Well said. I have no problem at all with vitriol, as long as I can see where it's coming from. In your first post, I couldn't understand where the rage was coming from. Now I understand, and your points are totally valid. I still have a higher opinion of OS X than you do, evidently, but that's certainly because I use it differently than you do.
what's the chance for infection after applying potato to an open cut?
Pretty damn good. That's why nobody's talking about applying potato to an open cut. They're talking about using a powder composed of little particles-- they call 'em beads-- that soak up water. What these particles actually do is reduce the volume of a mass of blood, allowing the platelets to form a clot more quickly than they otherwise could.
This is based, incidentally, on exactly the same mechanism that causes cornstarch to thicken a soup. Cornstarch is a powder made up of what are basically tiny starch particles. These tiny particles absorb water, thickening any liquid to which they're added. This stuff works the same way, only on a much smaller scale.
Earlier this year I got roped into a last-minute business trip from to Sydney. (I live in the US.) Thing is-- and I know this makes me sound like a nerd-- I was just getting started on the fourth Harry Potter book, and I was really digging it. So, yeah, I lugged a giant hardcover book from the US to Australia-- about 24 hours from door to door, because I don't live in Los Angeles-- and back.
Was it worth it? Shit, yeah. The in-flight movies were terrible. I've blocked most of 'em out, but I remember turning off "Zoolander." I actually chose to sit there and stare at the back of the seat in front of me rather than watch that steaming pile of crap. If I hadn't had my book, I would have gone quietly nuts.
Not a good idea. If it's taking our friend 26+ hours to get to London, I'm guessing that he's coming from Australia. You should know that Qantas only lets you carry 15 kg of carry-on baggage. I'm pretty sure my TAOCP comes in over that weight limit.;-)
Anyone have any good recommendations on geek books suitable for 26+ hours of flying
26+ hours? Are you coming from Oz or New Zealand?;-)
I'd suggest-- as you might guess from my nickname-- two of Vernor Vinge's novels: A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. The two are technically a novel and its prequel, but they're really only linked thematically. And they're both outstanding works of science fiction with particular appeal to computer geeks. Both are available in paperback, but they're long enough by far to keep you occupied while you're en route.
Eighteen months ago, my official org-charted job title was "Programmer-at-Arms," inspired by Deepness. These are two really cool books.
Are you passingly familiar with the Roman alphabet, and how the various letters-- 26 of 'em, you know-- correspond to the sounds of the English language? When you say "dep-ruh-kate," can you picture it in letters? Excellent! You're well on your way to spelling like a pro.
Point your web browser at dict.org, and type the word as you think it should be spelled in the little box. Go ahead, type "depracate." The online dictionary is actually smarter than you are, because it can recognize when you're misspelling a word, and suggest a correct spelling. It's polite, too. It even says, "Perhaps you meant 'deprecate,'" instead of, "It's 'deprecate' you fucking illiterate idiot. Get the fuck off our web site you cocksucker." See how nice dict.org is?
There you go. Now you can look up words without knowing how to spell them. Now get out there in that big, wide world and start spelling things!
I apologize for replying twice, but I accidentally clicked submit before I'd finished my response.
All I had left to say was this: I've looked at your posting history, and you seem to be a pretty educated and reasonable person. I don't know what the root of your bilious attitude toward OS X is. Maybe you've had one or more bad experiences, or maybe you just got up on the wrong side of the bed. Whatever the cause, I'd suggest that you try to cool it for a little while and give OS X a shot. Don't let the fact that you have to learn some new tools-- like ditto-- get you down, okay?
You know, you've got a point. When I said "legacy applications" I really should have said "applications that use legacy APIs." Of course, I don't think that really justifies the monster screed that you wrote.
Mac OS X is a hybrid system. It is based on UNIX-- no arguments about trademarks, please; I mean "UNIX" in the traditional, not literal, sense-- but it incorporates all of the features of the original Mac OS. A key feature of Mac OS is the idea of a forked file. Moving forked files to filesystems that don't support them naturally doesn't work. Also, moving forked files with tools that only touch the data segment naturally doesn't work.
