Low-carb diets change your metabolism. That's how they work, and that's why they are successful.
Yeah, I'm sure it has nothing to do with the person making a drastic change to their eating habits, like cutting out entire categories of food from their diet.
I believe you are right on there! The problem I have though is stopping eating, when I'm hungry, or at least think I'm hungry I eat/drink.
This isn't as big a problem to overcome as you'd think it would be. The real secret is to eat low calorie foods.
For example, would eating five 6 inch subway turkey and ham sandwitches a day fill you up? That's under 1500 calories total, and most people need 2000 a day.
1 snickers bar has close to 300 calories. 1 cup of strawberries is only 45. 1 cup of chopped carrots is only 60. A banana is only 100. An apple is only 80. Fish steaks average around 240 calories for a nice sized one.
It's just a matter of looking at everything you're eating and sort of saying, "will eating that snickers bar fill me up more than eating a subway?" or "I can drink a couple 110 calorie lemonades, but if I drink water instead I can munch down a couple bananas too".
The basis of Copyright Law is simple: A copyrighted work can not be used to make money by anyone but the copyright holder. If Mr. Peng were "bootlegging" copyrighted music - ie Making CDs and selling them for a personal profit - then yes, he would be in violation of Copyright Law. But this wasn't the case.
That's not quite right. Even if you distribute the music for free you're still in copyright violation.
Copyright isn't just that the author is the only one that can make money off it. The copyright owner is the only persion that can distribute the work. Money doesn't factor into the equation.
I'm not too sure what kind of system/traffic your site had, but our company runs web-based apps for over 40 insurance agencies across the US.
We have one server that hosts 42,000 lines of PHP code and sees around 1300 insurance agents each day who log in, generate term/ltc quotes and download forms.
Most of the above code drills into a seperate MSSQL database server running Win2k, which actually has become our only bottleneck. That server fails rarely during very high traffic.
Locally the web server also sports a MySQL database server instance which hosts a little under 5 megs worth of rates for Long Term Care quoting.
For Term Life quoting I pull in a 50-200k XML datastream from an outside vendor.
The server hosts 1.7gigs worth of downloadable insurance forms.
All of this runs on a 1Ghz Pentium 3 with a half gig of ram. A good 300 megs of that ram is currently free.
In the three years this has been running I've yet to see php cause a crash in apache.
I'd say it scales pretty damn well.
Re:PHP Is *not* an application server
on
Introduction to PHP5
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The "a scripting isn't a REAL programming language" arguement is as tired as it is old.
I started with Java back when the only IDE out was Symantec's Cafe(not Visual Cafe) and frankly over the years I've found myself to be most productive using scripting languages like perl and php.
They get things done faster with less code needed to be written in a world where fewer lines of code typically translates into fewer bugs and more productivity per programmer. And I can code in any amount of structure into a project as I see fit.
Now if I worked in a huge corporation where any idiot could submit code into my project, then yes a language that forces your hand could very well be a good thing.
But in skilled hands things like strong typing and forced OO really only get in the way.
When you GPL software you still keep the copyright of the code you wrote, which you can release under any license you want.
MySQL does this. They have the GPL version, but you can purchase a non-GPL license for it if you want to base your own software off of it.
Political Statements
on
RMS Turns 50
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
But if somebody says they have "GNU/Linux", they're just making a political statement.
I don't think even RMS would disagree with this.
The FSF is very political, because they're fighting a idealogical war.
On the one hand we have dictators like Microsoft that put a tax on any computer Joe Average buys and strips their natural rights away through EULA's. On the other hand we have the FSF beating the drum for the GPL and software that guarantees the user's rights.
I personally don't go around saying GNU/Linux, mainly because it's a mouthful, but I do understand why the GNU/Linux people preach it: they're trying to increase mindshare about free software.
5 years for the new technology? We could do it in 1.
Create the new protocol. Covert existing MTA's to use the new protocol but also support the old one. After a 6 months to a 1 year grace period switch off the old SMTP protocols from the MTA's.
Considering how much spam is a problem for people that run MTA's, I doubt you'd see much resistance to coverting over to a new system ASAP.
Re:That's not really the problem.
on
NYT on RFID Tags
·
· Score: 1
Clothing has tags and labels. You know, attached those annoying white plastic strings with the flat heads?
