reside said it is ok to violate the federal law?
In a word, no. A number of people licensed to grow or sell medical marijuana by their local cities have been sent to federal prison, and I believe they couldn't mention their local-government blessing in federal court.
There's a good article in today's LA Times. A guy who ran a dispensary is up on Federal charges, and at the top of the article is a photo of him cutting the ribbon with the whole city council standing with him. Boing Boing has some related coverage about the high school student with advanced cancer who Lynch was supplying with pot to help with pain and appetite loss. The feds are using that to push for a bigger sentence. Lynch probably won't even be able to use the term "medical marijuana" in court.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're using the wrong distro of Linux if things don't "just work" for you with a Thinkpad.
Possibly. I'm using Fedora Core, mainly out of inertia. Last I tried Ubuntu, which was a while back, it was more of a pain for me. I'm going to switch my old laptop over to Ubuntu and see how it has improved in the meantime.
Just got a new Thinkpad. Nvidia graphics, Intel networking chipsets. Getting this working properly was a bunch of fucking around, and the wireless networking still isn't quite right.
If you want detailed examples of the pain, check out ThinkWiki or Clemson Linux Initiative.
I love to be able to tweak things endlessly when I'm building a server for maximum performance, so I love the openness and flexibility of Linux. But for a desktop or laptop, I want it to just fucking work, and I've never had that experience on Linux.
I think it's a bit of column A and a bit of column B. Plus an incredibly poor appreciation for their duties as citizens, which, in my view, come before duty to party or employer.
Glenn Greenwald, a lawyer himself, recently caught something very interesting. Gonzales actually referred to Bush as "my client". That's totally warped; the AG's client is the people of the United States, not the president.
This to me is symptomatic; a lot of the Bush appointees seem to value personal and party loyalty above all else, and lack any regard for the government as a public service. Which in effect turns us from a collection of self-governing citizens into an elected tyranny.
Maybe I'm just a traditionalist, but I think the America we had for a couple hundred years was a pretty good one, and I wouldn't mind going back to things like rule of law, separation of powers, and checks and balances.
Yes, of course -- since it is illegal to take political views into consideration for certain kinds of career non-political jobs. Federal law is very clear on this. Read the PDF linked in the story for more information.
Absolutely. The theory here is that the government is a mostly neutral organization charged with implementing the law, with a thin layer of somewhat political people on top.
Countries that fail to have this distinction are, by and large, third world banana republics where every change in administration brings a vast amount of hiring and firing, and is usually accompanied by patronage, corruption, and incompetence. Until recently, that was not how America's federal government was run. Now, I worry the major distinction is that we can't really grow bananas here.
The law, which the practice was violating [...], is, probably, unconstitutional in itself, because it tramples on the President's power to run the Administration however he sees fit.
So you're saying that the guy in charge of upholding the constitution and the rule of law can, at his option, ignore any law that he pleases and do what he wants because somebody, somewhere thinks it is probably unconstitutional?
Because my crazy idea was that we had some sort of checks-and-balances system where only the legislature can make the laws, only the executive implements them, and only the courts interpret them. Maybe I was reading about some other country, though.
not according to any court, BTW, but only to the new Justice Department
How is it that here you can recognize that only courts can authoritatively interpret law, but the rest of your jabber grants that power to the executive branch? I can understand making this mistake weeks apart, but you've managed to contradict yourself in the same sentence.
I do want to point out that human beings are typically very social creatures.
Compared with other animals, sure. Compared with each other, not always. You get a range, and this guy is toward one end.
dealing with introversion is a psychological issue that is beneficial to address due to the other benefits it brings (specifically mates and allies)
You're working here with the blank slate theory, the notion that the mind is infinitely plastic. It's not. An introvert may be able to learn to put up with the gym, in the same way they learn to put up with nosy parkers telling them that introversion is a psychological issue rather than a normal personality variation. But they may not learn to like it, and the last thing somebody trying to adopt an exercise program needs is having it be more challenging than it needs to be.
Actually - you're just wrong. Yes, the body has a number of low-calorie adaptations, but HORDING FAT isn't one of them.
Eh? The point of fat is to get you through lean times. E.g., the bear fattening up for winter hibernation. Then when food is scarce, the metabolism shifts into a lower gear (those low-calorie adaptations you agree exist) and your body lives more off of the stored fat. But that lower gear, by reducing calories burned, would have act to hoard fat.
he is a physical impossibility. It doesn't take a lab to have common sense. Or do math.
You know what you're doing math on? Numbers that come out of labs where they study people of normal weight. As you can see elsewhere in the thread, the popular resting energy expenditure formula intentionally excluded very fat people.
It could well be that this guy is giant because he eats a lot more than other people. People with eating disorders often have trouble confronting the truth of what they eat. (Not that accusing them of lying helps them get over that.) However, we are not bumping up against the second law of thermodynamics here; the human body is a complex and poorly understood system even for the normal case.
