Seems to me it's only on the slower stories like these that we seem to get back to the intelligent posts from people who know what they're talking about - does this make me an old fart or what ??
Cheers for the info, I offer my hangover knowledge in return. A hangover is (for me) a mixture of the acetaldehyde/formic-acid poisoning from breaking down alcohol, general dehydration, and the dehydration effects on the nerve endings in the head. Following the advice such as this , following a big night I try to remember to drink a sports rehydration drink like IsoStar, a bit of ibuprofen to reduce swelling and the "blocked nose" effect, and some n-acetyl cysteine to help the liver break down what's there. If I take all these BEFORE going to bed, I'll sleep right thru, but without it I'll be up for a wee and feeling-like-shite around 4am, in which case I can try and take it then.
Done properly it's very strange as you wake up in the morning with all the "ohmigod did I really do/say that" memories, but without the punishing headache, nausea and general hangover, but possibly still feeling slightly drunk (the latter part I think always happens, but is normally masked by the other sensations).
YMMV, but as I get older I'm finding rehydration a miracle cure for all sorts of ills... and no, drinking plain water doesn't do it.
If you want to speed up your metabolism, the best way is to exercise. However, the benefits of that are more long term.
I don't instruct anymore, but...... you sound more convincing than me. Makes sense now I think about it this morning...
Diving deep to cure a hangover? I have no comment......but I've (ahem) heard it works. I have no idea why though.
Never tried it myself - I use N-Acetyl Cysteine and rehydration drinks like IsoStar to avoid a hangover (seems easier and more repeatable), but maybe it's just dive-master machismo...
The deeper you dive, the quicker you use your air - I thought (note, not claiming I'm right, just asking really) that a part of this was because as the pressure increases your metabolism speeds up, your body effectively ticks over at a much faster rate (I know I'm always hungry after a deep dive, much more so than after a shallow dive).
Hence the (ahem, very dangerous...) practice of diving deep to clear a hangover - you shouldn't dive with a hangover for lots of reasons, but I know dive-masters who go deep with a hangover. 5 or 10 minutes at 30 metres and they're just taken the equivalent of an hour or two's recovery (or they're in such deep shit that the hangover is no longer a major concern).
If true, this would explain quicker healing at pressure - whereas the explanation about "dissolving more oxygen" sounds rather dubious to me...
Anyone with a proper understanding in a position to confirm/refute/discuss ??
and using native windows is indeed of no practical importance as long as the toolkit is good enough in emulating the look
Except for testing - we use tools like Rational Robot to run an automated test suite over our products, and these tools work by looking for the native widgets. As such it makes it very hard to do automated GUI testing without the native widgets.
If anyone use Perforce (source code control) on Windows - the P4Win GUI client doesn't give you a command line, but it will show in a seperate pane all the "raw" commands it uses to drive the GUI, so if you want to know how to do something on the command line you simply do it in the GUI and then look at the log of how the program did it - very useful.
Similarly "Record a macro" in programs like Excel and Word will generate a (VBA) script of the function calls required to generate an action - again very useful for when you want to see how to do something programatically.
Finally, I always like the way that Emacs will intelligently use the status bar to report items like "you've been typing a long command but you've paused at this point", or some commands will display extra info (like - you could have done that with a keyboard shortcut), but these messages don't get in the way of what you're doing (like a modal message-box does). Oh, and recording actions to Lisp macros (cf Excel and VBA) is very useful too.
I wrote (you're going to hate this) a very small VB screensaver that just runs an IE window (no nav bar etc) so that I can have a screen-saver showing a webpage, and point it at a web page that has a META tag to refresh every 60 seconds.
We run this on a machine plugged into a plasma screen so that our "latest build status" web page is always on display in the corner of the room, but the machine it's running on is locked against casual prying eyes.
I don't know why IE doesn't have a screen-saver mode built-in itself, and as far as I know Mozilla or similar don't do this...
Anyway, it's about 300 lines of VB which you're welcome to (contact me via schmerg.com), and then you can just write webpages to co-ordinate any action between machines.... get each client to request a page and add it's local machine name as a CGI parameter and you're away...
Looking at a dealer's page it seems it comes without a harddisk but with connectors so you can put any size disk you want in it - seems a smart way for retailers to avoid being left with a load of old small disks....
