The reason is simple - I never bought a steering wheel for it. Worse, all of my friends were better than me at it.
These days, my Dreamcast is gathering dust, and it's not for lack of love.:\ My new HDTV doesn't have a VGA-in. This was a VERY stupid oversight on my part, and the picture is just abysmal using S-Video. The cheapest I could get a VGA to Component adapter was $100! It's awful man...awful.
So I need a VGA adapter, and then a VGA -> Component Adapter. It's cruel. That, and I've wanted to grab a pair of guns and House of the Dead 2, but most places still want more than $25/gun. Insanity.
I'm going to take off my scientific-mind hat for a moment and put on my christian hat.
You're right. This is pointless because the data is tainted and useless.
Why? Because it isn't a controlled environment. For accuracy in a study you need to be able to replicate a situation, and this isn't it. The reason is that you cannot measure, as a human being, the state of one's spirit during prayer. What I mean by this is that if you claim christianity (if you're an aetheist, I'll respect that, but this won't apply to you), then you must have a working faith for prayer of this magnitude to have much effect. Our relationship with God is not one where we give the orders and God does what we tell h im to do. Prayer is our opportunity to communicate a willingness to do God's will for us, not the other way around. If his will is for us to be healed, and we our receptive to his will, then so be it.
That said, it is interesting to note that near the end of the book of James, James' letter states that the elders of the church should be doing the prayer in the situation, annointing the one being prayed for with oil as a symbol of their faith and willingness, the presumption being that if anyone within the chruch would have a heart for the Lord and know how to appropriately pray in such an instance, it should be the elders, and (in theory) the elders would have an appropriately working faith.
So, yes, the study is flawed. Things start to fluctuate wildly when you try to throw a being we don't understand and the vast majority of us don't personally know into the equation. As another poster mentioned as well, the "Observer Effect" may come into play here as well. God generally doesn't appreciate being judged for measured himself, as he deems himself (rightfully so) above judegement./me takes off christianity hat.
I think Apple has the right approach, just evil execution.
The database approach allows for file synchronization without execessive re-writes, plus it allows the iPod software itself to have nice searching and sorting capabilities.
I remember back in 1999, I had about 2GB of MP3's and I thought then it was a nightmare to manage them all. At the time, I was intentionally stripping ID3 tag information from songs because most of them were wrong anyway and just using filenames. I got burned by this later on of course, but at the time no one had come up with a better solution.
iTunes and the iPod do it right. I've been sitting here waiting for the iTunes and iPod database structures to be cracked and brought to light so that other applications could handle synchronization both ways without breaking the iPod's "one computer trust". I see a few here or there, but none do a better job.
Getting a different mp3 player doesn't fix this problem, rather it makes it worse.:\
If I had investor funding and could get a building to do it, I would absolutely LOVE to open an adult-only theater. We could show common films that everyone else is showing, and maybe stuff that isn't the big-studio material. Who knows.
I'd want to have 1, maybe 2 screens, tops. Have the seating arrangement be more of a slightly-sloped floor, but not squished together stadium seating. Instead, recliners, couches, and tables. Serve *good* beer and alcohol, food such as steaks and seafood to those dining. Allow a short dining period before the movie, and perhaps an intermission so that people that go to the restroom without missing part of the movie, plus it allows for ordering additional drinks or food without disturbing anyone.
THEN I could feel okay with charging people $20-$25/person to get in. They'd get their money's worth. Good food. Good beer, and hopefully a good movie. Get a good sound system going in there, and I would like to think that THEN people might be willing to come back. No babies crying. No cell phones (install a jammer).
I'm just so swamped with everything else I'm doing right now that I can't go looking for funding, and to be honest I think that theaters and big-name movies as they are now will be going away soon anyway.
If anyone agrees and wants to send money my way though, let me know. With proper funding lots of good things can happen.:D
Thanks for the link, I've got a call into them right now.
Given that this is a 1 1/2 mile link (wireless was already in the picture), I'd have to get a dry pair from the phone company or stretch UTP myself, right? To do UDP myself I'd have to put conduit, at which point I might as well do fiber, but at least this gives me choices.
Have you tried to buy dark fiber from a telco before?
Ain't gonna happen. I've tried. I've been trying to months now. Sprint, Charter, Ma Bell, you name it. They all have dark fiber I could simply light up and my work would be done, but none of them will do it. They want to light it and sell me "service", at a price that winds up well exceeding the price of the dark fiber. My choice winds up being having to overbuild them, because none of them will sell. At least not to the little guy, so Google might have an advantage here.
