You can't just start running barefoot. You have to build up your calluses and the muscles in your arches.
Even after all the buildup, I'm not convinced it's worth it. Some people swear by it, but people swear by all kinds of things, and it doesn't make it right. In my case, I pronate, which is to say my foot hits a little too hard on the inside when I run. Shoes with good firm soles help redistribute the impact to the outside of my foot, and make my ankles hurt less.
Yup yup. I had more trouble with the expensive nike's than I ever had with the low-midrange asics: they last longer, and they don't wear poorly, even if you have a tendency to pronate (like me). The fricking nikes would wear so as to make the pronation worse.
Yea, and don't be fooled by cost. I used to buy the top 'o the line, 120 dollar running shoes, until I stepped on a screw and ripped the air cushion open. Couldn't afford to replace the brand new shoes with new 120 dollar shoes, so I bought a 39 dollar pair, and they were all around better shoes.
I don't agree with all these people who are rhapsodizing about the barefoot running though. If you're running a significant distance (7-10 miles) on anything but soft grass, your feet will be in shreds by the end, no matter how thick your calluses are. And there's not much chance you'll be doing it again the next day.
And forget running in snow or in high summer...I once burned the soles of my (extremely) callused feet to the point where the calluses peeled off and left me with nasty blisters while I built up more. (Grew up at the beach, and ran cross country for a decade...Don't really have nerve endings on the soles of my feet anymore).
I used to run cross country with sprinter spikes(first link on the goog), which are basically slippers with metal spikes near the toes...They effectively have no heel.
There are plenty of shoes out there that offer some protection without being heavy clod hoppers.
It hardly matters. One of the primary ways in which IT makes things better is by trying to keep the infrastructure up-to-date: this usually involves capital money.
Now, funny thing about capital: it's not the same every year. That screws up budgets. So, rather than grant capital money to replace obsolete systems, they approve hilarious maintenance costs, simply because those look better on the budget, they don't change a lot year to year.
At which point IT becomes the poor bastards who have to support other peoples' poor business decisions. I pitch yearly for upgrades to systems that are 10+ years out of date. Upgrades that would pay for themselves in tangible savings in 4 years, not counting the dramatic productivity increases or anything like that, just in maintenance costs and other actual line items that we could eliminate.
You can't just claim that it's all our fault, when the support and the approval has to come from on high.
Hah, I have a similar story. We have a big fancy website, and the regional CEO, in an effort to drive traffic told IT to set a policy that forced everyone's home page to be our website.
So every time anyone opens a browser window, they go to that site. Hundreds and hundreds of workers, thousands and thousands of times a day, every single connection going out on one single IP address, resulting in exactly one unique page view, per day.
It's a pain in the ass, no one really cares, and the first time some manager had data loss from a machine shutting itself down, the policy would end.
If we all sat down and set up our networks so that everything correctly booted and shutdown when the network told it to, we could attach power management stuff to the whole network...Assuming that everything correctly saved state when it shut down, so that people didn't lose all their work when their machine automatically shut itself off.
They're treating this like it's just lazy admins, but its a knotty problem, and not a particularly critical one. In datacenters the computers are the primary energy draw, in office buildings it's light and climate control, and, judging by the heating bills in the winter, the computers aren't really heating the building up that much.
So it's fair to let them pollute the water and air, and for us to get taxed to clean it up, but it's not fair for them to get taxed for polluting the water and air?
The problem right now is that the government is footing the bill for companies to allow them to keep polluting. That's corporate welfare, which is supposed to be bad, right?
Agreed. The most efficient way to store the carbon from coal would be to leave it as coal. Of course, if we could make efficient biofuel out of algae, the difference there would be that the cycle would be closed. CO2->Algae->Biofuel->CO2
But if we have to burn the coal (and right now we do), why not see if there is some way we can lessen the environmental impact? It's not inherently a bad idea. Like it or not, barring some game changing new technology, we're going to be burning coal for years to come.
"As president, as president, I will tap our natural gas reserves, invest in clean coal technology, and find ways to safely harness nuclear power. I'll help our auto companies re-tool, so that the fuel-efficient cars of the future are built right here in America."
Seriously man. Seriously. You cite the Drudge version of the Chronicle piece just like a conservative tool. Here's the whole quote:
"So, if somebody wants to build a coal power plant, they can. It's just that, it will bankrupt them because they're going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted. That will also generate billions of dollars that we can invest in solar, wind, biodiesel, and other alternative energy approaches. The only thing that I've said, with a respect to coal -- I haven't been some coal booster -- what I have said is, that, for us to take coal off the table as a ideological matter, as opposed to saying, if technology allows us to use coal in a clean way, we should pursue it. You know, that I think is the right approach." Barak Obama, SF Chronicle Interview, Jan 17, 2008 (emphasis mine)
How about you think for yourself just a tiny little bit, eh?