For my money and/or time, the proper direction for a 3D GUI would be something like a combination of Personal Brain and the GUI from Minority Report. (Don't laugh, I'm serious!) You want to give the user the ability to establish relationships between chunks of data, and visually echo those relationships in the UI -- thick cord connects to parent; thin line connects to peers; ghosted dots indicate references; etc
I have a working but basic prototype of a system I built to do this plus a whole lot more (the basics come from a different but important field of data management) that I've been meaning to turn into a proper product for the last 5 years or so.
I'll be putting some more work into it next year, anyone who's interested drop me a line.... I don't think it'll change the WIMPS part of GUIs (i.e. you'll still be running programs in windows with menus), but it could drastically change the way you organise your life on a computer.
Guess what bright boy? It's NOT First Class Mail. It goes into the Post Office Dead Letter bin. You just advised people to raise our postage rates, thank you very much.
No, I advised people to try and think of something more effective than a petition (note, I didn't insult the petition or the people doing it, I just made the point that I didn't think it would carry much weight), and gave a few starter ideas of the sorts of things that they might want to think about. If I was proposing any of them as a complete solution I would have said so.
And AOL is a global phenomenon - who said anything about the US postal system anyway ? I didn't... and not every country follows the same rules as the US.
If you'll forgive my directness, your sarcasm seems a little rich here given that you're the one leaping to assumptions, and pouncing on one point as if it was the entirety of my comment. You're not the only one to do precisely this, so maybe I'm unfairly tarring you with the sum of faults of others, but I'm asking you to back off and think of something that could help, rather than simply throwing rocks - criticism is more effective if you offer something constructive at the same time.
Now thats what I like to hear... do AOL CD's in the US have the same "connie" girl on the cober that we get here in the UK, the one who wears make-up to look like CoCo the clown ?? Surely make-up that bad only occurs in pr0n.
In Germany there was a suggestion of a rule whereby retailers would have to take back (and dispose of in a ecological way) excess packing materials for goods - could our Teutonic friends claim the service was intangible (10 days free trial) and the entire CD is excess packaging ??
We nearly got this law in the UK (it might be a European Directive, but it might never have been passed) but the big retailers lobbied hard and claimed it would destroy the ecomomy...
Again (tho you're not to know), I have to say that I'm not living in the US, and whilst what you say may be true for you (I'm assuming, maybe incorrectly, that you are in the US), different laws about return mail apply elsewhere.
A million CD's returned in one job lot go in the bin in one motion, but a million CDs returned one-at-a-time cost a hell of a lot more to process.
The usual point of a petition is to demonstrate to people the mass rejection the public are showing their idea. Returning a million AOL CDs doesn't, IMHO, do this; it just tells AOL that their brand awareness campaign is working (and I dare say AOL know how many they have made).
If you want it stopped, hit them where it hurts - put a return-to-sender sticker on them, make AOL pay for the postage, or handle them one-by-one, or see if you can use that German law about making retailers pay the cost of removing and disposing of excess packaging... I'm not a genius (I used to be, but I'm told I'm not any more) but surely we can come up with something more persuasive than a one-off dump of a large single load of CDs.
I was going to say that my karma is excellent so this wouldn't happen, but I see my original comment has been modded down already, so pardon me for a moment while I go hide my latest backups under the garden shed...
Forgot to say, I don't live in the USA, and I work for small companies, so this isn't a concern for me although it's a valid point.
Anyway, the point was more about taking my home-backups to work, and while I'm sure some lawyer could find a problem with this practice too, the fact is it works for me, and for "home backups" I'd suggest it's often a reasonable solution.
Well I bring them home when I get handed the black bag (the real problem is that I keep about 50-100 books at work too) and I usually start a new job the next day...;^)
The advantage of them being at work is that I know I have quick access, the office is quite physically secure and has fire protection, and I'm regularly reminded how old the last "offsite backup" is... whereas "mail them to a family member" - maybe not...
Sorry, but when I couldn't get my Radeon 8500 to drive the DVI output at 1600x1200 under Linux, I voted with my wallet and went out and bought a GeForce 4 card for my new (Linux) machine. The ATI is left in my Windows machine, which is in the process of being shut down, while the Nvidia card drives my TFT at 1600 x 1200 very nicely with SuSE.
3D I don't need, but I was surprised ATI hadn't figured that high-end cards are also bought to drive high-end displays (as well as for playing games) and so cross-platform support does count for sales (see also the ATI workstation cards).
