There was a story on/. yesterday about some new research that indicated that stress hormones could shift the balance of intestinal tract flora and result in extracting more calories from simple carbohydrates. However, before blaming everything on stress, there's a couple things you'd want to check out first.
Because you're stressed, I assume you have not much time to spend on making food. If you're consuming already prepared food, do you count calories? When I started doing that last year I was amazed at the calorie density of some things I would commonly eat. Things you wouldn't expect to be that bad from how "healthy" it tastes can be more than you should eat all day. Conversely, some relatively rich things, prepared at home, can be a lot less calorie dense than you'd think. Unless you're counting calories, you really can't make a reliable comparison between those two periods.
There's also a possibility that things have swung the other way without you noticing. If stress kills your appetite for a bit, you may drop into a low enough calorie range to trigger starvation mode, causing your metabolism to tank. I've found that letting my average intake drop too much or for too long makes it hard to lose weight as my metabolism adjusts, and that a week or two of eating more will kick start it again.
Finally, with any holiday and temporary change in habits, there's a good chance that your hydration levels are going out of whack. If you started skipping out on liquid intake over Christmas, that can contribute to as much as a 6 or 8 pound drop which will come back pretty quickly once you resume your normal habits.
I agree, fad diets are scams, but the basics of nutrition (calories in - calories out) is still sound. And while stress is a factor, I tend to think that it's more because of the behaviors it causes than just a biological change.
IIRC, we already know that answer. The cells do not reproduce perfectly. Think of it like a photocopier. You make a copy, then make a copy of that copy, and then a copy of that copy, and so on. Eventually, you'll have an unreadable copy.
True, except for reproductive cells. Sperm and ova. Every new human is created from a cell that's been copied over and over and over and over since the start of life on this planet. There have been genetic mutations along the way, sure, but not the rapid degradation you're talking about which does occur in regular body cells. But there are ways for cells to keep dividing for millions of years without losing all genetic data or becoming cancerous.
I know that's the theory, but when a completely unrecognized police officer can show up and get sent out in an official squad car... you'd think the station would have a duty roster or something.
Why would I have to trust some random person's word? Why couldn't I write it myself? Anyway, it's your choice if you want to trust a random guy in the first place. The PC is no longer yours; it belongs to Microsoft, and any unapproved use cripples it.
That does sound odd. You shouldn't have had more than 2 phone interviews before a yes/no for the in-person interview. I've heard very mixed things about HR in the past, but it is improving, so I'd venture that another try would be handled much differently.
What amazed me was how so many of the questions were basically out of a textbook. It was pointless and ridiculous. They were testing on trivia for the most part instead of ability.
I've heard the process at Amazon can be somewhat uneven. I have only the one loop to refer to from personal experience, but I found nothing of the kind. And from participating in the process from the other side myself, I can tell you that random trivia is emphatically not what they're looking for. They're looking for problem solving skills, and a willingness to have a coherent discussion with your co-workers. If you're given a trivia question and stare at the board for 10 minutes before jotting down something, it doesn't matter whether you get it right or not.
Also, it seems fairly possible that what you consider "trivia" or "textbook" might be something relatively simple that they expect you to reason through yourself on the spot.
That can and does happen. Also, if there was one particularly hard person on the loop who you didn't do so well with, they may have veto power over the rest of the people you talked to. It's not perfect, and it does end up rejecting good people, but it's pretty successful at keeping the bad people out. Having worked at MS and seen the result of lowering hiring standards, I appreciate that.
Anyway, my point is there are still places hiring even with the economy the way it is. You just have to be able to present yourself as competent enough to get hired (even when that may be partly a matter of luck).
Sadly it sounds like that's not what they're doing. The articles and the leaked Balmer memo mention a number of divisions that will be included in the cuts, and product development is suspiciously lacking. It sounds like they're cutting all the fringe divisions (legal, HR, R&D, etc) and leaving the developers alone entirely. Which is really a shame, since they have a number of completely incompetent devs who need to go as well.
Getting work is nowhere near impossible if you're really good at what you do. I quit MSFT about 4 months back (they just pissed me off too much to continue there) and went to work for Amazon. Now MSFT is in layoffs, and we still can't find enough qualified people to fill our open headcount. Not coincidentally, the working environment is much more relaxed and friendly, pays significantly better, and we actually keep out the cruft that MSFT gladly hired when they started lowering their standards 5 years ago.