In a nutshell. Just because you're pro-green, doesn't mean you're completely out of touch with reality. We use coal for a HUGE amount (it's the largest single source) of our national energy production, and it'll be decades before that can change in any meaningful way, so it only makes sense to see if you can make a virtue of necessity.
The thing I liked about Obama was that he wasn't batshit crazy. This is a perfectly sensible move, something he promised to look into during his campaign, and something worthy of study at the least. I am at a loss to explain all the crazy that's leaking out in this thread.
Ever try running Firefox 3 on a version of Linux from 2003 or 2004? Get ready to build Gnome from source, because the versions (of Gnome) that are compatible with distro's of that age don't support Firefox versions higher than 2.
When I went to school we got our email using mm from a Solaris command line. Later they upgraded all the way to Pine. If you wanted to change your preferences you had to learn to edit your.profile.
400 pages? The world just don't work like that any more. You hire a guy to do a template and a stylesheet, and then you hire a programmer to generate all the pages dynamically from a database. You'd never pay someone to handcraft 400 individual html pages.
The thing is, web design isn't any more complicated than making a good power point presentation. You don't put out an employment ad for "Power Point Jockey," you look for someone who has that skill set, as well as some other skill set you need.
What's this, a set up for a joke about unemployment?
In my more recent experience, html people are liberal arty types who pick up some web design to complement their other skills. Photographers, animators, graphical artists. Webapp designers usually have some html, but often you have a coder and a design person and they have different responsibilities.
HTML by itself just isn't a marketable skillset anymore. Hell, it's hard enough being a graphic artist, or a flash designer, or something like that, who also does html.
What, like Microsoft did when it reinvented Java for IE? Do you really want a 3rd version of Java that's not quite compatible with regular Java (counting gcj as the 2nd)?
I'm fine with the GOOG not offering Java support, but what's the justification for only offering half-assed support? It kills the whole point of portability.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you seriously expect me to shell $39.99 for something that I'm not sure I'll like?
So, when you go out to eat, you expect them to give you free food, and only decide afterward whether it was good enough for you to pay for it?
Do you go to a play or a live concert, and only decide afterward if you want to pay for it?
There is a certain amount of risk in going out for entertainment. Deal with it.
You can't just start running barefoot. You have to build up your calluses and the muscles in your arches.
Even after all the buildup, I'm not convinced it's worth it. Some people swear by it, but people swear by all kinds of things, and it doesn't make it right. In my case, I pronate, which is to say my foot hits a little too hard on the inside when I run. Shoes with good firm soles help redistribute the impact to the outside of my foot, and make my ankles hurt less.
Yup yup. I had more trouble with the expensive nike's than I ever had with the low-midrange asics: they last longer, and they don't wear poorly, even if you have a tendency to pronate (like me). The fricking nikes would wear so as to make the pronation worse.
Yea, and don't be fooled by cost. I used to buy the top 'o the line, 120 dollar running shoes, until I stepped on a screw and ripped the air cushion open. Couldn't afford to replace the brand new shoes with new 120 dollar shoes, so I bought a 39 dollar pair, and they were all around better shoes.
I don't agree with all these people who are rhapsodizing about the barefoot running though. If you're running a significant distance (7-10 miles) on anything but soft grass, your feet will be in shreds by the end, no matter how thick your calluses are. And there's not much chance you'll be doing it again the next day.
And forget running in snow or in high summer...I once burned the soles of my (extremely) callused feet to the point where the calluses peeled off and left me with nasty blisters while I built up more. (Grew up at the beach, and ran cross country for a decade...Don't really have nerve endings on the soles of my feet anymore).
I used to run cross country with sprinter spikes(first link on the goog), which are basically slippers with metal spikes near the toes...They effectively have no heel.
There are plenty of shoes out there that offer some protection without being heavy clod hoppers.
It's not actually. That's texas, this is new york.
It hardly matters. One of the primary ways in which IT makes things better is by trying to keep the infrastructure up-to-date: this usually involves capital money.
Now, funny thing about capital: it's not the same every year. That screws up budgets. So, rather than grant capital money to replace obsolete systems, they approve hilarious maintenance costs, simply because those look better on the budget, they don't change a lot year to year.
At which point IT becomes the poor bastards who have to support other peoples' poor business decisions. I pitch yearly for upgrades to systems that are 10+ years out of date. Upgrades that would pay for themselves in tangible savings in 4 years, not counting the dramatic productivity increases or anything like that, just in maintenance costs and other actual line items that we could eliminate.
You can't just claim that it's all our fault, when the support and the approval has to come from on high.
Hah, I have a similar story. We have a big fancy website, and the regional CEO, in an effort to drive traffic told IT to set a policy that forced everyone's home page to be our website.
So every time anyone opens a browser window, they go to that site. Hundreds and hundreds of workers, thousands and thousands of times a day, every single connection going out on one single IP address, resulting in exactly one unique page view, per day.
It's a pain in the ass, no one really cares, and the first time some manager had data loss from a machine shutting itself down, the policy would end.
