"The Republicrats (or is it the Demopublicans?) differ on most fundamental topics so little as for it to be irrelevant."
I'm so sick of hearing this crap.
Four years ago, a sizeable chunk of Democratic voters cast their ballots for Nader, using the same logic. If the parties are truly so similar, why is Nader having trouble even getting on the ballot this year? (Hint: it's not a Democratic conspiracy against him.)
Really, now... just look at the social and public policy decisions that took place as a result of White House proposals in the last four years:
- We have (essentially) pulled out of the Kyoto accord. - We've gutted federal water quality standards regarding arsenic and heavy metal contamination. - We cut funding to international family-planning organizations that conduct abortion counseling. - We're proposing new road-building into Wilderness Areas. - We've made it much more difficult to declare certain types of bankruptcy. - We've hobbled basic stem-cell research, in the name of "pro-life" activism.
These are just off the top of my head, and many didn't even require congressional intervention (the Kyoto accord, family-planning funding and stem-cell research decisions are Pure Bush). Are you honestly suggesting that these decisions would have been made under a Democratic administration?
Do Democrats support conservative initiatives? Sure. And Republicans support liberal initiatives too, sometimes. Does that make the parties "identical"? I don't think so. I like to think that governing a nation the size of our own is a complicated and intricate task, and that sometimes partisan bullshit has to take a backseat to cooperation and actual thought.
IMO, if you don't see the differences between the parties in this country, your overwhelming cyncism is impairing your ability to think critically.
(for the record -- I am a Bush-hating moderate who regularly votes Republican and Democrat. Gasp!!)
Sigh. Look -- I wasn't saying that proteins can't act as signalling molecules. I was pointing out that the poster's interpretation of the "reading" of proteins is incorrect. Proteins aren't "read," except in the most strained interpretation of the word.
What makes this dangerous is proteins can learn new and unique ways of folding.. so if in contact with a BSE protein it'll learn to fold the BSE way. Meaning.. it'll learn to fold superstable.. which is basically a knot you can't untie. Proteins are the messengers of the body.. and if they can't unfold to be read.. its basically dead weight.
I'm not sure what you think you mean by "messengers of the body", but proteins are not information storage devices. They are products of genes, which are encoded by DNA, which is the information-carrying molecule of living organisms.
Proteins are functional or structural objects -- they act as scaffolding, motors and chemical reaction centers. They can be modified in ways that allow the transmission of information (e.g. phosphorylation), but that's a secondary responsibility.
That said, your description of BSE is incorrect. Proteins are not unfolded for "reading." They fold to assume their functional shape, and unfolding destroys their function. It's not something that happens to healthy, useful proteins. In fact, the cell has mechanisms to hunt down and destroy unfolded proteins, lest they do some sort of damage.
BSE is the result of a rarity in the protein universe -- a protein that has two stable folds. Most proteins have only a single, naturally stable conformation, but the protein responsible for BSE has another. What's more, this oddball protein fold can actually catalyze the folding of other proteins into it's own shape, thus destroying their previous function. What ultimately causes the disease, however, is the propensity of these misfolded proteins to aggregate, forming solid clumps that kill the cells in which they accumulate.
BSE has nothing to do with proteins "learning" of new ways to fold. Proteins don't learn. Proteins fold correctly, or they don't -- and in this case, failing to fold correctly has a nasty consequence.
Do we really want our scientific community to be comprised of people who are in it for the money and attention?
I have news -- the scientific community is comprised of people who are in it for the money and attention. I speak as someone who has been up to his ears in the scientific "community," for the last six years.
The days of the gentleman scientist/aristocratic man of leisure are long gone...today, most successful scientists work in large groups, where politics and negotiation for credit are just as important (if not more important) than the science itself. Within this atmosphere, it is very easy for publicity artists and empire builders to thrive (and if you doubt me, you need only look to one J. Craig Venter -- possibly the biggest science performer ever).
It isn't necessarily bad, and it's certainly easy to understand why things are the way they are (modern science is complicated and expensive, for starters), but you're deluding yourself if you think that modern scientists are self-sacrificing, curiosity-driven, seekers-of-truth. Like most people in the world, scientists have to be interested in building their careers first. That may or may not come at the expense of the research that they do....
...if they're not the ones doing it. Note that it's isn't Starbucks recruiting talent, working out technical glitches, and otherwise managing the distribution of music. They're managing the space in Starbucks' stores to make it more attractive to Starbucks' customers -- which is exactly their core competency.