Are you supposed to download an "inane Perl script?" No. You're supposed to use ditto. See the ditto man page for more information.
Just because Mac OS X is based on UNIX doesn't mean that it's not also a Mac OS.
OS X does not give you any ability to do the most basic filesysem manipulation in any meaningful fashion without ridiculous third-party tools....
That's simply untrue. You need to spend a little time checking out the man pages, that's all.
Laparoscopic surgery is about as painless-- both literally and metaphorically-- as it gets. It's all done with endoscopes and little tools that fit through half-inch tubes. You'll have two or three one-inch incisions in your abdomen. You may be kept overnight in the hospital for observation, but usually they only do that if you're exhibiting nausea and vomiting after surgery. Chances are you'll go home that night, especially if they do you first thing in the morning. You'll be posting on Slashdot by dinnertime, tracking me down and saying things like, "You lying fucker, it hurt like a son of a bitch, I hate you you liar!" It'll be great.;-)
My family has lost 2 others to cancer in the last 12 years too. Brain and Lung cancer.
Gosh, I'm really sorry. I hope you don't think I'm being insensitive, but is there a reason for this? Some cancers, like breast cancer, are linked to a gene, but I'm not aware of genetic links between different types of cancer. Do you have any idea what the root cause of this is? Or, worst of all, is it just a horrible coincidence?
You're good. It wasn't gallstones, but it was a case of acute-onset cholecystitis. Abdominal CT revealed a grossly inflamed gall bladder. The cholecystitis was secondary to something, but I have to confess I can't remember what it was. Laparoscopic cholecystetomy solved the patient's problem. (My girlfriend performed the operation.) Oh, and just to drive the point home, the labs were basically no help here. The elevated white count indicated some kind of infection or inflammation, but they really didn't know anything more than that until the docs got a CT of the belly.
I'm glad to hear you made it through your bouts of ALL okay. (If anybody reading doesn't know, ALL stands for acute lymphocytic leukemia. It's the most common form of cancer in children. Fortunately, it's also one of the most survivable cancers; something like 70% of kids that have it end up completely cured.)
How did they treat you for your gallstones? Around here, protocol for treatment of gallstones is removal of the gall bladder, 'cause they've found that patients who keep their gall bladder have something like a 90% recurrence of cholecystitis, with or without stones, later in life. Easier to just snip it out and be done with it. But it's a surgeon telling me this, so take two grains of salt and call me in the morning.;-)
The only thing I would say is that I wish you could know about this stuff by osmosis, like I do, rather than having to learn about it firsthand.
The high-end TiBook is well over $5K. $6,059.00 to be exact, and that's without any extra options.
The high-end TiBook is $3,799.00 without any extras. The middle-of-the-road one is $3,199.00.
If you had mentioned the fact that you were quoting prices in Canadian dollars, you could have avoided this correction. Of course, if your purpose was to artificially inflate prices, you should have looked at the Australian store, where a top-end PowerBook goes for a whopping $8,745.00.
I'd rather have a plain old UFS filesystem that IS case sensitive than HFS+journaling+whatever.
Then... use one. You can create and mount UFS filesystems with OS X. You can even install the OS on a UFS filesystem, but legacy software often depends on features of HFS/HFS+. So if you don't have any legacy apps, you can run an entire OS X system on UFS.
The only place Apple currently lags is in the CPU, we all hope the Power4 will fix that....
I'm sorry to nitpick, but you're talking about the PowerPC 970. (AKA GPUL) The newly announced chip is not the same as the POWER4. They share some architectural aspects, like the instruction set, but they're not the same.
Again, sorry for nitpicking. It's just that this is a really confusing matter, what with the POWER4 chip and the POWER architecture and the Amazon architecture and the PowerPC architecture and the PowerPC chips and... so on.
Dude, do you have a problem with doctors in general, or are you just uninformed? I can't accept that you honestly believe that "it's the people in the labs that diagnose and prescribe."
Have you ever seen a lab report? Let's try this little exercise. I got my girlfriend to type this up for me based on something she dealt with the other night.
