With a good enough algorithm most people, including those with well-trained ears, will not be able to consciously distinguish the two sounds. But that does not mean that these people don't subconsciously react differently to them. One way to measure that might be to measure brain activity in various regions of the brain, which is exactly what this article mentions. The problem is that that type of test is always going to show a different reaction which is something the makers and users of audio codecs often don't want to hear.
The major problem here is what does the brain activity data mean? Even if you can see a difference in brain activity for a 16 bit/44 kHz PCM file verses a 128 kbit/sec VBR AAC file how do you determine if one format is preferred over the other?
You end up still falling back on subjective measures, it's much simpler to have a large number of participants and then ask them questions like, "Which recording did you prefer?" The data from a properly run survey is much more likely to yield meaningful conclusions than scans of brain activity. We are, after all, dealing with music - a highly subjective art form.
One notable feature of DSD is that dynamic compression occurs at higher frequencies yet the frequencies are able to be reproduced accurately. Contrast this with PCM where the dynamic range is fixed (i.e. 16-bit, 20-bit, 24-bit) but at higher frequencies the tonality is not as pure because it's impossible to represent anything other than a square wave at the nyquist frequency which is exactly 1/2 the sampling rate. Of course, a filter is applied to make that into a more pleasant sine wave. Now consider a frequency that is not exactly 22.05 kHz but perhaps a little shy of that. It's almost impossible to represent this accurately with PCM. The result is that you actually get a slightly oscillating frequency somewhere around the original frequency.
What you are describing is a phenomenon known as aliasing.
I'm not sure you completely understand how the Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem works. It boils down to the fact that as long as you sample at a rate greater than double the maximum frequency you want to capture, you will get no aliasing. This means that if you sample at 44.1 kHz then all frequencies below 22.05 kHz will be represented accurately. If you sample a frequency just shy of 22.05 kHz you will NOT "get a slightly oscillating frequency somewhere around the original frequency".
It is true that DSD has a variable dynamic response that depends on frequency but that works both for and against DSD since higher frequencies tend to less accurately represented than lower frequencies. In fact there is a lot of discussions (PDF file, see page 8, section 3[c]) that conclude that the current implementations of DSD produce worse quality per bit than an equivalent bit-rate PCM sampling. There are solutions to these problems but they are very complex and involve a mix of DSD and PCM sampling methods, so much so that the line between DSD and PCM blurs considerably.
This has a serious effect on how an album is mastered. When the target format is CD the producer can cause the CD player to output extremely loud high frequency sounds though not particularly accurate frequencies. This is reflected in the current crop of music which is often extremely loud and to many ears just sounds like a bunch of noise. Metallica's self-titled black album was one of the first to use severe dynamic compression to make the album sound super loud. Comparing it with modern CDs we can see that that album was relatively tame.
Again you are mixing up sound levels with frequencies. Severe dynamic compression basically limits the number of sound levels which are utilized,
MP3 and iPod is actively damaging the quality of the music we get because recording engineers are forced to compress the dynamic range and make other sound quality compromises to enhance listenability on this crappy delivery chain. This has nothing at all to do with MP3 files and the iPod.
First of all the iPod supports plenty of different encodings, including WAV, AIFF, Apple Lossless, MP3, and AAC. All of these formats support a decently large dynamic range that most recording artists don't even come close to utilizing. People could encode their music as full 96 dB dynamic ranges (highest theoretical dynamic range for 16 bit recordings) and only use those on their iPods and it would work just fine.
No, the problem has nothing to do with the medium used to present the music. It's the sound engineers and the recording companies that are the problem. They are the ones who decide to compress the dynamic range down to nothing in order to get music that sounds like it has more "oomph". The consumers who buy this over-compressed crap are partly to blame, although a lot of them just don't know any better.
I also saw you mentioning in another reply that the music needs to be compressed in order to be listened to in more active environments. That's partly true but that can be accomplished pretty easily through some post-processing in the device. There are already mechanisms in place where you can tell the music player to adjust relative volumes of tracks, as well as the fact that you can simply raise the volume to drown out the background nose or get earphones that are better at isolating you from your environment. The environment that you listen the music in is a completely separate issue from how the music is encoded.
If you really want to make a difference then teach the ignorant consumers where the REAL trouble lies. It's not the iPod or digital encodings that are the problem, it's the people who are packaging the music up in these formats.
I just love this statement from the linked article:
EMI Records announced earlier this year the introduction of higher-priced downloads at a slightly higher bit rate, although the difference will be difficult to detect. "It's probably indistinguishable to even a great set of ears," says Levitin. Lets see, it went from 128 kilobits/second to 256 kilobits/second. I'd like to think that DOUBLE the bitrate is a lot more than "slightly higher".