And, though anecdotes mean very little in this game, I can't count the number of times that I wish I could have burned a copy of the music playing in a cofeehouse around here. As long as it isn't outrageously expensive, I can see it being very popular....
I'm futzing around with the other hash benchmark, and sure enough, making only a trivial change to the code (eliminating the unnecessary strdup in the second hash lookup), gets me about a 30% improvement in performnace.
Ya know...maybe it's just my field (computational biology), or the fact that I've been in school for far too long, but the more I code, and the more math that I use, the more I see the two as different faces of the same beast.
You don't have look at much interesting software before you realize that the difficult problems -- the ones that are fun to solve -- are inherently mathematical. And conversely, once you start seeing programming languages as expressions of underlying mathematical forms, they start to become very similar to one another. And I'm not even referring to bleeding-edge research code, either -- look at P2P networking, and you're staring into the eyes of a massive, graph theory problem.
Anyone can write a shell script. Very few people can express mathematical concepts in code.
Hello! My records indicate that this number is registered to an eligible single female in my area code. As an eligible single male, I wanted to take this opportunity to extend a special, one-time off...*click*....
sigh...
555-1112...ring...ring...
Re:I know this is tongue-in-cheek article, but ...
on
The Science of Love
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
"To "cure" depression, you could inject chemicals to balance things out, or you could think thoughts that do the same thing. The injection technique is likely more effective for many."
They're about equal in effectiveness, actually. Current studies on depressed patients treated with cognitive therapy, antidepressants, or a combination of both, show that both methods have about equal efficacy, with the combined approach working best.
My point is: using genetically altered food, and generally exploiting nature in unnatural ways has been found to result in long-term genetic and other problems for humans (can anybody tell me how the first case of AIDS is believed to have occurred). Putting genetically modified fish in the food-chain is not a good idea, unless it's *very* strictly controlled to make sure the fish aren't eaten by other animals.
You don't know what you're talking about. This wouldn't be bad, except for the fact that you're propagating your silly, sky-is-falling rhetoric to other people, who will hear you use factual-sounding words, and therefore think that you have some knowledge of the subject and possibly listen to you.
One of the first errors you make is in the assumption that the modification to the glowfish is poorly understood. In fact, the protein that is responsible for this was isolated from a living organism, is widely used in biomedical research (even to the point of modifying living human cells), and is extremely well-characterized. Contrast this to the protein that is hypothesized to cause vCJD: we don't even know what it is with any confidence, let alone how it works. Apples and oranges.
Furthermore, you confuse (purposefully?) a naturally-occuring disease (vCJD) with the results of genetic engineering. Let me reiterate: vCJD has nothing to do with genetic engineering. The prion assumed to be responsible for vCJD has occurred spontaneously in nature for a very long time. Similar mutant proteins spontaneously occur in elk, deer, and, yes, humans. Equating Mad Cow with genetic engineering is just a cheap scare tactic. (Ditto for your AIDS reference -- HIV has a long evolutionary history, and is known to have evolved from other viruses in other organisms. No genetic boogeymen involved.)
In short, your conclusion is completely unfounded. Genetically altered food has never been implicated in long-term genetic or medical problems for humans. It may be true that the long-term health effects of particular mutations haven't been studied adequately, but that doesn't support your assertion. And, ultimately, compared to the genetically-modified organisms being sold into our food supply every day, the Glowfish is extremely well-characterized and inert.
Actually, not only is the article a dupe, but I just saw the old article linked on google news!
My new year's prediction: this article, having found a niche, will be continually resubmitted by clueless slashdot readers, reposted, and picked up by automated news services in a never-ending cycle of google-reader-slashdot that will ultimately threaten the very fabric of the internet itself!!
Hey. It's as plausible of any other prediction I've read today...
I thought the same thing that you did -- Redhat terminating support for RHL meant that I should get to know another Linux distribution, and Debian seemed popular, so I tried Debian Woody on my new desktop box...for about two days.
The problem is, by all objective standards, Woody is significantly behind Redhat, SuSE, Mandrake and Yellow Dog (all distributions that I've used extensively) in terms of usability. As others will attest, it's often a nightmare to get Woody installed and configured on a machine where Redhat or Mandrake will Just Work (tm). In many ways, using Debian felt like I was using Slackware circa 1998. Too much reinvention of the same old wheels. And don't even get me started on the documentation or community support -- I'm a very technically adept guy (I've been using Linux since 1995), and I find the technical support attitude that surrounds Debian to be...well, elitist, to say the least.