To put this into perspective, when I first started looking, I was being quoted $35/ft for fiber, "just to get to the street". Once you get to "the street", now you're having to shut down roads and such, so we're at closer to $100/ft. That, and my municipality has rules against putting fiber on poles, so you have to bore conduit underground...unless of course you're a big media company with a presence in the area (**cough** Charter **cough**), in which case they get to ignore the rules.
So for me to run fiber 1/4 of a mile to link my two sites? (btw, I'm going to user optical and rf backhauls, but I'd sleep a lot better with a "hardline") would cost nearly 1/2 million dollars. 1/4 mile!
The comment was so vague as to be flame-war fodder.
He's right. In the building our data center is in right now, I can pay as little as $50/Mbit/mo and as much as $500/Mbit/mo. It just depends on how redundant the throughput is and how important it is to us that our connectivity not go down.
Here's the issue I have. We keep using the term "faster".
In my mind, faster == less latency. More throughput is how much I can send at that speed. I could sell you 5Mbit/sec access that has latency of nearly a full second, or I could sell you 512k access with latency under 2ms. Which is "faster"?
I'm hoping our FCC overlords are simply experiencing a moment of that same confusion, and that we have the opportunity to clear up the clouds in their heads. There are a few technological decisions that are of critical importance to the growth of our country, and I think this is easily one of them. We can't allow this to happen.
Ma Bell would like to be able to bottleneck throughput, and in effect artificially create latency. I can buy 5MBit/sec backbone service, but what they're asking is that if I don't pay the "access cartel" for "protection", then something might choke up that throughput on the way to its destination.
Back in 1996 I was one of the rare students that actually owned a laptop computer. Good old Compaq P133 with a whopping 24MB of RAM. w00t!
I got in trouble though. You see, at least 3 of my profs wanted us to not only keep notebooks, but turn those notebooks in at intervals for review. WTF?
So...I saved them all was word documents, and turned them in as a zip file. The profs were note amused.
They wanted sprial-bound notebook and handwriting. How could I prove my notes were my own otherwise?
I had to take it to the school's administration and finally they accepted my notes...begrudgingly. I wound up failing one of the classes however because my notes were not..."lengthy" enough? It seems that despite I type faster than I can handwrite (and I can actually ready my typing later!), my notes seemed shorter and smaller because well, they WERE smaller. I was using a variable-width font, about 10 point to be exact. I was so mad. I told her to count letters or words if she must to compare against other students, but to no avail. I think more than anything she wanted to make an example out of me.
Seems I was actually just way ahead of the curve and getting bushwhacked for it.:\
Okay, humor me for a moment. I'm a sysadmin, not a DBA.
We use primarily MySQL for EVERYTHING. There are just now rumblings in the company to migrate to PostreSQL, primarily for what our developers are saying "better transaction support".
So PostgreSQL vs the "big guys". Anything that stands out? MySQL is certainly not "a toy". It's worked very well for us for YEARS, but I'd like to hear a logical explanation of what we're missing out on.
I've noticed that Fasterfox's default setting is to be horribly abusive about page loading. I'm far more thorough about reading through settings than most people, and I toned it down from "Turbo Charged" to "Optimized".
I'm hoping this isn't a trend, because Fasterfox really does make a HUGE pageloading difference.:(
Perhaps if I run a squid proxy on my network it would help too? There's only 3 machines here, my desktop, may laptop, and my wife's desktop.
pfSense, VRRP, CARP, et al. Hot failover is a reality, and I use no Cisco equipment, although I am Cisco certified. I'm intentionally making due with all free/open source. Call it an experiment in sanity, but my company (it IS mine) is going down this path very deliberately. We'll see how things pan out in a year or two. pfSense is getting ready to hit 1.0. I'm really liking it so far, my only gripe at teh moment is that configuration is nearly 100% web based, adn no console.
It's because you want to cheat the system and get ranked highly to begin with.
If you were truly "popular", you wouldn't have to worry about worthless original content.
Case in point...the word "Numbski" isn't a terribly popular term. If you google it, it's pretty safe that you'll find me, and my website, along with a base understand of who I am and what I do.
The same goes for George W. Bush, or "Wall Street Journal".
Now, if I just made up a company name right now....let's see....Framboozleweisenschnapps.
Nope, no hits. I want that company to program open source software.
Of course if someone goes searching for open source software no one is going to find your company. However if you get out there and do the work, when you do online articles, post your company's name, and the work you do is evident in the online content, with time, you WILL bubble to the top.
That's the problem. An entire world full of people, people competing in similar businesses, all wanting to be in the first 10 hits of a google search.
Quit crying. Quit trying to cheat the system and LIVE.
"Faith without works is about as useless as a screen door on a submarine."