This guy isn't normal. He isn't within three standard deviations of normal. Unless you are senior faculty member whose field of study is the metabolisms of the morbidly obese, pretending that you know everything important about him based on one short paragraph from the guy plus something you read on a dieting site is a big scoop of arrogance, leavened with a pinch of cluelessness.
Hookay, bub. It seems like I've been playing Whack-a-mole with morons recently.
The quoted value is calculated using the Mufflin equation, which is regarded as among the best in the business [...]
Listen up, my little douchenozzle. You're about to learn some science.
First, there is no Mufflin equation. If you are going to be a total prick, you should at least know a tiny bit about what you're talking about. I gather you're referring to the Mifflin-St Jeor equation. But hey, I'm sure you just mis-typed it. Twice. The same way.
Second, you're not "in the business". My guess is that you haven't gotten past a college sophomore science lab, and the most business you get up to is stocking cans in aisle 6. Otherwise you would know how people come up with numbers like this, and what they actually mean, rather than what self-important shitbag internet bullies think they mean on a casual reading of about.com. No, I didn't mean you there. I was thinking about... uh... somebody else.
Third, this is not an equation like E=mc^2 or F=ma. Those describe fundamental natural relationships that are baked into the structure of the universe. This is a curve fit. These guys, by which I mean Mifflin and St Jeor, got a few hundred points of data (to be precise, 498), drew some lines through their field of dots, and then came up with an equation for those lines. If you had bothered to read the original paper, you would find that they say flat out that there is, even by their calculations, a 30% error rate baked in to their equation based on normal human variability.
Fourth, they were studying normal people. They only got 40 guys who were more than 40% of the ideal weight, so at best you could say our anonymous big guy is rarer than 1 in 40. Worse, they specifically excluded anybody over 80% of their ideal weight. That's right: people anywhere near this guy's weight were intentionally left out of the study. So you are running your mouth in overdrive and being a jackass based on no data at all.
Fifth, people still don't really understand how stuff like this works. They are still doing basic, basic science on the relationship between diet and weight. That this guy weighs 380 pounds means that he is a complete outlier. Maybe he's just fat because he likes the pies a whole lot. Or maybe he's fat because there's something different about him. E.g., that his body's famine adaptations are stuck in overdrive due to some genetic condition. We already know that he's very abnormal, and your whole line of argument is based on assuming that he's perfectly normal in every aspect except one. Which, if you knew any science, you would know is shitty science.
So let's sum up here. You were a complete dick to some stranger on an internet forum based on nothing more than the heady fumes of your arrogance. plus maybe a quick Google search. If you'd bothered to think about it, you would know that anybody at 380 lbs has already taken plenty of crap about their weight. But did that slow you down? No. If anything, it made it easier for you to heap on the abuse. Nothing like picking on a fatty, eh? Then, when called on your ignorance, you tried to spin your way out of it, and failed.
My sincere hope for you is that you are some vaguely malodorous, poorly groomed 10th-grade dweeb who sneaks off to the computer lab at lunch to post on Slashdot and hide from the people picking on him. Because that would give you an excuse for being such a clueless, needless asshole to a stranger who's life is already filled with suck. And because eventually you will have the chance to grow up and become a real human eventually.
What I fear, though, is that you are already past the larval stage, and are writing missives like this from your elderly mom's basement while working a minimum wage job and creeping out the people who have to sit next to you on the bus. If that's the case, god help you, as you'll probably never change, and your life will be much sadder than some guy who is merely very fat.
The one thing I'd disagree with is your suggestion of cheap mats. A solid metal pad makes the game vastly more fun to play, and lets you move faster without having to develop all kinds of unhelpful skills to keep the pad from moving out from under you.
I think this is true for serious players, but you have to be pretty serious to buy one of those metal pads; they're pricey! I never would have started playing DDR if I'd had to buy one of those to get going.
For just starting out, the cheap pads are enough to let you know if you like the game. And given that they are like 10% of the cost of a high-end pad, there's nothing wrong with starting cheap and then trading up.
They also make a wrist watch version.
I have one of those, the Garmin Forerunner 305, and I love it. All that lovely data is just plain fun to play with. But it's also surprisingly useful. With a heart monitor, I found that I was often working out too hard. Once I started learning to keep my effort more even, I enjoyed my workouts a lot more. Which means that I actually did them more.
I second all of that.
My yoga teacher claims that the origin of yoga is as preparation for extended meditation. The notion is that if you satisfy your body's needs, it will hush up and let you think. And really, what's programming but focused meditation with a bit of typing?
And yes, working out with the hot chicks is a nice bonus.
So you're an introvert. Big deal! Exercise in front of people anyway.