We did this with what was then a huge SCSI disk storage (1.2 Gb shared between PCs in 1987 - just before the first 386 PC's came out) and SCSI supported it then. But SCSI won't protect you from conflicting update problems, so unless your OS disk sub-system understands what's going on, you'll have to use some discipline to make sure only one host is writing to the disk at once. You say the other machine is just for failover, so I'd suggest you tell the "failover" machine to mount the drive read-only, and then unmount and re-mount it RW only when you're actually failing-over.
Or, if you're after a cheap solution for failover (and it sounds like you'll be doing a manual failover) I'd just use external devices plugged into a SCSI card, and if you need to failover, manually unplug the disk from one machine and attach it to the other and boot it up. Not quite "hot standby", but quite warm...
I know it's not a popular opinion here at Slashdot, but until you give people like me a compelling reason to change, why should I ?
They came for the Communists, and I didn't object - For I wasn't a Communist; They came for the Socialists, and I didn't object - For I wasn't a Socialist; They came for the labor leaders, and I didn't object - For I wasn't a labor leader; They came for the Jews, and I didn't object - For I wasn't a Jew; Then they came for me - And there was no one left to object.
-- Martin Niemoller, German Protestant Pastor, 1892-1984
You have a valid point, but equally you should be careful that you are being pushed into a corner by Microsoft's practices whereby you'll be unable to change, unless you're very careful today, and you find that all your avenues of escape or appeal have been eliminated because, at that time, they weren't important to you.
So whilst you might be happy today, think about what this will mean for your options in the future - think also about the anecdote about boiling a frog.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems to me it's only on the slower stories like these that we seem to get back to the intelligent posts from people who know what they're talking about - does this make me an old fart or what ??
Cheers for the info, I offer my hangover knowledge in return. A hangover is (for me) a mixture of the acetaldehyde/formic-acid poisoning from breaking down alcohol, general dehydration, and the dehydration effects on the nerve endings in the head. Following the advice such as this , following a big night I try to remember to drink a sports rehydration drink like IsoStar, a bit of ibuprofen to reduce swelling and the "blocked nose" effect, and some n-acetyl cysteine to help the liver break down what's there. If I take all these BEFORE going to bed, I'll sleep right thru, but without it I'll be up for a wee and feeling-like-shite around 4am, in which case I can try and take it then.
Done properly it's very strange as you wake up in the morning with all the "ohmigod did I really do/say that" memories, but without the punishing headache, nausea and general hangover, but possibly still feeling slightly drunk (the latter part I think always happens, but is normally masked by the other sensations).
YMMV, but as I get older I'm finding rehydration a miracle cure for all sorts of ills... and no, drinking plain water doesn't do it.
If you want to speed up your metabolism, the best way is to exercise. However, the benefits of that are more long term.
Very true, too...
Cheers
--
T
I don't instruct anymore, but... ... you sound more convincing than me. Makes sense now I think about it this morning...
Diving deep to cure a hangover? I have no comment......but I've (ahem) heard it works. I have no idea why though.
Never tried it myself - I use N-Acetyl Cysteine and rehydration drinks like IsoStar to avoid a hangover (seems easier and more repeatable), but maybe it's just dive-master machismo...
Thanks for the reply
--
T
The deeper you dive, the quicker you use your air - I thought (note, not claiming I'm right, just asking really) that a part of this was because as the pressure increases your metabolism speeds up, your body effectively ticks over at a much faster rate (I know I'm always hungry after a deep dive, much more so than after a shallow dive).
Hence the (ahem, very dangerous...) practice of diving deep to clear a hangover - you shouldn't dive with a hangover for lots of reasons, but I know dive-masters who go deep with a hangover. 5 or 10 minutes at 30 metres and they're just taken the equivalent of an hour or two's recovery (or they're in such deep shit that the hangover is no longer a major concern).
If true, this would explain quicker healing at pressure - whereas the explanation about "dissolving more oxygen" sounds rather dubious to me...
Anyone with a proper understanding in a position to confirm/refute/discuss ??
--
T
and using native windows is indeed of no practical
importance as long as the toolkit is good enough in emulating the look
Except for testing - we use tools like Rational Robot to run an automated test suite over our products, and these tools work by looking for the native widgets. As such it makes it very hard to do automated GUI testing without the native widgets.
--
T
Sorry if that sounded a little harsh ... I meant "the error seems an oversight rather than malice", not "geez this bloke is an idiot".