I can see how things must work at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: "We're going to make your workload slightly higher," said the Editor as he dumped double the usual paperwork on Joel's desk.
The fact is that even if the file size of the audio file is 10% of the uncompressed audio file that doesn't mean you lose 90% of the sound. A good deal of the compression is lossless and the lossy part is carefully chosen so as to have minimal or even no impact on the final sound. You also save quite a bit by simply only encoding one channel and the difference between it and the other channel - many songs have most of the same content for both the left and right channels.
Yes, as we get increased bandwidth, storage space, and computing power we can cut back on the lossy compression but right now it's not as bad as some audiophiles make it out to be. There are tradeoffs for every medium that you record onto, if you look at history the audiophiles screamed at the transition from live concerts to wax records, to reel-to-reel tape, to 8 track, to CD, and now to MP3. Each format had its own quirks and it turns out that the audiophiles learned to enjoy those quirks and even depend on them at times, such as the "warm" sound of records.
Ketoacidosis is when your body, which creates acetones naturally, can't clean those acetones out of the blood. So, you get nail-polish breath, which, if medical personnel aren't careful, can smell like booze. IAAC (I am a chemist) so just a little nitpick here.
Ketogenesis is a normal process that occurs in everyone in order to metabolize fats. Two ketones (acetoacetate and acetone) and a carboxylic acid (beta-hydroxybutyrate) are produced during this process, these chemicals are called ketone bodies. Your body normally gets rid of small amounts of these chemicals by either blowing them off through your breath, excreting them, or by further metabolizing them.
Ketosis occurs when you have an elevated level of ketone bodies, it is a fairly normal situation and most people usually have no problems with it. Sometimes the levels rise too high and the presence of excess ketone bodies lowers the blood PH enough that the person enters ketoacidosis, a dangerous condition that should be corrected as soon as possible.
Sorry to get technical on ya but this is "News for Nerds" and all!
First of all this thread is mostly about non-fit people who are exercising in order to become fit. In that context it is far better to raise your metabolic rate in order to become fit than to maintain a low metabolic rate and remain unhealthy.
As for fit people the issue of exercise verses non-exercise gets a bit muddy. One of the benefits of exercise is a more efficient cardio-vascular system, one in which your heart beats less in order to move the same volume of blood than it used to. There have been quite a few studies that link lower heartrate to increased lifespan.
On the other hand there are studies that show that a higher metabolic rate does work to decrease lifespan but the researchers are still working to pin down the mechanisms of this effect.
The best I can say is that if you are not fit then by all means exercise and raise your metabolic rate in order to become fit. If you are already fit then watch your diet and do a bit of exercise, enough to maintain a decent level of fitness.
I looked around and the only thing that I've seen is that diabetics are at a greater risk of developing problems with candida albicans, not that candida albicans causes diabetic-like symptoms. As far as not being conclusively tested as a diabetic you should get tested periodically, a lot of borderline people later develop diabetes.
Well good luck with it and I hope that avoiding simple sugars does the trick for you. I'm just over the edge of being diabetic (type 2) and have it in control by avoiding carbohydrates as much as possible. I've been following the South Beach Diet and it's kept my blood sugar levels down below 120 mg/dL, good enough not to need any medication.
You might want to try to snag a blood sugar test kit and test yourself periodically to make sure that diabetes hasn't crept up on you. Catching it early is the best thing because every minute you don't treat it is more damage to your body.
The exercise is a pain, I know how you feel about it. I've been trying to walk at least an hour a day to help reduce the blood glucose levels and it helps a ton.
"Unrefined" carbohydrates (complex starches) give you gas because many of them are difficult to break down and so bacteria in your gut do the job, producing byproducts such as methane gas. This is natural although you may be able to take enzymes to reduce the effect.
Now the fact that "refined" carbohydrates (simple sugars) put you to sleep and give you headaches probably means that you have a bad insulin response to them. This means that you either don't produce enough insulin (type 1 diabetes) or that your cells have become resistant to insulin (type 2 diabetes). When you eat simple sugars they are quickly absorbed into your bloodstream and your blood sugar spikes. Insulin would normally temper the spikes but something is wrong with that system and so you are getting wild swings in your blood sugar levels. This has a ton of detrimental affects upon your health.
I'm not a doctor and there may be other reasons for your reactions but I wouldn't take a chance. Getting tested for diabetes is very simple and worth doing regularly.