You could just put the RF tag into one of those or some other removable label.
The problem with that idea is that a CS degree doesn't instill the drive or values required to become a really good programmer.
I feel you really need to be a self learner in this field, because by the time a language or idea is in the colleges, more likely that not brand new better ideas are already on the horizon. You have to be able to constantly self teach in order to keep up with the trends.
That takes a passion for the technology which you can't pin down in by looking at the certs someone may have.
I think this is becoming less and less of an issue as the scripting languages mature.
I've been using OOP design in PHP for several years now, and PHP 5 will have even better objectified design principles behind it.
Python as a language is extremely modular, easy to read, and very maintainable.
Traditionaly this hasn't been the case with scripting languages, as the code grew it bloated and was hard to work with(anyone here care to work with a 100k line bash or perl script?). And I think it'll be awhile before the new languages shake off that old stigma.
But really about the only different between, say, php or python today and java is that the scripting languages don't force you to use a particular design principle. You're free to be as sloppy or clean as you like.
And in a really big project there should be design constraints no matter what the language will allow you to do.
On #1 I think he wants it to be like trademark law.
If you don't enforce it, you lose it. Meaning with patents you can't just sit on a patent until your tech becomes really popular, then start strong arming like the Mafia for money.
Software groups like MS and Adobe empower the BSA to investigate and recoup software piracy costs. The BSA gets evidence that a company might be pirating software then works with local law enforcement on a raid.
The BSA itself doesn't have the power to raid your business, but they can and do use the local authorities to raid businesses.
Solution? Don't use products whose companies are a member of BSA.
"And that will be hard - because an external floppy drive is under $50 retail now"
A quick search online found me a 128 meg USB pen drive for 50 bucks, the 32/64 meg ones are half that price.
And while floppies may be thinner, the pen drives are narrower. You can't stick a floppy disk in your front pocket or use it as a key chain.
Plus USB is faster than floppy read/write, probably less prone to failure(ever get 1 bad floppy in a zipped set of 10?) and can hold a hell of a lot more material.
Floppies are old tech that should've died years ago.
In skydiving it's not uncommon for someone to get killed. Typically when that happens the people at the dropzone continue to skydive on that day, not out of any disrespect of the person that died, but because dying is just another part of life and it should not interrupt what people do.
Similairly when a person in skydiving has a near death event, it's also typical that they immediately go back up and do another skydive as soon as they're able to. It's kind of a cliche, but "getting back on the horse" is an important part of life. When people don't go back up, it's not uncommon for them to leave the sport entirely, ie. give in to their fears.
Space travel is dangerous, and shit's gonna happen. No matter what decisions are made, how safe you play the game, eventually somewhere somehow something bad will go wrong and with the dangers and forces involved with space travel that will usually mean people will die.
But that should not cause any interruptions in the space program. Just because a shuttle went down doesn't make them unsafe. In fact considering how often they go up, I'd say 1 shuttle down every 18 years is pretty damn good. NASA needs to get another shuttle up and get back on the horse ASAP.
Unfortunately what will probably happen is that the space program will be suspended while everyone plays the blame game. Fingers will be pointed, a lot of If's will be thrown around: If they hadn't dismissed the damage done to the wing at launch - If they had rehauled the shuttle more carefully in '99 - If more money was spent on the program - If we weren't using 20 year old technology - If, if, if...
If you skydive long enough, you'll see people die. The forces are extreme enough in the sport, that small mistakes can become lethal. Space travel involves forces even more extreme: here we had a craft screaming through re-entry into earth at 12,000 miles per hour. I can't begin to imagine the kind of stresses those forces put on a space craft.
Eventually the odds are going to catch up with those involved, something nobody thought of will happen and with such extreme forces involved, people will die.
But death doesn't mean you put all life on hold.
When you push the limits of human experience, the price is risk. But life without risk is meaningless.
Economics: win/lose or win/win?
on
Giant Sucking Noise
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Whether jobs going offshore is bad or not for the economy depends on whether economics is a win/win game or win/lose game.
If it's a win/lose game, then yes, jobs out means nothing coming back in.
But in a win/win game it may very well mean lower prices for everyone, with the added benefit of more exports out to those who now have more money and wish to consume American goods.