That said, this is a new release, so maybe things have changed completely. But if you're like me, and you have to get work done that doesn't involve futzing with config files and kernel modules, be very wary of Debian. (Not incidentally, Fedora is a very nice distribution, and it supports apt too....)
In the parent post, I express a legitimate concern about the quality of the Debian install process. I believe I have been unfairly censored, so I will repost the core of my complaint.
To recap: I just bought a new system, containing fairly run-of-the-mill hardware, including an Intel eepro100-derived network card and a CD writer. Debian Woody, as installed directly from the net, does not properly detect my network hardware at boot time, and furthermore, doesn't even bother to set up my CD writer. I said as much in the parent post. I did not insult anyone, post false information, or try to start an argument. I posted my experience, and was moderated as flamebait.
I guess I have to wonder what the discussion on this site is worth if posts like mine are so easily censored. Perhaps those individuals who are so extremely sensitive about critiques of Debian's quality should spend a little time fixing bugs, and a little less time moderating posting on slashdot...
"You must be doing something wrong. My epro 10/100 works just by loading the module during the install and the CD writer "just works"./me wonders what is wrong with you?"
Ah, you must be part of the highly-touted "community support" for Debian!
What is wrong with me, if you must know, is that I stuck a Debian CD into my drive, and naively assumed that it would work.
Frankly, between half-assed installs, old packages and trolls like yourself, I don't have any problem using Redhat or Fedora. I prefer to get work done, rather than fskcing around with my CD drive for days....
"To be fair, the only time most people ever need to even insert any hardware modules for the install is to install a single network card driver. The modules for the rest of a person's hardware are generally loaded by the kernel after installation."
HA!
Maybe my system isn't "general" enough for Debian. I've spent the last 2 days installing Woody, reconfiguring and recompiling kernels, and reinstalling packages, just to get my network card (Intel Eepro 10/100) and CD writer working. Debian doesn't correctly configure the network card modules during the install, and doesn't even bother to think about the CD writer.
I think the only "fair" thing to say about Debian's current installer is that it's competitive with Redhat's 1998 installer. So, ultimately, I have to spend 3x as long installing the system as I would using Redhat, and I'll get a system composed of packages that are old. Why is this worthwhile, again?
I'm burning a Fedora Core CD as I write....
Re:I listen to my local independent radio station
on
Who Needs Radio?
·
· Score: 1
The Mountain? Independent? Hardly.
The Mountain is owned by Entercom -- the second largest radio conglomerate in the country. Don't believe me? Do a search for "The Mountain Seatte," and you'll pull up the website for the same exact station (even the logo is the same!) in the Seattle/Tacoma market. Except, the Mountain, Seattle makes no bones about being part of Entercom.
"This is quite indicative of the business environment in california, and a perfect example of why the recall is (1) going forward, and (2) going to replace Davis with a Republican who's not afraid to protect business."
You know, you're absolutely right. With a Republican in office, California will finally be able to support some successful businesses and leap forward into the modern age! I can hardly wait!
I help develop and maintain a project for computational structural biology, and our project stats look pretty similar to yours. We release, see an interest spike, then it dies down.
Factor in that you're in a very niche market -- real estate offices who have the need for a dedicated software package, who know enough about computers to use Linux/PHP/Apache, and who don't have in-house developers. Then, consider that you're not actually maintaining the original project, but a project that branched from the original so that users won't have to upgrade. It doesn't leave many interested users.
This is part of the justification behind "release early, release often" -- the more you release, the more hits you generate, and the more likely you are to find interested users. All the same, don't expect to get the hits of the next big RPG platform or internet chat application. The users just aren't there.
Since entering grad school, I've dropped more than 30 pounds! It's a miracle! I highly recommend the Grad School Diet!
Seriously, when I was working a desk job, I was gaining weight, and now I'm losing weight. And this is despite the fact that I still sit on my duff 8+ hours a day while working. The differences are:
I walk everywhere. Something about being in a college environment encourages this, but there's nothing preventing you from walking more often. Walk to the store, to the bus, to lunch, etc.
I eat a lot less. When I was working, it wasn't uncommon to find myself eating high-Calorie fast food at my desk, sitting all day, then going home to eat a large dinner. These days, my schedule is less regular, and as a result, I eat smaller meals, more sporadically. I'm poor, so I often bring my leftover dinner to work (which reduces portion size). Finally, I just eat less now. I realize that this is harder when you're sitting at a desk all day long, but there's nothing stopping you from eating less food.