In the end it's not the "unrefined" or "refined" sugars which are the problems, it's how our sugar-regulating systems have evolved. Our bodies just aren't built for the sedentary lifestyles we are living. We need to make changes in our activity levels, as well as keeping an eye on what foods we are eating. Simple sugars are just fine when taken in moderation and when combined with a decent amount of physical activity.
I've repeatedly heard it said that you would have to run for an insane amount of time to burn off the extra calories from just one cookie, so it isn't in that fashion that exercise helps with weight problems. The amount of calories burned during exercise is only the tip of the iceberg.
Exercising burns up glucose and puts a demand on your body to change how it processes foods. As a result of these changes your body's metabolism increases not only the rate at which it burns calories during exercise but it will also be elevated for a good amount of time afterwards. This means that you burn calories for the actual exercise done but you will also burn more after you have finished exercising, taken your shower, and sat down at your desk to do some work. Here is an article on this phenomenon.
In addition, by exercising you are telling your body that changes need to be made. Part of exercise is the microscopic tearing of muscle fibers, stress on capillaries and other transport systems within your body, and the release of various hormones related to your exertion. Your body's overall response is to rebuild and bolster these systems. You grow more muscle tissue, your capillaries increase their ability to carry more blood, various organs and cellular structures configure themselves for the next bought of exercise. All of these actions take energy and they put food to a better use than simply turning into fat around your waist.
Finally, now you have more muscle mass, better circulation, and so on. This generally results in an overall higher metabolic rate because your body has prepared itself to provide you with more energy at all times. The higher metabolic rate burns more calories even when you aren't exercising and allows you to exert yourself even more the next time you do exercise.
So there's a lot more going on than the simple "1 Calorie will lift 155 pounds to 20 feet in the air". You body changes with exercise and that is where the real weight loss begins.
Even the size doesn't matter too much here. The Mac Mini is 6.5 in x 6.5 in x 2 in, that's 165 mm x 165 mm x 51 mm. The Pico-ITX is 100 mm x 72 mm with an unknown height. Of course the Pico-ITX is without a case, cables, optical drive, memory, hard drive, power supply, and so on. Once you add those on you would easily approach the Mac Mini's size.
The main thing here is price and effort. The Mac Mini costs $600 and comes fully assembled with a case, hard drive, connectors, memory, an operating system, and a good deal of software. The Pico-ITX costs $300 just for the motherboard and nothing else. Yes the Pico-ITX will probably drop in price and eventually someone will sell it as part of a full system but the Mac Mini also blows the Pico-ITX away in terms of processing power and features. For example, the lowest current Mac Mini uses a 1.83GHz Core Duo processor, the Pico-ITX uses a 1.0GHz VIA C7 processor. The Core Duo is a much more powerful processor, the same goes for many of the other components in the Mac Mini.
The Pico-ITX is a step in the right direction but it would have to be vastly less expensive or at least as powerful as the Mac Mini before I'd consider using it.
It's a shame that people's debating skills are so lacking that they have to resort to fallacious arguments in order to respond to a post. Oh well, welcome to Slashdot!:)
I'll use the old quote: "Going to church no more makes you a Christian than sleeping in your garage makes you a car." It's also true if you replace "going to church" with "calling yourself a Christian." I'll wholeheartedly agree with you there.
I was raised strict Roman Catholic and although I am not religious at all I still try to adhere to the moral values that Christianity has taught me. I've seen some very devout Catholics who go to church, donate a lot of money, and so on but who are the most vile people you will ever meet. I know that I'll never be considered to be a true Catholic if I don't believe in the theology of the faith but I'd like to think I'm much closer to truly understanding Christianity than any of these "devout worshipers".
By the way, for the people who have started to follow my comments and are modding me down for my honest and fair opinions, thanks for demonstrating the points I'm making in this post. If you have a problem with my comments feel free to post about them, don't hide behind moderation. Save the moderation points for the people who are trolling.
One of the problems with these kind of ratings is that it fails to consider many other variables. For example, Christianity at various times has hit all of your ratings. During the Inquisition the Catholic Church was a number 1 on your list, during the Dark Ages it was at number 2, at various other times it was a 3, 4, or 5.
Your rating system also assumes that every member of a religious group is the same as every other. There are members of all religions who range over the entire scale, for example the Koran actually preaches mostly peaceful ways but a lot of followers see violence as a part of their religion.
Then there is the whole definition of moral values. Groups like the Jehovah Witness view "messing with others" (going out and attempting to convert people) as doing good, by preaching and attempting to convert others they are trying to improve the world. Your definition of morals might be radically different from another person's. In their minds they might be at a 5 on your scale and you might be at a 3.