Have faith in the system, do your work, do it honestly.
I don't use Comcast. I work with a few other VOIP providers in the midwest that focus on SIP and Asterisk. I just choose to use IAX2 for all of my work.
The "codec of choice" conundrum is simply one of cpu horsepower, and it needs to be evaluated as such. As it is I'll probably set up of a bank of systems that are dedicated to a certain type of codec as to minimize transcoding on any one machine, but at the end of the day it all has to go ulaw when I hand it off to them.:\
I've been using asterisk for nearly 6 months now, doing all voip. My only grip is that even though my upstream provider will allow IAX2 termination, they will only let me use ulaw codec, rather than gsm or speex, which would significantly reduce the throughput needed.
I'm in the process of getting some IAX2 servers in place in our data center so I can use some leaner codecs, the trick here is that in practice this is all transcoding...I'm doing the equivalent of wav -> mp3 on all of that audio in real-time, which is the reason my upstream provider won't allow it, and I can't realy blame them in that regard.
If you work with someone that knows their stuff, gives you a properly prioritized connection, and you minimize latency to them, VOIP will just beat the living tar out of POTS. The problem is that companies like Comcast won't give you that kind of personalized attention. If I want to provide cheap sip or iax2 termination, I can do it, but I can't support you that well. If you're willing to wrestle with it yourself, absolutely.
We're heading into an area where high tech must be supportable, and not just throw out there.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.ramelectronics.net/html/kd-vtca2.htm http://www.digitalconnection.com/products/video/9a 60.asp - Audio Authority 9A60, $112. And that's the cheap one!
The reason is simple - I never bought a steering wheel for it. Worse, all of my friends were better than me at it.
:\ My new HDTV doesn't have a VGA-in. This was a VERY stupid oversight on my part, and the picture is just abysmal using S-Video. The cheapest I could get a VGA to Component adapter was $100! It's awful man...awful.
These days, my Dreamcast is gathering dust, and it's not for lack of love.
So I need a VGA adapter, and then a VGA -> Component Adapter. It's cruel. That, and I've wanted to grab a pair of guns and House of the Dead 2, but most places still want more than $25/gun. Insanity.
What happens if we lose contact? "The probes bound for Uranus vanished mysteriously tuesday morning..."
I'm going to take off my scientific-mind hat for a moment and put on my christian hat.
/me takes off christianity hat.
You're right. This is pointless because the data is tainted and useless.
Why? Because it isn't a controlled environment. For accuracy in a study you need to be able to replicate a situation, and this isn't it. The reason is that you cannot measure, as a human being, the state of one's spirit during prayer. What I mean by this is that if you claim christianity (if you're an aetheist, I'll respect that, but this won't apply to you), then you must have a working faith for prayer of this magnitude to have much effect. Our relationship with God is not one where we give the orders and God does what we tell h im to do. Prayer is our opportunity to communicate a willingness to do God's will for us, not the other way around. If his will is for us to be healed, and we our receptive to his will, then so be it.
That said, it is interesting to note that near the end of the book of James, James' letter states that the elders of the church should be doing the prayer in the situation, annointing the one being prayed for with oil as a symbol of their faith and willingness, the presumption being that if anyone within the chruch would have a heart for the Lord and know how to appropriately pray in such an instance, it should be the elders, and (in theory) the elders would have an appropriately working faith.
So, yes, the study is flawed. Things start to fluctuate wildly when you try to throw a being we don't understand and the vast majority of us don't personally know into the equation. As another poster mentioned as well, the "Observer Effect" may come into play here as well. God generally doesn't appreciate being judged for measured himself, as he deems himself (rightfully so) above judegement.
I think Apple has the right approach, just evil execution.
:\
The database approach allows for file synchronization without execessive re-writes, plus it allows the iPod software itself to have nice searching and sorting capabilities.
I remember back in 1999, I had about 2GB of MP3's and I thought then it was a nightmare to manage them all. At the time, I was intentionally stripping ID3 tag information from songs because most of them were wrong anyway and just using filenames. I got burned by this later on of course, but at the time no one had come up with a better solution.
iTunes and the iPod do it right. I've been sitting here waiting for the iTunes and iPod database structures to be cracked and brought to light so that other applications could handle synchronization both ways without breaking the iPod's "one computer trust". I see a few here or there, but none do a better job.
Getting a different mp3 player doesn't fix this problem, rather it makes it worse.
If I had investor funding and could get a building to do it, I would absolutely LOVE to open an adult-only theater. We could show common films that everyone else is showing, and maybe stuff that isn't the big-studio material. Who knows.