Uh, that doesn't sound right. I skipped OS9 so maybe there was a huge step backwards that I'm not aware of, but from what I remember it took MS until XP to equal what Apple had done in OS8.5 many years earlier.
News flash: some of the population -- I would argue a majority of the population -- don't want this country to engage in empire building in the first place. Maybe this disconnect is part of why you don't understand what we see in him.
When I learned it, I ended up trying it two or three times as my default for a couple days each (separated by months), and doing some simple training programs. The last time it stuck.
This is not scientific; it's a study of one subject based on self-reporting.
True, but there are a LOT of people out there with similar stories (myself included, wrist pain), and I have yet to speak to someone who will claim that they switched to Dvorak and found that it didn't help.
I use Dvorak on all my accounts, but have to switch back to Qwerty when I'm on someone else's machine. It's not too bad. I'm faster in Dvorak, but I can still touch-type reasonably well.
I spent maybe 4-5 years touch-typing in Qwerty, and the past 5 in Dvorak, and I much prefer it. The amount of motion necessary to type is much smaller. I'm probably not significantly faster than I was in Qwerty, but the conservation of movement makes my hands feel a lot more relaxed. Even if it's all just mental, I think it's worth it.
Sure, it's not for everyone. And it's not worth this back and forth battle of "proof" about which one is better. It's just an alternative, there for you to try if you want.
True, but a quick glance at the feature set for 2.0 reveals that there's a lot of new stuff around "controls" and "skin-able interfaces". Not that these things are strictly necessary for streaming video, but odds are the widget used to play this broadcast will be written using those features.
The marketing won't work. Silverlight will die, and pretty rapidly. I predict MSFT will stop pushing it early 2010.
Good luck with that, since it's going to happen the second people stop using Netflix (their Silverlight-only "Watch Instantly" software is in Beta, and will at some point replace the old version entirely).
Slashdot Mirror
There was a story on /. yesterday about some new research that indicated that stress hormones could shift the balance of intestinal tract flora and result in extracting more calories from simple carbohydrates. However, before blaming everything on stress, there's a couple things you'd want to check out first.
Because you're stressed, I assume you have not much time to spend on making food. If you're consuming already prepared food, do you count calories? When I started doing that last year I was amazed at the calorie density of some things I would commonly eat. Things you wouldn't expect to be that bad from how "healthy" it tastes can be more than you should eat all day. Conversely, some relatively rich things, prepared at home, can be a lot less calorie dense than you'd think. Unless you're counting calories, you really can't make a reliable comparison between those two periods.
There's also a possibility that things have swung the other way without you noticing. If stress kills your appetite for a bit, you may drop into a low enough calorie range to trigger starvation mode, causing your metabolism to tank. I've found that letting my average intake drop too much or for too long makes it hard to lose weight as my metabolism adjusts, and that a week or two of eating more will kick start it again.
Finally, with any holiday and temporary change in habits, there's a good chance that your hydration levels are going out of whack. If you started skipping out on liquid intake over Christmas, that can contribute to as much as a 6 or 8 pound drop which will come back pretty quickly once you resume your normal habits.
I agree, fad diets are scams, but the basics of nutrition (calories in - calories out) is still sound. And while stress is a factor, I tend to think that it's more because of the behaviors it causes than just a biological change.
True, except for reproductive cells. Sperm and ova. Every new human is created from a cell that's been copied over and over and over and over since the start of life on this planet. There have been genetic mutations along the way, sure, but not the rapid degradation you're talking about which does occur in regular body cells. But there are ways for cells to keep dividing for millions of years without losing all genetic data or becoming cancerous.
I know that's the theory, but when a completely unrecognized police officer can show up and get sent out in an official squad car... you'd think the station would have a duty roster or something.
Why would I have to trust some random person's word? Why couldn't I write it myself? Anyway, it's your choice if you want to trust a random guy in the first place. The PC is no longer yours; it belongs to Microsoft, and any unapproved use cripples it.
When "tampering" means "any software not approved by MS". Basically you can choose between running custom software, and watching DRM-infested media.
Still only affects the media, but it's evil as hell.