My personal view is they are all interesting fictions, they all have a possibility to do good and they all have a possibility to do evil. I personally don't see why someone would need religion since a logical moral framework can do all that a religious moral framework does with the added bonus of being based on verifiable and undeniable facts. However, I'm perfectly willing to let other people believe in these fictions if they want to, as long as they allow me to be happy with my facts.
I'm not an expert on every religion out there but I have read the entire Bible (I forget which version), a bunch of the Koran, a good deal of the Book of Mormon, some of the Tao-te-ching, and a bit of the Koran, as well as other various religious works. They are all very interesting although I tend to read them for their historical, moral, and philosophical value rather than for their theological content.
What I can say about them is that every religion I have looked at has assumptions that can't be verified and they all exist outside of logic. Therefore they are based on fiction rather than fact. Again this doesn't make them "evil" but I don't regard any religion as being more or less correct than any other religion.
Are you not acknowledging a fundamental religious belief when you mention humans can do evil (good vs. evil)? I do not believe science or a lack of religious belief allows classification of human actions as evil or good. Oh I don't think that evil is necessarily a religious concept, although it is a bit of a loaded term since it can mean a lot of different things to different people.
I favor the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and I tend to use his concept of the "Categorical Imperative" in judging what is right (good) and what is wrong (evil). In my mind that which does not follow the Categorical Imperative is wrong and should be avoided. Sometimes it is difficult to assign value to an action but that's normal for almost every system of moral values.
I say it's time for Orson Scott Card to abandon the faked gospels of the "Church of Latter Day Saints". As opposed to that of any other religion?
I'm not going to judge people by their religion, personally I don't see the point in religion but as long as people don't use it as an excuse to do evil I'm fine with whatever faith they have. On the other hand I really don't see the difference in believing in the Book of Mormon verses the Koran verses the Tao-te-ching. Along with the many other faiths on Earth, none of these religions have any rational, scientific basis and therefore they are all simply interesting fictions.
Good call there, I hadn't seen that article before and I'm glad you pointed it out. It very cleanly sums up my objections to the methodology and well, theology, of the global warming theorists.
I should have known Orson Scott Card would weigh in on this subject with such a great analysis.
if you lose power you're in trouble because now you have all those pending (how many?) atimes that you just lost. and you don't know how many and for what files so if you rely on atime for something then you suddenly no longer can for any of those files (but which ones? - you have no way of knowing).. Which is why there would be an option for immediately applying the access times. For many people they really don't need to have the access times and having it applied immediately is a huge performance hit. Those people would have the option set to delay the writing of access times, if a crash happens and they lose the access times then it's not a huge deal for them, it's not critical data.
For the people who rely on access times they could set the option so that access times are written out immediately. That means that with a crash you would probably have all the access times properly updated, with the exception of the very few that were in the process of being written when the crash occurred.
Yeah I was reading further about it and I believe another big problem is that when the atime is updated it marks the whole inode as dirty. You can keep the inode in memory but you'll then start to accumulate a large store of dirty inodes or you can write it out immediately and get the performance hit.
I don't think trusting the access times is too critical in most cases, the cases where it really seems to matter are in software that checks for the files that have the most activity or programs that monitor for new files. For those programs the access time provides a simple way of doing their job but there are only a few programs that need this information. It seems like it would be easier to have a separate file which keeps track of the last so many accesses and then write that file out when the disk activity allows for it. If you really want each inode to have the access time stored within it then maybe have a process that uses idle time to apply the access times to the proper inodes.
What I'm getting at is that due to the structure of most file systems it doesn't make sense to update access times immediately and spread across the storage device. Instead you can keep the access time information somewhere centralized and pick a proper idle time to apply the information to the inodes. Any program that needs to monitor for most recent accesses can then just check the file which temporarily stores the most recent access times. I think that's basically similar to what you were saying in your post.
Exactly what I was thinking, wouldn't it be smart if all of the access times were just cached and then updated in one write? I mean why do 100 small writes when you are in the middle of a bunch of reads when you can just gather up all the access times and write them in a burst.
It just seems like common sense to me. Yes, access times can be useful data but I think they are minor enough not to be done immediately. I'd default to having them cached and have an option for them to be applied immediately for those people who want that.
I wouldn't say that for sure. Those are the ones that Apple has tested and definitely work, they are probably on the list because Apple had a partnership with those companies and had a reason to test them. I would give a device a try to see if it works with iTunes before I write it off. If it is a USB device and it mounts as a USB drive it has a good chance of working.
If it doesn't work then you can always use something like the freeware SyncTunes which is supposed to work well.