Yes, I too find it completely effective to dismiss stated the preferences and core personality characteristics of others rather than taking them seriously.
Are you an extrovert who needs to spend time with people? Suck it up and just work from home.
Have a speech impediment? Don't let that stop you from a career in broadcast journalism.
Are you caucasian? Don't fall for that sun-block jazz. Just go out in the sun and you'll adapt. Tall? Sure, buy that Smart Car. Short? No, you won't look silly in that H2. Enjoy coding? Ignore that and get a sales job. Dyslexic? The career for you: librarian!
The only kind of exercise program that people stick with is one that suits them, one that they enjoy. Introversion is not something that you shake off or get over; introverts find it draining to be around strangers, and will no matter how much they practice.
I second this. It's especially good if you have to travel a lot. You can get a roll-up dance mat, put DDR or the open-source StepMania on your laptop, and then just do 20 minutes of DDR in the morning at your hotel.
The minimum caloric needs of your 380 lb corpulence are ~2700 calories/day.
I've seen other people make similar reports. You're quoting an average number, but I've never seen good data on the outliers, which this guy could well be.
Also, data like that you quote is generally taken from people on normal diets. The body has a number of low-calorie adaptations do deal with times of famine.
Although the AC you reply to is not typical, you won't be able to know that he's actually wrong until you get him in a lab for a week. Which, given that you feel confident enough to be a total dick about it, I'm sure you've already done, right?
On the other hand, MathML was never designed [w3.org] to be easily human writable, and when I read that years ago, I immediately lost interest - what's the point?
No XML-derived language is really meant to be human-writable, not in the way you're thinking. XML is made for program-to-program exchanges of data in a way that's meant to be kinda human-readable, but mainly easy to parse and durable. On top of that, the various *ML domain-specific formats are meant to be common agreements on representing particular kinds of data.
The real point of XML was so that people didn't have to write low-level parsers over and over again, and instead could argue about more interesting problems than how to represent a string. In an earlier era, XML would have been both pointless (because people didn't exchange documents much) and wasteful (because it's relatively expensive to parse). But with the rise of the Internet, an open standard that took advantage of increasing processor power was just the right thing to solve problems that plagued people throughout the 80s and 90s.
A human-writable math language wouldn't be in XML. Humans are pretty smart, so you could make the language much more information-dense and take advantage of a lot of implicit structure. You could also provide a lot of nice shortcuts, and much richer constructs than are allowed in XML. But the price of that is a complicated custom-built parser with a lot of custom user-friendly error messages.
My guess is that they weren't trying to replace LaTeX, but were instead solving the same data interchange problems that other XML people were solving, so it's no surprise it doesn't meet your personal needs.
The sad truth of the matter is that the servicing of highly technical writers just isn't a very big market
I know bupkis about TeX, but I do know a little about the business of software, and I can think of three things that make it even worse than the market size would indicate.
First, the high end of anything is likely to have a lot of divergence of needs. McDonald's can serve 80% of America with the same products, but you'd never be able to satisfy the top 1%, let alone the top 1% of that, with a single restaurant.
Second, all of those people, given that they are dedicated professionals and masters of their domains, will be very fussy, wanting any program they use to be well tailored to their needs. Look at programmers and the great variety of tools we use, even though the tasks are are pretty similar. So even for the same set of needs, you'd have a hard time making a product that a sufficient chunk of people liked.
And third, since everybody is used to TeX, you need to support a big swathe of what people are used to there to make people happy. Putting a modern face on that isn't easy, or somebody already would have done it.
And a bonus fourth reason: there's no money in it. It's not like most of the people writing science papers are swimming in dough, and they're used to getting TeX for free. Most of the market just wouldn't pay much for a replacement, even a better one.
So yeah, I agree; I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for a good commercial solution, not until it's a cheap mod of some existing technology.
But the point is, branching and merging are EASY in git, and not in the least harmful unless you've got problems in your project management flow in the first place.
Oh, well if git only good for places that don't have any problems, actual or latent, then recommending it to everybody on Slashdot certainly makes sense.
Very interesting! Thanks for taking the time to post that.
The teams I've seen that have this problem mainly have solved it in other ways, like pre-commit automated testing and distributed build tools. Or they're working with languages that do more of the work at run-time, so the cost of change isn't as severe. But it's great to hear that you folks have the branch-heavy approach working pretty well for you; every one I've seen personally has always been a terror.
I take it we're talking a C++ code base here? Can you say roughly how many developers you're talking about? And how often you release?
Thats why I said you need a change in culture.
You're talking about culture and technology as if they're two separate things, but they aren't at all; each influences the other.
Take the modern American lifestyle, which people openly call an automobile culture. That technology has deeply shaped the culture, and that culture shapes the technology. The recent rise in American cities of a cycling culture also has a symbiotic relationship with technology. Improvements in clothing, cycles, and locks started things out. Now we have things like Internet-enabled carshare and innovation in maintaining bike lanes and traffic management.