The key to the later is to keep producing solid American goods that people outside the country want. I think we've done a pretty good job so far and it'll probably continue.
I used Debian for several years and still use it on the servers I administer. Before then I used a little Red Hat and before then Slackware.
Gentoo is very similar to Debian in the way the packaging system works. You simply tell them what to get and they download and install it and anything else it requires.
Debian distributes binaries which are pre-compiled for your platform. For intel they're compiled against the 386 I believed. Debian is also slow to update due to testing, but that in turn makes it quite stable and reliable.
Gentoo is a bit more of a tinkerers OS. It downloads the source code for any package you want to install and it compiles it custom to your PC. My Gentoo system is compiled specifically for my Athalon XP system.
Also Gentoo tends to update more quickly than Debian, in part because just throwing the sources at your users is easier than packaging up and compiling/testing yourself.
I enjoy using Gentoo on my desktop OS, but I wouldn't use it on a server until it matures a little more. I also wouldn't use it on a slow computer as compiling source code can take awhile. I also wouldn't recommend it to someone who doesn't want to know what's going on under the hood of their desktop.
Gentoo by the way it's setup tends to walk users through the a lot of the core functions that make your OS tick. It doesn't hide your config files in GUIs. Even the installer is very much a hands on process where you manually mount, chroot and fdisk. But at the same time it has very nice documentation for these processes so even non-uber-geeks can work through the OS.
Slashdot Mirror
I own a Tivo and plan to build a media box one of these days.
For one thing, by building it myself I have a lot more options with what I can do with it: internet accessible, play DvDs/mp3/ogg/mpegs, etc.
For another, I won't have to put up with a monthly fee or ads.
With Tivo your box does what they want. If you build it yourself it'll do what you want.
Low-carb diets change your metabolism. That's how they work, and that's why they are successful.
Yeah, I'm sure it has nothing to do with the person making a drastic change to their eating habits, like cutting out entire categories of food from their diet.
I believe you are right on there! The problem I have though is stopping eating, when I'm hungry, or at least think I'm hungry I eat/drink.
This isn't as big a problem to overcome as you'd think it would be. The real secret is to eat low calorie foods.
For example, would eating five 6 inch subway turkey and ham sandwitches a day fill you up? That's under 1500 calories total, and most people need 2000 a day.
1 snickers bar has close to 300 calories.
1 cup of strawberries is only 45.
1 cup of chopped carrots is only 60.
A banana is only 100.
An apple is only 80.
Fish steaks average around 240 calories for a nice sized one.
It's just a matter of looking at everything you're eating and sort of saying, "will eating that snickers bar fill me up more than eating a subway?" or "I can drink a couple 110 calorie lemonades, but if I drink water instead I can munch down a couple bananas too".
The basis of Copyright Law is simple: A copyrighted work can not be used to make money by anyone but the copyright holder. If Mr. Peng were "bootlegging" copyrighted music - ie Making CDs and selling them for a personal profit - then yes, he would be in violation of Copyright Law. But this wasn't the case.
That's not quite right. Even if you distribute the music for free you're still in copyright violation.
Copyright isn't just that the author is the only one that can make money off it. The copyright owner is the only persion that can distribute the work. Money doesn't factor into the equation.
I'm not too sure what kind of system/traffic your site had, but our company runs web-based apps for over 40 insurance agencies across the US.
We have one server that hosts 42,000 lines of PHP code and sees around 1300 insurance agents each day who log in, generate term/ltc quotes and download forms.
Most of the above code drills into a seperate MSSQL database server running Win2k, which actually has become our only bottleneck. That server fails rarely during very high traffic.
Locally the web server also sports a MySQL database server instance which hosts a little under 5 megs worth of rates for Long Term Care quoting.
For Term Life quoting I pull in a 50-200k XML datastream from an outside vendor.
The server hosts 1.7gigs worth of downloadable insurance forms.
All of this runs on a 1Ghz Pentium 3 with a half gig of ram. A good 300 megs of that ram is currently free.
In the three years this has been running I've yet to see php cause a crash in apache.
I'd say it scales pretty damn well.
The "a scripting isn't a REAL programming language" arguement is as tired as it is old.
I started with Java back when the only IDE out was Symantec's Cafe(not Visual Cafe) and frankly over the years I've found myself to be most productive using scripting languages like perl and php.