Chances are that most USB MP3 players will work with iTunes if they follow the standards set for such devices. If you have an MP3 player give it a try and see if it works with iTunes, it probably will.
You might want to do a bit more research the next time you make false, blanket statements like that.
In addition to having a weapon available I like to back it up with a well-trained dog. My Dalmatian might look cute but she's very nasty when it comes to intruders!
There's a lot of people who would have no problems dealing with a person that would think twice if that person had an angry dog with them.
Bleh sorry about that. Dunno how I misread that to think you were saying the x-height included the ascenders and descenders. Ahh well, thanks for pointing that out.
Actually that's wrong. The x-height is the height of the body of the font, that is the part of the font that DOESN'T include the ascenders and descenders. The point size of a font is the height including ascenders and descenders. IMO you should never use the point size to determine the size of a font, the x-height is much more useful visually. However, most computer typography systems do use point size which is why some fonts usually look much larger or smaller than other fonts of the same point size.
Here's a good discussion on typography and the visual impact of different type styles.
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With a good enough algorithm most people, including those with well-trained ears, will not be able to consciously distinguish the two sounds. But that does not mean that these people don't subconsciously react differently to them. One way to measure that might be to measure brain activity in various regions of the brain, which is exactly what this article mentions. The problem is that that type of test is always going to show a different reaction which is something the makers and users of audio codecs often don't want to hear.
The major problem here is what does the brain activity data mean? Even if you can see a difference in brain activity for a 16 bit/44 kHz PCM file verses a 128 kbit/sec VBR AAC file how do you determine if one format is preferred over the other?
You end up still falling back on subjective measures, it's much simpler to have a large number of participants and then ask them questions like, "Which recording did you prefer?" The data from a properly run survey is much more likely to yield meaningful conclusions than scans of brain activity. We are, after all, dealing with music - a highly subjective art form.
One notable feature of DSD is that dynamic compression occurs at higher frequencies yet the frequencies are able to be reproduced accurately. Contrast this with PCM where the dynamic range is fixed (i.e. 16-bit, 20-bit, 24-bit) but at higher frequencies the tonality is not as pure because it's impossible to represent anything other than a square wave at the nyquist frequency which is exactly 1/2 the sampling rate. Of course, a filter is applied to make that into a more pleasant sine wave. Now consider a frequency that is not exactly 22.05 kHz but perhaps a little shy of that. It's almost impossible to represent this accurately with PCM. The result is that you actually get a slightly oscillating frequency somewhere around the original frequency.
What you are describing is a phenomenon known as aliasing.
I'm not sure you completely understand how the Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem works. It boils down to the fact that as long as you sample at a rate greater than double the maximum frequency you want to capture, you will get no aliasing. This means that if you sample at 44.1 kHz then all frequencies below 22.05 kHz will be represented accurately. If you sample a frequency just shy of 22.05 kHz you will NOT "get a slightly oscillating frequency somewhere around the original frequency".
It is true that DSD has a variable dynamic response that depends on frequency but that works both for and against DSD since higher frequencies tend to less accurately represented than lower frequencies. In fact there is a lot of discussions (PDF file, see page 8, section 3[c]) that conclude that the current implementations of DSD produce worse quality per bit than an equivalent bit-rate PCM sampling. There are solutions to these problems but they are very complex and involve a mix of DSD and PCM sampling methods, so much so that the line between DSD and PCM blurs considerably.
This has a serious effect on how an album is mastered. When the target format is CD the producer can cause the CD player to output extremely loud high frequency sounds though not particularly accurate frequencies. This is reflected in the current crop of music which is often extremely loud and to many ears just sounds like a bunch of noise. Metallica's self-titled black album was one of the first to use severe dynamic compression to make the album sound super loud. Comparing it with modern CDs we can see that that album was relatively tame.
Again you are mixing up sound levels with frequencies. Severe dynamic compression basically limits the number of sound levels which are utilized,
First of all the iPod supports plenty of different encodings, including WAV, AIFF, Apple Lossless, MP3, and AAC. All of these formats support a decently large dynamic range that most recording artists don't even come close to utilizing. People could encode their music as full 96 dB dynamic ranges (highest theoretical dynamic range for 16 bit recordings) and only use those on their iPods and it would work just fine.
No, the problem has nothing to do with the medium used to present the music. It's the sound engineers and the recording companies that are the problem. They are the ones who decide to compress the dynamic range down to nothing in order to get music that sounds like it has more "oomph". The consumers who buy this over-compressed crap are partly to blame, although a lot of them just don't know any better.