Telling me you need to optimize for stupid project managers reeks of fail as well.
I think stupidity isn't the only reason people make bad choices. Sometimes it's because they're inexperienced, busy, tired, desperate, curious, or just optimistic. If the DVCSes are being sold as making branching and merging much easier, then you can bet that many people will say, "Great! More branching will solve all of our conflict problems." I've seen entire companies of otherwise smart people make this mistake.
So far, my take-away from this thread is about what I came in with. DVCSes are great for the sorts of dispersed teams that created them. But I'm not seeing a compelling need for them for more typical commercial teams. If you're not branching and merging a lot, then they apparently bring no upside but do have a downside risk of misapplication.
The main reason that people don't use branching more is because it has been very painful to merge the branches together again. The current generation of DVCS tools were all designed to mitigate this as much as possible.
Are the tools really the problem?
The major merge problems I've seen sure weren't helped by the tools. But the essential problem seems to be managing complexity. With a single trunk and frequent checkins, you have one true version, plus a bunch of tiny variations whose differences get hammered out daily. Branching creates a lot of opportunity for conceptual drift. Keeping track of one main line is hard enough; keeping track of what a bunch of other teams are doing in their own branches seems a lot harder.
Further, my experience is that the pain of merges grows exponentially with the duration of branches, not linearly. No matter how good the tools, I don't see that core fact changing.
Maybe he does realize he works for the stockholders and maybe he also realizes they can't fire him just because he won't show them the medical records. The shareholders don't have a choice here. They may ask, but they can't demand. Because Steve Jobs is Apple.
I don't think you realize that you've made my point for me. If he's running the company to suit himself rather than his shareholders, then he's failing to do his duty.
I'm having trouble following both your answer and your question, so let me try again.
The best single teams I work with almost never branch. They all sit in the same room, talk frequently, check in every few hours, and don't go home with work uncommitted. Except for occasional very rare production issues, they don't branch; they always work off trunk.
For people in a good team-of-teams situation (e.g., 30 engineers in the same office, working on the same code base, in 5-10 teams) I see slightly more branching, but even those shops try very hard to avoid it, generally because they've tried it and find it too painful to manage the complexity.
However, I've seen a number of bad teams that just wallow in the complexity, where a dozen developers might have 30 active branches for different features and releases and lord knows what else. And then the spend a lot of their time trying to merge the right bits together to get stuff out the door.
The distributed VCS tools make sense to me when you're dealing with a large open-source project with a dispersed team, and I'm fine with them in that context. But for a team of full-time pros working together, I'm suspicious of the DVCS approach; every team I've seen like that is a rollicking clusterfuck of branch confusion. When somebody tells me they want to use git in their office because it makes it easier to branch, it gives me the fear.
Thus, what I'm trying to ask is: have you been using your DVCS with a dispersed team?
Anyway, I do believe ease of forking/branching/merging to be the killer feature of a VCS and I think git has got it completely right. I've never tried mercurial (hg) but I've heard great things about it as well...but I have zero dissatisfaction with git, and a project I'm working on has even adopted the short-hash conventions git uses with much success.
I take it you're working with a distributed team? For teams that are all in one spot, I see more of them them moving away from branching. The notion being that if you have a lot of people trying to collaborate tightly, branches let them run off in all sorts of different directions, which gets painful.
So that a VCS makes branching easy is not always a plus for me; when something's dangerous, I like it to be hard.
When everybody on the NYT Board of Directors posts their full medical histories in an NYT op-ed, I will read this article.
If you lose a member of a board of directors, you have a bunch of other directors. I don't ever recall an incident where a director died and substantially affected the stock price.
However, Steve Jobs's health is an important component of Apple's stock price. Saying he doesn't need to disclose it because it's private is implying that it isn't somehow material, which is patently false. I can't think of a major company that is more closely identified with a single person. It's his fiduciary duty, and that of his board, to ensure that he had a good succession plan, especially if there's any reason to be concerned about his health.
Not that Jobs will care one whit. Even though he owns only a tiny fraction of the company, I don't have the impression that he realizes he works for the owners.
Would you be able to make an arguable case in court on the premise that the state in which you reside said it is ok to violate the federal law?
In a word, no. A number of people licensed to grow or sell medical marijuana by their local cities have been sent to federal prison, and I believe they couldn't mention their local-government blessing in federal court.
There's a good article in today's LA Times. A guy who ran a dispensary is up on Federal charges, and at the top of the article is a photo of him cutting the ribbon with the whole city council standing with him. Boing Boing has some related coverage about the high school student with advanced cancer who Lynch was supplying with pot to help with pain and appetite loss. The feds are using that to push for a bigger sentence. Lynch probably won't even be able to use the term "medical marijuana" in court.