They get things done faster with less code needed to be written in a world where fewer lines of code typically translates into fewer bugs and more productivity per programmer. And I can code in any amount of structure into a project as I see fit.
Now if I worked in a huge corporation where any idiot could submit code into my project, then yes a language that forces your hand could very well be a good thing.
But in skilled hands things like strong typing and forced OO really only get in the way.
Free software stimulates the market, just not the software market :)
When you GPL software you still keep the copyright of the code you wrote, which you can release under any license you want.
MySQL does this. They have the GPL version, but you can purchase a non-GPL license for it if you want to base your own software off of it.
But if somebody says they have "GNU/Linux", they're just making a political statement.
I don't think even RMS would disagree with this.
The FSF is very political, because they're fighting a idealogical war.
On the one hand we have dictators like Microsoft that put a tax on any computer Joe Average buys and strips their natural rights away through EULA's. On the other hand we have the FSF beating the drum for the GPL and software that guarantees the user's rights.
I personally don't go around saying GNU/Linux, mainly because it's a mouthful, but I do understand why the GNU/Linux people preach it: they're trying to increase mindshare about free software.
And Linux wouldn't exist without free software.
5 years for the new technology? We could do it in 1.
Create the new protocol.
Covert existing MTA's to use the new protocol but also support the old one.
After a 6 months to a 1 year grace period switch off the old SMTP protocols from the MTA's.
Considering how much spam is a problem for people that run MTA's, I doubt you'd see much resistance to coverting over to a new system ASAP.
Clothing has tags and labels. You know, attached those annoying white plastic strings with the flat heads?
You could just put the RF tag into one of those or some other removable label.
You mean stuff like this?
/\s*(\d+)\s+(\d*\.?\d+)\s+(\d*\.?\d+)\s+(\d*\.?\d+ )\s+(\d*\.?\d+)\s+(\d*\.?\d+)\s+(\d*\.?\d+)\s+(\d* \.?\d+)\s+(\d*\.?\d+)\s+(\d*\.?\d+)\s+(\d*\.?\d+)\ s+(\d*\.?\d+)\s+(\d*\.?\d+)/)
if($line =~
It may be unreadable, but without it it would be a nightmare to transfer certain numbers I get from several sources into our database.
The problem with that idea is that a CS degree doesn't instill the drive or values required to become a really good programmer.
I feel you really need to be a self learner in this field, because by the time a language or idea is in the colleges, more likely that not brand new better ideas are already on the horizon. You have to be able to constantly self teach in order to keep up with the trends.
That takes a passion for the technology which you can't pin down in by looking at the certs someone may have.
I think this is becoming less and less of an issue as the scripting languages mature.
I've been using OOP design in PHP for several years now, and PHP 5 will have even better objectified design principles behind it.
Python as a language is extremely modular, easy to read, and very maintainable.
Traditionaly this hasn't been the case with scripting languages, as the code grew it bloated and was hard to work with(anyone here care to work with a 100k line bash or perl script?). And I think it'll be awhile before the new languages shake off that old stigma.
But really about the only different between, say, php or python today and java is that the scripting languages don't force you to use a particular design principle. You're free to be as sloppy or clean as you like.
And in a really big project there should be design constraints no matter what the language will allow you to do.
Well there's Fudge which has been around for years now, http://www.fudgerpg.com/fudge/ and you can even buy a hardcopy version of it if you want.
l ist.html
Here's a list of about 350 freely available rpg systems: http://www.darkshire.org/~jhkim/rpg/freerpgs/full
And another list: http://www.homebrew.net/games/
One more: http://dmoz.org/Games/Roleplaying/Free_Systems/
"it means we have the resources and ability to help you 10 years from now when you're having trouble."
So what MS rep do I call about problems with MS Mail or Windows 95?
Naw, dude. I talked with Bill the other day and he SAID it was cool.
He wouldn't lie to me, would he?
On #1 I think he wants it to be like trademark law.
If you don't enforce it, you lose it. Meaning with patents you can't just sit on a patent until your tech becomes really popular, then start strong arming like the Mafia for money.
They don't have the right, unless you don't know your rights and let them in.
But they can do a search through the local authorities assuming they have enough evidence to get a warrant.