:D
I'd want to have 1, maybe 2 screens, tops. Have the seating arrangement be more of a slightly-sloped floor, but not squished together stadium seating. Instead, recliners, couches, and tables. Serve *good* beer and alcohol, food such as steaks and seafood to those dining. Allow a short dining period before the movie, and perhaps an intermission so that people that go to the restroom without missing part of the movie, plus it allows for ordering additional drinks or food without disturbing anyone.
THEN I could feel okay with charging people $20-$25/person to get in. They'd get their money's worth. Good food. Good beer, and hopefully a good movie. Get a good sound system going in there, and I would like to think that THEN people might be willing to come back. No babies crying. No cell phones (install a jammer).
I'm just so swamped with everything else I'm doing right now that I can't go looking for funding, and to be honest I think that theaters and big-name movies as they are now will be going away soon anyway.
If anyone agrees and wants to send money my way though, let me know. With proper funding lots of good things can happen.
I mean, look at what they've been up to:
i _Rocket_Boosters_Batman-esque_armor_plating_
:P
http://digg.com/technology/_Help_me_Obi_Wan_Kenob
At best they've been spying on Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent, and Obi-Wan. Down with the bastahds.
WTF is this world coming to? Our children turn evil this quick now?
p g
http://www.spamdailynews.com/uploads/rizler_003.j
I mean good lord. He amassed that kind of wealth that quickly, is now in jail and was threatening to kill another human being.
So sad...I don't feel bad for him, per se...but it makes me sick...
We do. St. Louis. :)
I don't think I'll go sewer hopping just yet, but you did put an idea in my head. Thanks.
Thanks for the link, I've got a call into them right now.
Given that this is a 1 1/2 mile link (wireless was already in the picture), I'd have to get a dry pair from the phone company or stretch UTP myself, right? To do UDP myself I'd have to put conduit, at which point I might as well do fiber, but at least this gives me choices.
Thanks again!
Have you tried to buy dark fiber from a telco before?
:(
Ain't gonna happen. I've tried. I've been trying to months now. Sprint, Charter, Ma Bell, you name it. They all have dark fiber I could simply light up and my work would be done, but none of them will do it. They want to light it and sell me "service", at a price that winds up well exceeding the price of the dark fiber. My choice winds up being having to overbuild them, because none of them will sell. At least not to the little guy, so Google might have an advantage here.
To put this into perspective, when I first started looking, I was being quoted $35/ft for fiber, "just to get to the street". Once you get to "the street", now you're having to shut down roads and such, so we're at closer to $100/ft. That, and my municipality has rules against putting fiber on poles, so you have to bore conduit underground...unless of course you're a big media company with a presence in the area (**cough** Charter **cough**), in which case they get to ignore the rules.
So for me to run fiber 1/4 of a mile to link my two sites? (btw, I'm going to user optical and rf backhauls, but I'd sleep a lot better with a "hardline") would cost nearly 1/2 million dollars. 1/4 mile!
Insanity knows no bounds.
The comment was so vague as to be flame-war fodder.
:\
He's right. In the building our data center is in right now, I can pay as little as $50/Mbit/mo and as much as $500/Mbit/mo. It just depends on how redundant the throughput is and how important it is to us that our connectivity not go down.
Here's the issue I have. We keep using the term "faster".
In my mind, faster == less latency. More throughput is how much I can send at that speed. I could sell you 5Mbit/sec access that has latency of nearly a full second, or I could sell you 512k access with latency under 2ms. Which is "faster"?
I'm hoping our FCC overlords are simply experiencing a moment of that same confusion, and that we have the opportunity to clear up the clouds in their heads. There are a few technological decisions that are of critical importance to the growth of our country, and I think this is easily one of them. We can't allow this to happen.
Ma Bell would like to be able to bottleneck throughput, and in effect artificially create latency. I can buy 5MBit/sec backbone service, but what they're asking is that if I don't pay the "access cartel" for "protection", then something might choke up that throughput on the way to its destination.
Not good.
Back in 1996 I was one of the rare students that actually owned a laptop computer. Good old Compaq P133 with a whopping 24MB of RAM. w00t!
:\
I got in trouble though. You see, at least 3 of my profs wanted us to not only keep notebooks, but turn those notebooks in at intervals for review. WTF?
So...I saved them all was word documents, and turned them in as a zip file. The profs were note amused.
They wanted sprial-bound notebook and handwriting. How could I prove my notes were my own otherwise?
I had to take it to the school's administration and finally they accepted my notes...begrudgingly. I wound up failing one of the classes however because my notes were not..."lengthy" enough? It seems that despite I type faster than I can handwrite (and I can actually ready my typing later!), my notes seemed shorter and smaller because well, they WERE smaller. I was using a variable-width font, about 10 point to be exact. I was so mad. I told her to count letters or words if she must to compare against other students, but to no avail. I think more than anything she wanted to make an example out of me.