Your patient is a 45-year-old white male who presented in the ER with severe radiating abdominal pain and vomiting. He has a history of mild abdominal pain for several years. Vitals: pulse 80, BP 130/70, respirations 30. The patient is alert and oriented, but is obviously in severe pain localized to his abdomen and back. Upon examination, the abdomen is soft with guarding and tenderness is the upper right epigastric area. No bowel sounds heard. Some vomiting with blood was observed.
What do you do, cloudmaster? You're the doc, so what do you do? Get labs? Okay, let's see the labs. You ordered a CBC, BMP, glucose, and liver panel. (Sorry for the formatting; if I tabularized it, the lameness filter got all riled up.) Test : Result : Normals
That's it. Those are your lab results. What should you do? That's funny, I don't see the little box on the lab report with the diagnosis and treatment plan in it. The lab guys must have left it off of this one. Weird.
So what's the plan, doc? What do you do?
I'll post the rest of this patient's story if anybody wants to read it.
Actually, it kind of irks me that she's taking this program yet her primary career goal will not be medical research. Oh well, glad I'm not a Texan taxpayer.
The MD/PhD program is funded by grants and endowments. Stand down from red alert.;-)
There are several. I know University of Washington's otolaryngology residency is 6 years. I believe that UCSD's is as well.
Incidentally, my girlfriend got her PhD because it paid for medical school. She is interested in academics, but her career of choice is ear, nose, and throat surgery. At the University of Texas, you get to go to school for free if you get into the MD/PhD program. Quite a bargain.
Apple: spends the better part of a year looking for interesting, off-beat, photogenic people. Then they read hundreds of emails. They hand-pick a bunch of folks and pay money to fly them out, coach them, then tape them. They put the ads on nationwide TV.
Great post, but you left out one more telling fact. Apple hired acclaimed documentary filmmaker Errol Morris to direct these little 30-second spots. That's right up there with-- I hear many people don't know this-- getting Ridley Scott to direct the now-famous "1984" commercial.
I'm posting this so late, it's unlikely that anybody will read it. But I thought you guys might be interested to know just who, exactly, wrote this article for the AP.
His name is Ted Bridis. I'll quote him here.
I work in our Washington bureau, along with about 60 other reporters and
about 30 photographers, and have been covering Microsoft as a technology writer since 1998 (I worked for the Wall Street Journal as a tech reporter here in DC from 2000-2001 then came back to AP). I was the only reporter to interview Gates during the antitrust trial, and I broke the story about Oracle hiring private detectives to dig through the trash of Microsoft's allies.
I decide which stories to cover based on what's newsworthy, in my judgment and in the judgment of our editors. Ideally, a story we latch onto will end up on the front page of many of the world's newspapers. (In this case, although I anticipate the story will get pretty reasonable "play," it's doubtful it would end up on p1 anyplace).
So this guy, who's evidently been around the block a few times, thought this story was worth covering. That's saying something, I think.
He also says that the story could contine developing in the morning. He asks us to stay tuned.
Lol. That's a good one. Let's see, a bachelor's degree, that's 3-4 years. Then four years of medical school-- and no, you can't "test out" of any of it; medical school is four years, and that's that. Then three to six years of residency, depending on your specialty.
If you're a true badass who chooses the right specialty-- and I'm not even going to count undergrad time here-- you can become a doctor in as little as seven years. And that's if you pick one of the "easy" specialties with a short residency. If you do what my girlfriend is doing-- get your MD/PhD, then do a surgical residency, then a fellowship-- you're looking at an upper bound of fifteen consecutive years of training. That's three years for a PhD in biology, four years for an MD, six years of residency at a teaching hospital, and two more years of fellowship before you can go get an actual job practicing medicine.
Doctors are better trained than you give them credit for.
Slashdot Mirror
Well said. I have no problem at all with vitriol, as long as I can see where it's coming from. In your first post, I couldn't understand where the rage was coming from. Now I understand, and your points are totally valid. I still have a higher opinion of OS X than you do, evidently, but that's certainly because I use it differently than you do.
what's the chance for infection after applying potato to an open cut?
Pretty damn good. That's why nobody's talking about applying potato to an open cut. They're talking about using a powder composed of little particles-- they call 'em beads-- that soak up water. What these particles actually do is reduce the volume of a mass of blood, allowing the platelets to form a clot more quickly than they otherwise could.