"Right" I rarely am...
--
T
If anyone use Perforce (source code control) on Windows - the P4Win GUI client doesn't give you a command line, but it will show in a seperate pane all the "raw" commands it uses to drive the GUI, so if you want to know how to do something on the command line you simply do it in the GUI and then look at the log of how the program did it - very useful.
Similarly "Record a macro" in programs like Excel and Word will generate a (VBA) script of the function calls required to generate an action - again very useful for when you want to see how to do something programatically.
Finally, I always like the way that Emacs will intelligently use the status bar to report items like "you've been typing a long command but you've paused at this point", or some commands will display extra info (like - you could have done that with a keyboard shortcut), but these messages don't get in the way of what you're doing (like a modal message-box does). Oh, and recording actions to Lisp macros (cf Excel and VBA) is very useful too.
--
T
Yep, typical chartjunk - normally meant to deliberately mislead or obfuscate, I think here it's just a case of plain poor thinking.
Everyone should read Tufte - the first book in particular decribes chartjunk in detail.
They are addictive books tho.
suggested "Last name 'Hunt' , First name 'Mike'".
A friend of mine from school also used to suggest Mike's brother - Yorrick.
I wrote (you're going to hate this) a very small VB screensaver that just runs an IE window (no nav bar etc) so that I can have a screen-saver showing a webpage, and point it at a web page that has a META tag to refresh every 60 seconds.
We run this on a machine plugged into a plasma screen so that our "latest build status" web page is always on display in the corner of the room, but the machine it's running on is locked against casual prying eyes.
I don't know why IE doesn't have a screen-saver mode built-in itself, and as far as I know Mozilla or similar don't do this...
Anyway, it's about 300 lines of VB which you're welcome to (contact me via schmerg.com), and then you can just write webpages to co-ordinate any action between machines.... get each client to request a page and add it's local machine name as a CGI parameter and you're away...
--
T
how big is the hard drive?
Looking at a dealer's page it seems it comes without a harddisk but with connectors so you can put any size disk you want in it - seems a smart way for retailers to avoid being left with a load of old small disks....
For my money and/or time, the proper direction for a 3D GUI would be something like a combination of Personal Brain and the GUI from Minority Report. (Don't laugh, I'm serious!) You want to give the user the ability to establish relationships between chunks of data, and visually echo those relationships in the UI -- thick cord connects to parent; thin line connects to peers; ghosted dots indicate references; etc
I have a working but basic prototype of a system I built to do this plus a whole lot more (the basics come from a different but important field of data management) that I've been meaning to turn into a proper product for the last 5 years or so.
I'll be putting some more work into it next year, anyone who's interested drop me a line.... I don't think it'll change the WIMPS part of GUIs (i.e. you'll still be running programs in windows with menus), but it could drastically change the way you organise your life on a computer.
--
T
Guess what bright boy?
It's NOT First Class Mail. It goes into the Post Office Dead Letter bin.
You just advised people to raise our postage rates, thank you very much.
No, I advised people to try and think of something more effective than a petition (note, I didn't insult the petition or the people doing it, I just made the point that I didn't think it would carry much weight), and gave a few starter ideas of the sorts of things that they might want to think about. If I was proposing any of them as a complete solution I would have said so.
And AOL is a global phenomenon - who said anything about the US postal system anyway ? I didn't... and not every country follows the same rules as the US.
If you'll forgive my directness, your sarcasm seems a little rich here given that you're the one leaping to assumptions, and pouncing on one point as if it was the entirety of my comment. You're not the only one to do precisely this, so maybe I'm unfairly tarring you with the sum of faults of others, but I'm asking you to back off and think of something that could help, rather than simply throwing rocks - criticism is more effective if you offer something constructive at the same time.
Now thats what I like to hear... do AOL CD's in the US have the same "connie" girl on the cober that we get here in the UK, the one who wears make-up to look like CoCo the clown ?? Surely make-up that bad only occurs in pr0n.
In Germany there was a suggestion of a rule whereby retailers would have to take back (and dispose of in a ecological way) excess packing materials for goods - could our Teutonic friends claim the service was intangible (10 days free trial) and the entire CD is excess packaging ??
We nearly got this law in the UK (it might be a European Directive, but it might never have been passed) but the big retailers lobbied hard and claimed it would destroy the ecomomy...