Seems I was actually just way ahead of the curve and getting bushwhacked for it.
Either an iPod or a simple tape recording and a good mic.
Transcribe after class.
Okay, humor me for a moment. I'm a sysadmin, not a DBA.
We use primarily MySQL for EVERYTHING. There are just now rumblings in the company to migrate to PostreSQL, primarily for what our developers are saying "better transaction support".
So PostgreSQL vs the "big guys". Anything that stands out? MySQL is certainly not "a toy". It's worked very well for us for YEARS, but I'd like to hear a logical explanation of what we're missing out on.
I've noticed that Fasterfox's default setting is to be horribly abusive about page loading. I'm far more thorough about reading through settings than most people, and I toned it down from "Turbo Charged" to "Optimized".
:(
I'm hoping this isn't a trend, because Fasterfox really does make a HUGE pageloading difference.
Perhaps if I run a squid proxy on my network it would help too? There's only 3 machines here, my desktop, may laptop, and my wife's desktop.
Perhaps not Linux, but BSD....
pfSense, VRRP, CARP, et al. Hot failover is a reality, and I use no Cisco equipment, although I am Cisco certified. I'm intentionally making due with all free/open source. Call it an experiment in sanity, but my company (it IS mine) is going down this path very deliberately. We'll see how things pan out in a year or two. pfSense is getting ready to hit 1.0. I'm really liking it so far, my only gripe at teh moment is that configuration is nearly 100% web based, adn no console.
Dude, I hate to be a grammar nazi, but you didn't even come close to spelling terrorism right. You do know how to use a spell-checker, right?
It's because you want to cheat the system and get ranked highly to begin with.
If you were truly "popular", you wouldn't have to worry about worthless original content.
Case in point...the word "Numbski" isn't a terribly popular term. If you google it, it's pretty safe that you'll find me, and my website, along with a base understand of who I am and what I do.
The same goes for George W. Bush, or "Wall Street Journal".
Now, if I just made up a company name right now....let's see....Framboozleweisenschnapps.
Nope, no hits. I want that company to program open source software.
Of course if someone goes searching for open source software no one is going to find your company. However if you get out there and do the work, when you do online articles, post your company's name, and the work you do is evident in the online content, with time, you WILL bubble to the top.
That's the problem. An entire world full of people, people competing in similar businesses, all wanting to be in the first 10 hits of a google search.
Quit crying. Quit trying to cheat the system and LIVE.
"Faith without works is about as useless as a screen door on a submarine."
Have faith in the system, do your work, do it honestly.
...we're INTENTIONALLY creating Sky-net.
Just want to make sure I'm understanding this right. Don't mind me, I'm going to go hide in the Vet office.
You've misunderstood.
:\
I don't use Comcast. I work with a few other VOIP providers in the midwest that focus on SIP and Asterisk. I just choose to use IAX2 for all of my work.
The "codec of choice" conundrum is simply one of cpu horsepower, and it needs to be evaluated as such. As it is I'll probably set up of a bank of systems that are dedicated to a certain type of codec as to minimize transcoding on any one machine, but at the end of the day it all has to go ulaw when I hand it off to them.
I've been using asterisk for nearly 6 months now, doing all voip. My only grip is that even though my upstream provider will allow IAX2 termination, they will only let me use ulaw codec, rather than gsm or speex, which would significantly reduce the throughput needed.
I'm in the process of getting some IAX2 servers in place in our data center so I can use some leaner codecs, the trick here is that in practice this is all transcoding...I'm doing the equivalent of wav -> mp3 on all of that audio in real-time, which is the reason my upstream provider won't allow it, and I can't realy blame them in that regard.
If you work with someone that knows their stuff, gives you a properly prioritized connection, and you minimize latency to them, VOIP will just beat the living tar out of POTS. The problem is that companies like Comcast won't give you that kind of personalized attention. If I want to provide cheap sip or iax2 termination, I can do it, but I can't support you that well. If you're willing to wrestle with it yourself, absolutely.
We're heading into an area where high tech must be supportable, and not just throw out there.
There's just one problem with that.
:(
If you're over 19, you're no longer the RIAA's target demographic anymore. Quite literally:
"It's not you Marty, it's your kids! We've got to do something about your kids!"
We've got to educate our 10-19 year olds not to give any more money to the RIAA.
Good luck with that.
Wow I'm tired and ashamed. Haydn. Not Hyden. Sheesh.