I also saw you mentioning in another reply that the music needs to be compressed in order to be listened to in more active environments. That's partly true but that can be accomplished pretty easily through some post-processing in the device. There are already mechanisms in place where you can tell the music player to adjust relative volumes of tracks, as well as the fact that you can simply raise the volume to drown out the background nose or get earphones that are better at isolating you from your environment. The environment that you listen the music in is a completely separate issue from how the music is encoded.
If you really want to make a difference then teach the ignorant consumers where the REAL trouble lies. It's not the iPod or digital encodings that are the problem, it's the people who are packaging the music up in these formats.
I can see how things must work at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
"We're going to make your workload slightly higher," said the Editor as he dumped double the usual paperwork on Joel's desk.
The fact is that even if the file size of the audio file is 10% of the uncompressed audio file that doesn't mean you lose 90% of the sound. A good deal of the compression is lossless and the lossy part is carefully chosen so as to have minimal or even no impact on the final sound. You also save quite a bit by simply only encoding one channel and the difference between it and the other channel - many songs have most of the same content for both the left and right channels.
Yes, as we get increased bandwidth, storage space, and computing power we can cut back on the lossy compression but right now it's not as bad as some audiophiles make it out to be. There are tradeoffs for every medium that you record onto, if you look at history the audiophiles screamed at the transition from live concerts to wax records, to reel-to-reel tape, to 8 track, to CD, and now to MP3. Each format had its own quirks and it turns out that the audiophiles learned to enjoy those quirks and even depend on them at times, such as the "warm" sound of records.
Ketogenesis is a normal process that occurs in everyone in order to metabolize fats. Two ketones (acetoacetate and acetone) and a carboxylic acid (beta-hydroxybutyrate) are produced during this process, these chemicals are called ketone bodies. Your body normally gets rid of small amounts of these chemicals by either blowing them off through your breath, excreting them, or by further metabolizing them.
Ketosis occurs when you have an elevated level of ketone bodies, it is a fairly normal situation and most people usually have no problems with it. Sometimes the levels rise too high and the presence of excess ketone bodies lowers the blood PH enough that the person enters ketoacidosis, a dangerous condition that should be corrected as soon as possible.
Sorry to get technical on ya but this is "News for Nerds" and all!
First of all this thread is mostly about non-fit people who are exercising in order to become fit. In that context it is far better to raise your metabolic rate in order to become fit than to maintain a low metabolic rate and remain unhealthy.
As for fit people the issue of exercise verses non-exercise gets a bit muddy. One of the benefits of exercise is a more efficient cardio-vascular system, one in which your heart beats less in order to move the same volume of blood than it used to. There have been quite a few studies that link lower heartrate to increased lifespan.
On the other hand there are studies that show that a higher metabolic rate does work to decrease lifespan but the researchers are still working to pin down the mechanisms of this effect.
The best I can say is that if you are not fit then by all means exercise and raise your metabolic rate in order to become fit. If you are already fit then watch your diet and do a bit of exercise, enough to maintain a decent level of fitness.
I looked around and the only thing that I've seen is that diabetics are at a greater risk of developing problems with candida albicans, not that candida albicans causes diabetic-like symptoms. As far as not being conclusively tested as a diabetic you should get tested periodically, a lot of borderline people later develop diabetes.
Well good luck with it and I hope that avoiding simple sugars does the trick for you. I'm just over the edge of being diabetic (type 2) and have it in control by avoiding carbohydrates as much as possible. I've been following the South Beach Diet and it's kept my blood sugar levels down below 120 mg/dL, good enough not to need any medication.
You might want to try to snag a blood sugar test kit and test yourself periodically to make sure that diabetes hasn't crept up on you. Catching it early is the best thing because every minute you don't treat it is more damage to your body.
The exercise is a pain, I know how you feel about it. I've been trying to walk at least an hour a day to help reduce the blood glucose levels and it helps a ton.
Get tested for diabetes now.
"Unrefined" carbohydrates (complex starches) give you gas because many of them are difficult to break down and so bacteria in your gut do the job, producing byproducts such as methane gas. This is natural although you may be able to take enzymes to reduce the effect.
Now the fact that "refined" carbohydrates (simple sugars) put you to sleep and give you headaches probably means that you have a bad insulin response to them. This means that you either don't produce enough insulin (type 1 diabetes) or that your cells have become resistant to insulin (type 2 diabetes). When you eat simple sugars they are quickly absorbed into your bloodstream and your blood sugar spikes. Insulin would normally temper the spikes but something is wrong with that system and so you are getting wild swings in your blood sugar levels. This has a ton of detrimental affects upon your health.
I'm not a doctor and there may be other reasons for your reactions but I wouldn't take a chance. Getting tested for diabetes is very simple and worth doing regularly.