Again (tho you're not to know), I have to say that I'm not living in the US, and whilst what you say may be true for you (I'm assuming, maybe incorrectly, that you are in the US), different laws about return mail apply elsewhere.
A million CD's returned in one job lot go in the bin in one motion, but a million CDs returned one-at-a-time cost a hell of a lot more to process.
Cute kids (on your halloween photos) - I bet you can't tell me the trade-off was worth it...
Shit.. that was supposed to say "wasn't worth it" - no offence intended.... just a little late at night here in the UK, and the odd Freudian slip...
--
Tim
You must have gotten married.
9 years ago, but I know what you mean.
Cute kids (on your halloween photos) - I bet you can't tell me the trade-off was worth it...
--
T
The usual point of a petition is to demonstrate to people the mass rejection the public are showing their idea. Returning a million AOL CDs doesn't, IMHO, do this; it just tells AOL that their brand awareness campaign is working (and I dare say AOL know how many they have made).
If you want it stopped, hit them where it hurts - put a return-to-sender sticker on them, make AOL pay for the postage, or handle them one-by-one, or see if you can use that German law about making retailers pay the cost of removing and disposing of excess packaging... I'm not a genius (I used to be, but I'm told I'm not any more) but surely we can come up with something more persuasive than a one-off dump of a large single load of CDs.
Yeah, but she doesn't appreciate my taste in pr0n.
I was going to say that my karma is excellent so this wouldn't happen, but I see my original comment has been modded down already, so pardon me for a moment while I go hide my latest backups under the garden shed...
I wish there was "no sig" checkbox on submission
Forgot to say, I don't live in the USA, and I work for small companies, so this isn't a concern for me although it's a valid point.
Anyway, the point was more about taking my home-backups to work, and while I'm sure some lawyer could find a problem with this practice too, the fact is it works for me, and for "home backups" I'd suggest it's often a reasonable solution.
Well I bring them home when I get handed the black bag (the real problem is that I keep about 50-100 books at work too) and I usually start a new job the next day... ;^)
The advantage of them being at work is that I know I have quick access, the office is quite physically secure and has fire protection, and I'm regularly reminded how old the last "offsite backup" is... whereas "mail them to a family member" - maybe not...
I keep my home backups at work, and vice versa... works for me...
Sorry, but when I couldn't get my Radeon 8500 to drive the DVI output at 1600x1200 under Linux, I voted with my wallet and went out and bought a GeForce 4 card for my new (Linux) machine. The ATI is left in my Windows machine, which is in the process of being shut down, while the Nvidia card drives my TFT at 1600 x 1200 very nicely with SuSE.
3D I don't need, but I was surprised ATI hadn't figured that high-end cards are also bought to drive high-end displays (as well as for playing games) and so cross-platform support does count for sales (see also the ATI workstation cards).
We did this with what was then a huge SCSI disk storage (1.2 Gb shared between PCs in 1987 - just before the first 386 PC's came out) and SCSI supported it then. But SCSI won't protect you from conflicting update problems, so unless your OS disk sub-system understands what's going on, you'll have to use some discipline to make sure only one host is writing to the disk at once. You say the other machine is just for failover, so I'd suggest you tell the "failover" machine to mount the drive read-only, and then unmount and re-mount it RW only when you're actually failing-over.
Or, if you're after a cheap solution for failover (and it sounds like you'll be doing a manual failover) I'd just use external devices plugged into a SCSI card, and if you need to failover, manually unplug the disk from one machine and attach it to the other and boot it up. Not quite "hot standby", but quite warm...
I know it's not a popular opinion here at Slashdot, but until you give people like me a compelling reason to change, why should I ?
They came for the Communists, and I didn't object - For I wasn't a Communist;
They came for the Socialists, and I didn't object - For I wasn't a Socialist;
They came for the labor leaders, and I didn't object - For I wasn't a labor leader;
They came for the Jews, and I didn't object - For I wasn't a Jew;
Then they came for me - And there was no one left to object.
-- Martin Niemoller, German Protestant Pastor, 1892-1984
You have a valid point, but equally you should be careful that you are being pushed into a corner by Microsoft's practices whereby you'll be unable to change, unless you're very careful today, and you find that all your avenues of escape or appeal have been eliminated because, at that time, they weren't important to you.
So whilst you might be happy today, think about what this will mean for your options in the future - think also about the anecdote about boiling a frog.