If we all sat down and set up our networks so that everything correctly booted and shutdown when the network told it to, we could attach power management stuff to the whole network...Assuming that everything correctly saved state when it shut down, so that people didn't lose all their work when their machine automatically shut itself off.
They're treating this like it's just lazy admins, but its a knotty problem, and not a particularly critical one. In datacenters the computers are the primary energy draw, in office buildings it's light and climate control, and, judging by the heating bills in the winter, the computers aren't really heating the building up that much.
So it's fair to let them pollute the water and air, and for us to get taxed to clean it up, but it's not fair for them to get taxed for polluting the water and air?
The problem right now is that the government is footing the bill for companies to allow them to keep polluting. That's corporate welfare, which is supposed to be bad, right?
Agreed. The most efficient way to store the carbon from coal would be to leave it as coal. Of course, if we could make efficient biofuel out of algae, the difference there would be that the cycle would be closed. CO2->Algae->Biofuel->CO2
But if we have to burn the coal (and right now we do), why not see if there is some way we can lessen the environmental impact? It's not inherently a bad idea. Like it or not, barring some game changing new technology, we're going to be burning coal for years to come.
"As president, as president, I will tap our natural gas reserves, invest in clean coal technology, and find ways to safely harness nuclear power. I'll help our auto companies re-tool, so that the fuel-efficient cars of the future are built right here in America."
--Barak Obama, Acceptance Speech, Democratic National Convention. August 28, 2008.
Seriously man. Seriously. You cite the Drudge version of the Chronicle piece just like a conservative tool. Here's the whole quote:
"So, if somebody wants to build a coal power plant, they can. It's just that, it will bankrupt them because they're going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted. That will also generate billions of dollars that we can invest in solar, wind, biodiesel, and other alternative energy approaches. The only thing that I've said, with a respect to coal -- I haven't been some coal booster -- what I have said is, that, for us to take coal off the table as a ideological matter, as opposed to saying, if technology allows us to use coal in a clean way, we should pursue it. You know, that I think is the right approach." Barak Obama, SF Chronicle Interview, Jan 17, 2008 (emphasis mine)
How about you think for yourself just a tiny little bit, eh?
In a nutshell. Just because you're pro-green, doesn't mean you're completely out of touch with reality. We use coal for a HUGE amount (it's the largest single source) of our national energy production, and it'll be decades before that can change in any meaningful way, so it only makes sense to see if you can make a virtue of necessity.
The thing I liked about Obama was that he wasn't batshit crazy. This is a perfectly sensible move, something he promised to look into during his campaign, and something worthy of study at the least. I am at a loss to explain all the crazy that's leaking out in this thread.
Maybe I'll just cite FactCheck.org.
A McCain-Palin ad claims the Obama-Biden ticket opposes clean coal. Not true.
But, by all means, keep believing whatever the voices tell you.
Who's reversing his position? Everyone talked up so-called clean coal during the election.
I agree however; even if we don't use the technology, we can make money selling it to other people.
Oh yea, if you're running a Mac, you need OS X 10.4 (Tiger, released in 2005) or better.
Why should windows get off so easy, eh?
(On reflection, I think it's GTK or GLib that you have to upgrade to make firefox 3 work on an older linux distro)
Ever try running Firefox 3 on a version of Linux from 2003 or 2004? Get ready to build Gnome from source, because the versions (of Gnome) that are compatible with distro's of that age don't support Firefox versions higher than 2.
XP is what, 4 years older than that?
They hadn't heard of computers in 2001?
Welll...We are talking about Boston here...
In case you missed the reference: Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back!
*Second quote down
**probably a lot of profanity on that page
When I went to school we got our email using mm from a Solaris command line. Later they upgraded all the way to Pine. If you wanted to change your preferences you had to learn to edit your .profile.
Stupid cops.
Web pages are seldom all that interactive. Linking one page to the next isn't rocket science.
We're not talking about programming here, we're talking about HTML. Not even Javascript, just HTML. HTML and CSS are simple skills.
400 pages? The world just don't work like that any more. You hire a guy to do a template and a stylesheet, and then you hire a programmer to generate all the pages dynamically from a database. You'd never pay someone to handcraft 400 individual html pages.
The thing is, web design isn't any more complicated than making a good power point presentation. You don't put out an employment ad for "Power Point Jockey," you look for someone who has that skill set, as well as some other skill set you need.
What's this, a set up for a joke about unemployment?
In my more recent experience, html people are liberal arty types who pick up some web design to complement their other skills. Photographers, animators, graphical artists. Webapp designers usually have some html, but often you have a coder and a design person and they have different responsibilities.
HTML by itself just isn't a marketable skillset anymore. Hell, it's hard enough being a graphic artist, or a flash designer, or something like that, who also does html.
What, like Microsoft did when it reinvented Java for IE? Do you really want a 3rd version of Java that's not quite compatible with regular Java (counting gcj as the 2nd)?
I'm fine with the GOOG not offering Java support, but what's the justification for only offering half-assed support? It kills the whole point of portability.