This is based, incidentally, on exactly the same mechanism that causes cornstarch to thicken a soup. Cornstarch is a powder made up of what are basically tiny starch particles. These tiny particles absorb water, thickening any liquid to which they're added. This stuff works the same way, only on a much smaller scale.
It's 13 hours each way....
Earlier this year I got roped into a last-minute business trip from to Sydney. (I live in the US.) Thing is-- and I know this makes me sound like a nerd-- I was just getting started on the fourth Harry Potter book, and I was really digging it. So, yeah, I lugged a giant hardcover book from the US to Australia-- about 24 hours from door to door, because I don't live in Los Angeles-- and back.
Was it worth it? Shit, yeah. The in-flight movies were terrible. I've blocked most of 'em out, but I remember turning off "Zoolander." I actually chose to sit there and stare at the back of the seat in front of me rather than watch that steaming pile of crap. If I hadn't had my book, I would have gone quietly nuts.
Come on, teleportation.
Not a good idea. If it's taking our friend 26+ hours to get to London, I'm guessing that he's coming from Australia. You should know that Qantas only lets you carry 15 kg of carry-on baggage. I'm pretty sure my TAOCP comes in over that weight limit. ;-)
Anyone have any good recommendations on geek books suitable for 26+ hours of flying
;-)
26+ hours? Are you coming from Oz or New Zealand?
I'd suggest-- as you might guess from my nickname-- two of Vernor Vinge's novels: A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. The two are technically a novel and its prequel, but they're really only linked thematically. And they're both outstanding works of science fiction with particular appeal to computer geeks. Both are available in paperback, but they're long enough by far to keep you occupied while you're en route.
Eighteen months ago, my official org-charted job title was "Programmer-at-Arms," inspired by Deepness. These are two really cool books.
Are you passingly familiar with the Roman alphabet, and how the various letters-- 26 of 'em, you know-- correspond to the sounds of the English language? When you say "dep-ruh-kate," can you picture it in letters? Excellent! You're well on your way to spelling like a pro.
Point your web browser at dict.org, and type the word as you think it should be spelled in the little box. Go ahead, type "depracate." The online dictionary is actually smarter than you are, because it can recognize when you're misspelling a word, and suggest a correct spelling. It's polite, too. It even says, "Perhaps you meant 'deprecate,'" instead of, "It's 'deprecate' you fucking illiterate idiot. Get the fuck off our web site you cocksucker." See how nice dict.org is?
There you go. Now you can look up words without knowing how to spell them. Now get out there in that big, wide world and start spelling things!
I apologize for replying twice, but I accidentally clicked submit before I'd finished my response.
All I had left to say was this: I've looked at your posting history, and you seem to be a pretty educated and reasonable person. I don't know what the root of your bilious attitude toward OS X is. Maybe you've had one or more bad experiences, or maybe you just got up on the wrong side of the bed. Whatever the cause, I'd suggest that you try to cool it for a little while and give OS X a shot. Don't let the fact that you have to learn some new tools-- like ditto-- get you down, okay?
Lots of applications break on UFS....
You know, you've got a point. When I said "legacy applications" I really should have said "applications that use legacy APIs." Of course, I don't think that really justifies the monster screed that you wrote.
Mac OS X is a hybrid system. It is based on UNIX-- no arguments about trademarks, please; I mean "UNIX" in the traditional, not literal, sense-- but it incorporates all of the features of the original Mac OS. A key feature of Mac OS is the idea of a forked file. Moving forked files to filesystems that don't support them naturally doesn't work. Also, moving forked files with tools that only touch the data segment naturally doesn't work.
Are you supposed to download an "inane Perl script?" No. You're supposed to use ditto. See the ditto man page for more information.
Just because Mac OS X is based on UNIX doesn't mean that it's not also a Mac OS.
OS X does not give you any ability to do the most basic filesysem manipulation in any meaningful fashion without ridiculous third-party tools....
That's simply untrue. You need to spend a little time checking out the man pages, that's all.