In the end it's not the "unrefined" or "refined" sugars which are the problems, it's how our sugar-regulating systems have evolved. Our bodies just aren't built for the sedentary lifestyles we are living. We need to make changes in our activity levels, as well as keeping an eye on what foods we are eating. Simple sugars are just fine when taken in moderation and when combined with a decent amount of physical activity.
Exercising burns up glucose and puts a demand on your body to change how it processes foods. As a result of these changes your body's metabolism increases not only the rate at which it burns calories during exercise but it will also be elevated for a good amount of time afterwards. This means that you burn calories for the actual exercise done but you will also burn more after you have finished exercising, taken your shower, and sat down at your desk to do some work. Here is an article on this phenomenon.
In addition, by exercising you are telling your body that changes need to be made. Part of exercise is the microscopic tearing of muscle fibers, stress on capillaries and other transport systems within your body, and the release of various hormones related to your exertion. Your body's overall response is to rebuild and bolster these systems. You grow more muscle tissue, your capillaries increase their ability to carry more blood, various organs and cellular structures configure themselves for the next bought of exercise. All of these actions take energy and they put food to a better use than simply turning into fat around your waist.
Finally, now you have more muscle mass, better circulation, and so on. This generally results in an overall higher metabolic rate because your body has prepared itself to provide you with more energy at all times. The higher metabolic rate burns more calories even when you aren't exercising and allows you to exert yourself even more the next time you do exercise.
So there's a lot more going on than the simple "1 Calorie will lift 155 pounds to 20 feet in the air". You body changes with exercise and that is where the real weight loss begins.
Even the size doesn't matter too much here. The Mac Mini is 6.5 in x 6.5 in x 2 in, that's 165 mm x 165 mm x 51 mm. The Pico-ITX is 100 mm x 72 mm with an unknown height. Of course the Pico-ITX is without a case, cables, optical drive, memory, hard drive, power supply, and so on. Once you add those on you would easily approach the Mac Mini's size.
The main thing here is price and effort. The Mac Mini costs $600 and comes fully assembled with a case, hard drive, connectors, memory, an operating system, and a good deal of software. The Pico-ITX costs $300 just for the motherboard and nothing else. Yes the Pico-ITX will probably drop in price and eventually someone will sell it as part of a full system but the Mac Mini also blows the Pico-ITX away in terms of processing power and features. For example, the lowest current Mac Mini uses a 1.83GHz Core Duo processor, the Pico-ITX uses a 1.0GHz VIA C7 processor. The Core Duo is a much more powerful processor, the same goes for many of the other components in the Mac Mini.
The Pico-ITX is a step in the right direction but it would have to be vastly less expensive or at least as powerful as the Mac Mini before I'd consider using it.
It's a shame that people's debating skills are so lacking that they have to resort to fallacious arguments in order to respond to a post. Oh well, welcome to Slashdot! :)
I was raised strict Roman Catholic and although I am not religious at all I still try to adhere to the moral values that Christianity has taught me. I've seen some very devout Catholics who go to church, donate a lot of money, and so on but who are the most vile people you will ever meet. I know that I'll never be considered to be a true Catholic if I don't believe in the theology of the faith but I'd like to think I'm much closer to truly understanding Christianity than any of these "devout worshipers".
By the way, for the people who have started to follow my comments and are modding me down for my honest and fair opinions, thanks for demonstrating the points I'm making in this post. If you have a problem with my comments feel free to post about them, don't hide behind moderation. Save the moderation points for the people who are trolling.
One of the problems with these kind of ratings is that it fails to consider many other variables. For example, Christianity at various times has hit all of your ratings. During the Inquisition the Catholic Church was a number 1 on your list, during the Dark Ages it was at number 2, at various other times it was a 3, 4, or 5.
Your rating system also assumes that every member of a religious group is the same as every other. There are members of all religions who range over the entire scale, for example the Koran actually preaches mostly peaceful ways but a lot of followers see violence as a part of their religion.
Then there is the whole definition of moral values. Groups like the Jehovah Witness view "messing with others" (going out and attempting to convert people) as doing good, by preaching and attempting to convert others they are trying to improve the world. Your definition of morals might be radically different from another person's. In their minds they might be at a 5 on your scale and you might be at a 3.
My personal view is they are all interesting fictions, they all have a possibility to do good and they all have a possibility to do evil. I personally don't see why someone would need religion since a logical moral framework can do all that a religious moral framework does with the added bonus of being based on verifiable and undeniable facts. However, I'm perfectly willing to let other people believe in these fictions if they want to, as long as they allow me to be happy with my facts.