Software groups like MS and Adobe empower the BSA to investigate and recoup software piracy costs. The BSA gets evidence that a company might be pirating software then works with local law enforcement on a raid.
The BSA itself doesn't have the power to raid your business, but they can and do use the local authorities to raid businesses.
Solution? Don't use products whose companies are a member of BSA.
"And that will be hard - because an external floppy drive is under $50 retail now"
A quick search online found me a 128 meg USB pen drive for 50 bucks, the 32/64 meg ones are half that price.
And while floppies may be thinner, the pen drives are narrower. You can't stick a floppy disk in your front pocket or use it as a key chain.
Plus USB is faster than floppy read/write, probably less prone to failure(ever get 1 bad floppy in a zipped set of 10?) and can hold a hell of a lot more material.
Floppies are old tech that should've died years ago.
I couldn't stop laughing when I saw the reptile clip.
In skydiving it's not uncommon for someone to get killed. Typically when that happens the people at the dropzone continue to skydive on that day, not out of any disrespect of the person that died, but because dying is just another part of life and it should not interrupt what people do.
Similairly when a person in skydiving has a near death event, it's also typical that they immediately go back up and do another skydive as soon as they're able to. It's kind of a cliche, but "getting back on the horse" is an important part of life. When people don't go back up, it's not uncommon for them to leave the sport entirely, ie. give in to their fears.
Space travel is dangerous, and shit's gonna happen. No matter what decisions are made, how safe you play the game, eventually somewhere somehow something bad will go wrong and with the dangers and forces involved with space travel that will usually mean people will die.
But that should not cause any interruptions in the space program. Just because a shuttle went down doesn't make them unsafe. In fact considering how often they go up, I'd say 1 shuttle down every 18 years is pretty damn good. NASA needs to get another shuttle up and get back on the horse ASAP.
Unfortunately what will probably happen is that the space program will be suspended while everyone plays the blame game. Fingers will be pointed, a lot of If's will be thrown around: If they hadn't dismissed the damage done to the wing at launch - If they had rehauled the shuttle more carefully in '99 - If more money was spent on the program - If we weren't using 20 year old technology - If, if, if...
If you skydive long enough, you'll see people die. The forces are extreme enough in the sport, that small mistakes can become lethal. Space travel involves forces even more extreme: here we had a craft screaming through re-entry into earth at 12,000 miles per hour. I can't begin to imagine the kind of stresses those forces put on a space craft.
Eventually the odds are going to catch up with those involved, something nobody thought of will happen and with such extreme forces involved, people will die.
But death doesn't mean you put all life on hold.
When you push the limits of human experience, the price is risk. But life without risk is meaningless.
Whether jobs going offshore is bad or not for the economy depends on whether economics is a win/win game or win/lose game.
If it's a win/lose game, then yes, jobs out means nothing coming back in.
But in a win/win game it may very well mean lower prices for everyone, with the added benefit of more exports out to those who now have more money and wish to consume American goods.
The key to the later is to keep producing solid American goods that people outside the country want. I think we've done a pretty good job so far and it'll probably continue.
I used Debian for several years and still use it on the servers I administer. Before then I used a little Red Hat and before then Slackware.
Gentoo is very similar to Debian in the way the packaging system works. You simply tell them what to get and they download and install it and anything else it requires.
Debian distributes binaries which are pre-compiled for your platform. For intel they're compiled against the 386 I believed. Debian is also slow to update due to testing, but that in turn makes it quite stable and reliable.
Gentoo is a bit more of a tinkerers OS. It downloads the source code for any package you want to install and it compiles it custom to your PC. My Gentoo system is compiled specifically for my Athalon XP system.
Also Gentoo tends to update more quickly than Debian, in part because just throwing the sources at your users is easier than packaging up and compiling/testing yourself.
I enjoy using Gentoo on my desktop OS, but I wouldn't use it on a server until it matures a little more. I also wouldn't use it on a slow computer as compiling source code can take awhile. I also wouldn't recommend it to someone who doesn't want to know what's going on under the hood of their desktop.
Gentoo by the way it's setup tends to walk users through the a lot of the core functions that make your OS tick. It doesn't hide your config files in GUIs. Even the installer is very much a hands on process where you manually mount, chroot and fdisk. But at the same time it has very nice documentation for these processes so even non-uber-geeks can work through the OS.