I'm going to avoid an operation if I can
;-)
Laparoscopic surgery is about as painless-- both literally and metaphorically-- as it gets. It's all done with endoscopes and little tools that fit through half-inch tubes. You'll have two or three one-inch incisions in your abdomen. You may be kept overnight in the hospital for observation, but usually they only do that if you're exhibiting nausea and vomiting after surgery. Chances are you'll go home that night, especially if they do you first thing in the morning. You'll be posting on Slashdot by dinnertime, tracking me down and saying things like, "You lying fucker, it hurt like a son of a bitch, I hate you you liar!" It'll be great.
My family has lost 2 others to cancer in the last 12 years too. Brain and Lung cancer.
Gosh, I'm really sorry. I hope you don't think I'm being insensitive, but is there a reason for this? Some cancers, like breast cancer, are linked to a gene, but I'm not aware of genetic links between different types of cancer. Do you have any idea what the root cause of this is? Or, worst of all, is it just a horrible coincidence?
I smell scandle.
Does it smell anything like scandal? 'Cause we all know what scandal smells like, you know.
You're good. It wasn't gallstones, but it was a case of acute-onset cholecystitis. Abdominal CT revealed a grossly inflamed gall bladder. The cholecystitis was secondary to something, but I have to confess I can't remember what it was. Laparoscopic cholecystetomy solved the patient's problem. (My girlfriend performed the operation.) Oh, and just to drive the point home, the labs were basically no help here. The elevated white count indicated some kind of infection or inflammation, but they really didn't know anything more than that until the docs got a CT of the belly.
;-)
I'm glad to hear you made it through your bouts of ALL okay. (If anybody reading doesn't know, ALL stands for acute lymphocytic leukemia. It's the most common form of cancer in children. Fortunately, it's also one of the most survivable cancers; something like 70% of kids that have it end up completely cured.)
How did they treat you for your gallstones? Around here, protocol for treatment of gallstones is removal of the gall bladder, 'cause they've found that patients who keep their gall bladder have something like a 90% recurrence of cholecystitis, with or without stones, later in life. Easier to just snip it out and be done with it. But it's a surgeon telling me this, so take two grains of salt and call me in the morning.
The only thing I would say is that I wish you could know about this stuff by osmosis, like I do, rather than having to learn about it firsthand.
The high-end TiBook is well over $5K. $6,059.00 to be exact, and that's without any extra options.
The high-end TiBook is $3,799.00 without any extras. The middle-of-the-road one is $3,199.00.
If you had mentioned the fact that you were quoting prices in Canadian dollars, you could have avoided this correction. Of course, if your purpose was to artificially inflate prices, you should have looked at the Australian store, where a top-end PowerBook goes for a whopping $8,745.00.
I'm using Power4 until a "common name" emerges
The common name is "PowerPC 970." Here's the straight shit.
I'd rather have a plain old UFS filesystem that IS case sensitive than HFS+journaling+whatever.
Then... use one. You can create and mount UFS filesystems with OS X. You can even install the OS on a UFS filesystem, but legacy software often depends on features of HFS/HFS+. So if you don't have any legacy apps, you can run an entire OS X system on UFS.
The only place Apple currently lags is in the CPU, we all hope the Power4 will fix that....
I'm sorry to nitpick, but you're talking about the PowerPC 970. (AKA GPUL) The newly announced chip is not the same as the POWER4. They share some architectural aspects, like the instruction set, but they're not the same.
Again, sorry for nitpicking. It's just that this is a really confusing matter, what with the POWER4 chip and the POWER architecture and the Amazon architecture and the PowerPC architecture and the PowerPC chips and... so on.
And heck. Don't like the speed hit? Turn it off.
You mean leave it off. The reports say the feature will be disabled by default. Which makes sense; most people don't need it.
Dude, you missed the obvious! He's Bill Gates of Heaven, of course!
Dude, do you have a problem with doctors in general, or are you just uninformed? I can't accept that you honestly believe that "it's the people in the labs that diagnose and prescribe."
Have you ever seen a lab report? Let's try this little exercise. I got my girlfriend to type this up for me based on something she dealt with the other night.