I'm not an expert on every religion out there but I have read the entire Bible (I forget which version), a bunch of the Koran, a good deal of the Book of Mormon, some of the Tao-te-ching, and a bit of the Koran, as well as other various religious works. They are all very interesting although I tend to read them for their historical, moral, and philosophical value rather than for their theological content.
What I can say about them is that every religion I have looked at has assumptions that can't be verified and they all exist outside of logic. Therefore they are based on fiction rather than fact. Again this doesn't make them "evil" but I don't regard any religion as being more or less correct than any other religion.
I favor the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and I tend to use his concept of the "Categorical Imperative" in judging what is right (good) and what is wrong (evil). In my mind that which does not follow the Categorical Imperative is wrong and should be avoided. Sometimes it is difficult to assign value to an action but that's normal for almost every system of moral values.
I'm not going to judge people by their religion, personally I don't see the point in religion but as long as people don't use it as an excuse to do evil I'm fine with whatever faith they have. On the other hand I really don't see the difference in believing in the Book of Mormon verses the Koran verses the Tao-te-ching. Along with the many other faiths on Earth, none of these religions have any rational, scientific basis and therefore they are all simply interesting fictions.
Good call there, I hadn't seen that article before and I'm glad you pointed it out. It very cleanly sums up my objections to the methodology and well, theology, of the global warming theorists.
I should have known Orson Scott Card would weigh in on this subject with such a great analysis.
For the people who rely on access times they could set the option so that access times are written out immediately. That means that with a crash you would probably have all the access times properly updated, with the exception of the very few that were in the process of being written when the crash occurred.
Yeah I was reading further about it and I believe another big problem is that when the atime is updated it marks the whole inode as dirty. You can keep the inode in memory but you'll then start to accumulate a large store of dirty inodes or you can write it out immediately and get the performance hit.
I don't think trusting the access times is too critical in most cases, the cases where it really seems to matter are in software that checks for the files that have the most activity or programs that monitor for new files. For those programs the access time provides a simple way of doing their job but there are only a few programs that need this information. It seems like it would be easier to have a separate file which keeps track of the last so many accesses and then write that file out when the disk activity allows for it. If you really want each inode to have the access time stored within it then maybe have a process that uses idle time to apply the access times to the proper inodes.
What I'm getting at is that due to the structure of most file systems it doesn't make sense to update access times immediately and spread across the storage device. Instead you can keep the access time information somewhere centralized and pick a proper idle time to apply the information to the inodes. Any program that needs to monitor for most recent accesses can then just check the file which temporarily stores the most recent access times. I think that's basically similar to what you were saying in your post.
Exactly what I was thinking, wouldn't it be smart if all of the access times were just cached and then updated in one write? I mean why do 100 small writes when you are in the middle of a bunch of reads when you can just gather up all the access times and write them in a burst.
It just seems like common sense to me. Yes, access times can be useful data but I think they are minor enough not to be done immediately. I'd default to having them cached and have an option for them to be applied immediately for those people who want that.
I wouldn't say that for sure. Those are the ones that Apple has tested and definitely work, they are probably on the list because Apple had a partnership with those companies and had a reason to test them. I would give a device a try to see if it works with iTunes before I write it off. If it is a USB device and it mounts as a USB drive it has a good chance of working.
If it doesn't work then you can always use something like the freeware SyncTunes which is supposed to work well.
iTunes Compatible Players
Chances are that most USB MP3 players will work with iTunes if they follow the standards set for such devices. If you have an MP3 player give it a try and see if it works with iTunes, it probably will.
You might want to do a bit more research the next time you make false, blanket statements like that.
You mean like:
Mac OS X Server Command-Line Administration PDF
Here's a web page with all the manuals for Mac OS X Server, lots of good information there:
Apple Server Documentation
In addition to having a weapon available I like to back it up with a well-trained dog. My Dalmatian might look cute but she's very nasty when it comes to intruders!
There's a lot of people who would have no problems dealing with a person that would think twice if that person had an angry dog with them.
Bleh sorry about that. Dunno how I misread that to think you were saying the x-height included the ascenders and descenders. Ahh well, thanks for pointing that out.
Actually that's wrong. The x-height is the height of the body of the font, that is the part of the font that DOESN'T include the ascenders and descenders. The point size of a font is the height including ascenders and descenders. IMO you should never use the point size to determine the size of a font, the x-height is much more useful visually. However, most computer typography systems do use point size which is why some fonts usually look much larger or smaller than other fonts of the same point size.
Here's a good discussion on typography and the visual impact of different type styles.