When I get stressed, I go to the gym. This one is simple, deceptively so. You'd be amazed at how an hour of daily weight training or running can eliminate stress from your life. And it makes you healthier, too! The trick is getting in the habit, and that can be difficult. Try this: sign up for a gym with a friend. Go regularly, and go together, at least at first. You'll force each other to go in the beginning, but before long, you'll find that you need to go to feel healthy and productive. And that's when it becomes automatic.
I realize that this sounds a lot like the "eat less, exercise more" advice you're hearing from others. The thing is, they're right, but it seems impossible to follow their advice when you're out of shape and chained to a desk. You have to force these things to become habit. Start slowly (say, with walking daily), and gradually build up your exercise regimen. As you get bored, change what you're doing, and try something new. Before long, it will be an important component of your life (and as I said before, exercise is a great stress-reliever!)
(Side note: whatever you do, you don't have to kill yourself doing it. I used to make the mistake of exercising way too hard, giving up from the pain, and as a result, rarely exercising. Whatever you do, stay in your aerobic heart rate range, and realize that the fact that you're not dying doesn't mean you aren't getting exercise.)
Slashdot Mirror
"The Republicrats (or is it the Demopublicans?) differ on most fundamental topics so little as for it to be irrelevant."
I'm so sick of hearing this crap.
Four years ago, a sizeable chunk of Democratic voters cast their ballots for Nader, using the same logic. If the parties are truly so similar, why is Nader having trouble even getting on the ballot this year? (Hint: it's not a Democratic conspiracy against him.)
Really, now... just look at the social and public policy decisions that took place as a result of White House proposals in the last four years:
- We have (essentially) pulled out of the Kyoto accord.
- We've gutted federal water quality standards regarding arsenic and heavy metal contamination.
- We cut funding to international family-planning organizations that conduct abortion counseling.
- We're proposing new road-building into Wilderness Areas.
- We've made it much more difficult to declare certain types of bankruptcy.
- We've hobbled basic stem-cell research, in the name of "pro-life" activism.
These are just off the top of my head, and many didn't even require congressional intervention (the Kyoto accord, family-planning funding and stem-cell research decisions are Pure Bush). Are you honestly suggesting that these decisions would have been made under a Democratic administration?
Do Democrats support conservative initiatives? Sure. And Republicans support liberal initiatives too, sometimes. Does that make the parties "identical"? I don't think so. I like to think that governing a nation the size of our own is a complicated and intricate task, and that sometimes partisan bullshit has to take a backseat to cooperation and actual thought.
IMO, if you don't see the differences between the parties in this country, your overwhelming cyncism is impairing your ability to think critically.
(for the record -- I am a Bush-hating moderate who regularly votes Republican and Democrat. Gasp!!)
Sigh. Look -- I wasn't saying that proteins can't act as signalling molecules. I was pointing out that the poster's interpretation of the "reading" of proteins is incorrect. Proteins aren't "read," except in the most strained interpretation of the word.
What makes this dangerous is proteins can learn new and unique ways of folding.. so if in contact with a BSE protein it'll learn to fold the BSE way. Meaning.. it'll learn to fold superstable.. which is basically a knot you can't untie. Proteins are the messengers of the body.. and if they can't unfold to be read.. its basically dead weight.
I'm not sure what you think you mean by "messengers of the body", but proteins are not information storage devices. They are products of genes, which are encoded by DNA, which is the information-carrying molecule of living organisms.
Proteins are functional or structural objects -- they act as scaffolding, motors and chemical reaction centers. They can be modified in ways that allow the transmission of information (e.g. phosphorylation), but that's a secondary responsibility.
That said, your description of BSE is incorrect. Proteins are not unfolded for "reading." They fold to assume their functional shape, and unfolding destroys their function. It's not something that happens to healthy, useful proteins. In fact, the cell has mechanisms to hunt down and destroy unfolded proteins, lest they do some sort of damage.
BSE is the result of a rarity in the protein universe -- a protein that has two stable folds. Most proteins have only a single, naturally stable conformation, but the protein responsible for BSE has another. What's more, this oddball protein fold can actually catalyze the folding of other proteins into it's own shape, thus destroying their previous function. What ultimately causes the disease, however, is the propensity of these misfolded proteins to aggregate, forming solid clumps that kill the cells in which they accumulate.