Your patient is a 45-year-old white male who presented in the ER with severe radiating abdominal pain and vomiting. He has a history of mild abdominal pain for several years. Vitals: pulse 80, BP 130/70, respirations 30. The patient is alert and oriented, but is obviously in severe pain localized to his abdomen and back. Upon examination, the abdomen is soft with guarding and tenderness is the upper right epigastric area. No bowel sounds heard. Some vomiting with blood was observed.
What do you do, cloudmaster? You're the doc, so what do you do? Get labs? Okay, let's see the labs. You ordered a CBC, BMP, glucose, and liver panel. (Sorry for the formatting; if I tabularized it, the lameness filter got all riled up.)
Test : Result : Normals
white count : 16.3 : 4.3-10.9
hematocrit : 45.0 : 41-53
platelet count : 344000 : 150000-450000
sodium : 141 : 137-145
potassium : 3.0 : 3.6-5.4
chloride : 98 : 98-107
bicarbonate : 25 : 22-29
BUN : 17 : 5-20
creatinine : 0.9 : 0.5-1.3
glucose : 121 : 70-110
total bilirubin : 0.5 : 0.3-1.1
plasma total protein : 9.5 : 6.0-8.0
albumin : 4.4 : 3.4-4.8
AST : 24 : 8-26
alkaline phosphatase : 98 : 89-251
ALT : 31 : 7-46
amylase : 96 : 50-180
That's it. Those are your lab results. What should you do? That's funny, I don't see the little box on the lab report with the diagnosis and treatment plan in it. The lab guys must have left it off of this one. Weird.
So what's the plan, doc? What do you do?
I'll post the rest of this patient's story if anybody wants to read it.
Actually, it kind of irks me that she's taking this program yet her primary career goal will not be medical research. Oh well, glad I'm not a Texan taxpayer.
;-)
The MD/PhD program is funded by grants and endowments. Stand down from red alert.
I've never heard of a 6 year residency program.
There are several. I know University of Washington's otolaryngology residency is 6 years. I believe that UCSD's is as well.
Incidentally, my girlfriend got her PhD because it paid for medical school. She is interested in academics, but her career of choice is ear, nose, and throat surgery. At the University of Texas, you get to go to school for free if you get into the MD/PhD program. Quite a bargain.
Apple: spends the better part of a year looking for interesting, off-beat, photogenic people. Then they read hundreds of emails. They hand-pick a bunch of folks and pay money to fly them out, coach them, then tape them. They put the ads on nationwide TV.
Great post, but you left out one more telling fact. Apple hired acclaimed documentary filmmaker Errol Morris to direct these little 30-second spots. That's right up there with-- I hear many people don't know this-- getting Ridley Scott to direct the now-famous "1984" commercial.
Proud founder of the Church of Bog. In Bog we trust!
This isn't as funny as you think it is. "Bog" is the Russian word for "God."
To set up the same printer on a Mac you:
1. Plug it in.
Yeah, I know. I can't wait to get one of the new wireless-equipped and Rendezvous-savvy printers so we can simplify the install process a bit.
Won't that be a beautiful thing? A zero-step installation processes for a printer. Sweeeet.
His name is Ted Bridis. I'll quote him here.So this guy, who's evidently been around the block a few times, thought this story was worth covering. That's saying something, I think.
He also says that the story could contine developing in the morning. He asks us to stay tuned.
It takes 2 to 3 years to train to be a doctor
Lol. That's a good one. Let's see, a bachelor's degree, that's 3-4 years. Then four years of medical school-- and no, you can't "test out" of any of it; medical school is four years, and that's that. Then three to six years of residency, depending on your specialty.
If you're a true badass who chooses the right specialty-- and I'm not even going to count undergrad time here-- you can become a doctor in as little as seven years. And that's if you pick one of the "easy" specialties with a short residency. If you do what my girlfriend is doing-- get your MD/PhD, then do a surgical residency, then a fellowship-- you're looking at an upper bound of fifteen consecutive years of training. That's three years for a PhD in biology, four years for an MD, six years of residency at a teaching hospital, and two more years of fellowship before you can go get an actual job practicing medicine.
Doctors are better trained than you give them credit for.