Ah, that explains a lot. The company culture has changed a lot in the past 3 years, in a really positive way.
That does sound odd. You shouldn't have had more than 2 phone interviews before a yes/no for the in-person interview. I've heard very mixed things about HR in the past, but it is improving, so I'd venture that another try would be handled much differently.
One word: management.
I've heard the process at Amazon can be somewhat uneven. I have only the one loop to refer to from personal experience, but I found nothing of the kind. And from participating in the process from the other side myself, I can tell you that random trivia is emphatically not what they're looking for. They're looking for problem solving skills, and a willingness to have a coherent discussion with your co-workers. If you're given a trivia question and stare at the board for 10 minutes before jotting down something, it doesn't matter whether you get it right or not.
Also, it seems fairly possible that what you consider "trivia" or "textbook" might be something relatively simple that they expect you to reason through yourself on the spot.
Like I said, Amazon is still hiring :-)
That can and does happen. Also, if there was one particularly hard person on the loop who you didn't do so well with, they may have veto power over the rest of the people you talked to. It's not perfect, and it does end up rejecting good people, but it's pretty successful at keeping the bad people out. Having worked at MS and seen the result of lowering hiring standards, I appreciate that.
Anyway, my point is there are still places hiring even with the economy the way it is. You just have to be able to present yourself as competent enough to get hired (even when that may be partly a matter of luck).
Sadly it sounds like that's not what they're doing. The articles and the leaked Balmer memo mention a number of divisions that will be included in the cuts, and product development is suspiciously lacking. It sounds like they're cutting all the fringe divisions (legal, HR, R&D, etc) and leaving the developers alone entirely. Which is really a shame, since they have a number of completely incompetent devs who need to go as well.
Getting work is nowhere near impossible if you're really good at what you do. I quit MSFT about 4 months back (they just pissed me off too much to continue there) and went to work for Amazon. Now MSFT is in layoffs, and we still can't find enough qualified people to fill our open headcount. Not coincidentally, the working environment is much more relaxed and friendly, pays significantly better, and we actually keep out the cruft that MSFT gladly hired when they started lowering their standards 5 years ago.
Uh, that doesn't sound right. I skipped OS9 so maybe there was a huge step backwards that I'm not aware of, but from what I remember it took MS until XP to equal what Apple had done in OS8.5 many years earlier.
News flash: some of the population -- I would argue a majority of the population -- don't want this country to engage in empire building in the first place. Maybe this disconnect is part of why you don't understand what we see in him.
When I learned it, I ended up trying it two or three times as my default for a couple days each (separated by months), and doing some simple training programs. The last time it stuck.
True, but there are a LOT of people out there with similar stories (myself included, wrist pain), and I have yet to speak to someone who will claim that they switched to Dvorak and found that it didn't help.
Why does Dvorak need to increase speed, if it decreases fatigue? I've found the same, and that seems like more than enough reason to use it for me.
I use Dvorak on all my accounts, but have to switch back to Qwerty when I'm on someone else's machine. It's not too bad. I'm faster in Dvorak, but I can still touch-type reasonably well.
I spent maybe 4-5 years touch-typing in Qwerty, and the past 5 in Dvorak, and I much prefer it. The amount of motion necessary to type is much smaller. I'm probably not significantly faster than I was in Qwerty, but the conservation of movement makes my hands feel a lot more relaxed. Even if it's all just mental, I think it's worth it.
Sure, it's not for everyone. And it's not worth this back and forth battle of "proof" about which one is better. It's just an alternative, there for you to try if you want.
True, but a quick glance at the feature set for 2.0 reveals that there's a lot of new stuff around "controls" and "skin-able interfaces". Not that these things are strictly necessary for streaming video, but odds are the widget used to play this broadcast will be written using those features.
Their implementation is only Silverlight 1. Silverlight 2 is in Alpha, but does not work with anything real, as I understand it.
Good luck with that, since it's going to happen the second people stop using Netflix (their Silverlight-only "Watch Instantly" software is in Beta, and will at some point replace the old version entirely).
The test was useful, though... it let you know in no uncertain terms that you were better off somewhere else. Success!
Maybe they've designed a fool-proof test to detect arrogant jackasses.
He probably wasn't playing games... some places just really are that inconsiderate.