BSE has nothing to do with proteins "learning" of new ways to fold. Proteins don't learn. Proteins fold correctly, or they don't -- and in this case, failing to fold correctly has a nasty consequence.
A monopod? :)
an iPod.
Do we really want our scientific community to be comprised of people who are in it for the money and attention?
I have news -- the scientific community is comprised of people who are in it for the money and attention. I speak as someone who has been up to his ears in the scientific "community," for the last six years.
The days of the gentleman scientist/aristocratic man of leisure are long gone...today, most successful scientists work in large groups, where politics and negotiation for credit are just as important (if not more important) than the science itself. Within this atmosphere, it is very easy for publicity artists and empire builders to thrive (and if you doubt me, you need only look to one J. Craig Venter -- possibly the biggest science performer ever).
It isn't necessarily bad, and it's certainly easy to understand why things are the way they are (modern science is complicated and expensive, for starters), but you're deluding yourself if you think that modern scientists are self-sacrificing, curiosity-driven, seekers-of-truth. Like most people in the world, scientists have to be interested in building their careers first. That may or may not come at the expense of the research that they do....
...if they're not the ones doing it. Note that it's isn't Starbucks recruiting talent, working out technical glitches, and otherwise managing the distribution of music. They're managing the space in Starbucks' stores to make it more attractive to Starbucks' customers -- which is exactly their core competency.
And, though anecdotes mean very little in this game, I can't count the number of times that I wish I could have burned a copy of the music playing in a cofeehouse around here. As long as it isn't outrageously expensive, I can see it being very popular....
I'm futzing around with the other hash benchmark, and sure enough, making only a trivial change to the code (eliminating the unnecessary strdup in the second hash lookup), gets me about a 30% improvement in performnace.
This guy is a tool.
Ya know...maybe it's just my field (computational biology), or the fact that I've been in school for far too long, but the more I code, and the more math that I use, the more I see the two as different faces of the same beast.
You don't have look at much interesting software before you realize that the difficult problems -- the ones that are fun to solve -- are inherently mathematical. And conversely, once you start seeing programming languages as expressions of underlying mathematical forms, they start to become very similar to one another. And I'm not even referring to bleeding-edge research code, either -- look at P2P networking, and you're staring into the eyes of a massive, graph theory problem.
Anyone can write a shell script. Very few people can express mathematical concepts in code.
555-1111...ring...ring...
Hello! My records indicate that this number is registered to an eligible single female in my area code. As an eligible single male, I wanted to take this opportunity to extend a special, one-time off...*click*....
sigh...
555-1112...ring...ring...
"To "cure" depression, you could inject chemicals to balance things out, or you could think thoughts that do the same thing. The injection technique is likely more effective for many."
They're about equal in effectiveness, actually. Current studies on depressed patients treated with cognitive therapy, antidepressants, or a combination of both, show that both methods have about equal efficacy, with the combined approach working best.
My point is: using genetically altered food, and generally exploiting nature in unnatural ways has been found to result in long-term genetic and other problems for humans (can anybody tell me how the first case of AIDS is believed to have occurred). Putting genetically modified fish in the food-chain is not a good idea, unless it's *very* strictly controlled to make sure the fish aren't eaten by other animals.
You don't know what you're talking about. This wouldn't be bad, except for the fact that you're propagating your silly, sky-is-falling rhetoric to other people, who will hear you use factual-sounding words, and therefore think that you have some knowledge of the subject and possibly listen to you.
One of the first errors you make is in the assumption that the modification to the glowfish is poorly understood. In fact, the protein that is responsible for this was isolated from a living organism, is widely used in biomedical research (even to the point of modifying living human cells), and is extremely well-characterized. Contrast this to the protein that is hypothesized to cause vCJD: we don't even know what it is with any confidence, let alone how it works. Apples and oranges.
Furthermore, you confuse (purposefully?) a naturally-occuring disease (vCJD) with the results of genetic engineering. Let me reiterate: vCJD has nothing to do with genetic engineering. The prion assumed to be responsible for vCJD has occurred spontaneously in nature for a very long time. Similar mutant proteins spontaneously occur in elk, deer, and, yes, humans. Equating Mad Cow with genetic engineering is just a cheap scare tactic. (Ditto for your AIDS reference -- HIV has a long evolutionary history, and is known to have evolved from other viruses in other organisms. No genetic boogeymen involved.)
In short, your conclusion is completely unfounded. Genetically altered food has never been implicated in long-term genetic or medical problems for humans. It may be true that the long-term health effects of particular mutations haven't been studied adequately, but that doesn't support your assertion. And, ultimately, compared to the genetically-modified organisms being sold into our food supply every day, the Glowfish is extremely well-characterized and inert.
Actually, not only is the article a dupe, but I just saw the old article linked on google news!
My new year's prediction: this article, having found a niche, will be continually resubmitted by clueless slashdot readers, reposted, and picked up by automated news services in a never-ending cycle of google-reader-slashdot that will ultimately threaten the very fabric of the internet itself!!
Hey. It's as plausible of any other prediction I've read today...
Duuuude...duh!
For all the non-intensive purposes, you do something else!
Sheesh.
Now we can outsource our space program!
I thought the same thing that you did -- Redhat terminating support for RHL meant that I should get to know another Linux distribution, and Debian seemed popular, so I tried Debian Woody on my new desktop box...for about two days.
The problem is, by all objective standards, Woody is significantly behind Redhat, SuSE, Mandrake and Yellow Dog (all distributions that I've used extensively) in terms of usability. As others will attest, it's often a nightmare to get Woody installed and configured on a machine where Redhat or Mandrake will Just Work (tm). In many ways, using Debian felt like I was using Slackware circa 1998. Too much reinvention of the same old wheels. And don't even get me started on the documentation or community support -- I'm a very technically adept guy (I've been using Linux since 1995), and I find the technical support attitude that surrounds Debian to be...well, elitist, to say the least.
That said, this is a new release, so maybe things have changed completely. But if you're like me, and you have to get work done that doesn't involve futzing with config files and kernel modules, be very wary of Debian. (Not incidentally, Fedora is a very nice distribution, and it supports apt too....)
In the parent post, I express a legitimate concern about the quality of the Debian install process. I believe I have been unfairly censored, so I will repost the core of my complaint.
To recap: I just bought a new system, containing fairly run-of-the-mill hardware, including an Intel eepro100-derived network card and a CD writer. Debian Woody, as installed directly from the net, does not properly detect my network hardware at boot time, and furthermore, doesn't even bother to set up my CD writer. I said as much in the parent post. I did not insult anyone, post false information, or try to start an argument. I posted my experience, and was moderated as flamebait.
I guess I have to wonder what the discussion on this site is worth if posts like mine are so easily censored. Perhaps those individuals who are so extremely sensitive about critiques of Debian's quality should spend a little time fixing bugs, and a little less time moderating posting on slashdot...
"The guy commented that you must be doing something wrong, and you insulted him. The Debian network driver for your card does indeed work perfectly."
Ok, first off, how does "/me wonders what's wrong with you?" translate to politely commenting that I "must be doing something wrong"?
Second, dipshit, it's the linux network driver, not the Debian network driver.
And third, I never said the module didn't work correctly. I said that it wasn't loading properly. Which is a totally different thing.
Grow up.
"You must be doing something wrong. My epro 10/100 works just by loading the module during the install and the CD writer "just works". /me wonders what is wrong with you?"
Ah, you must be part of the highly-touted "community support" for Debian!
What is wrong with me, if you must know, is that I stuck a Debian CD into my drive, and naively assumed that it would work.
Frankly, between half-assed installs, old packages and trolls like yourself, I don't have any problem using Redhat or Fedora. I prefer to get work done, rather than fskcing around with my CD drive for days....
"To be fair, the only time most people ever need to even insert any hardware modules for the install is to install a single network card driver. The modules for the rest of a person's hardware are generally loaded by the kernel after installation."
HA!
Maybe my system isn't "general" enough for Debian. I've spent the last 2 days installing Woody, reconfiguring and recompiling kernels, and reinstalling packages, just to get my network card (Intel Eepro 10/100) and CD writer working. Debian doesn't correctly configure the network card modules during the install, and doesn't even bother to think about the CD writer.
I think the only "fair" thing to say about Debian's current installer is that it's competitive with Redhat's 1998 installer. So, ultimately, I have to spend 3x as long installing the system as I would using Redhat, and I'll get a system composed of packages that are old. Why is this worthwhile, again?
I'm burning a Fedora Core CD as I write....
The Mountain? Independent? Hardly.
The Mountain is owned by Entercom -- the second largest radio conglomerate in the country. Don't believe me? Do a search for "The Mountain Seatte," and you'll pull up the website for the same exact station (even the logo is the same!) in the Seattle/Tacoma market. Except, the Mountain, Seattle makes no bones about being part of Entercom.
"This is quite indicative of the business environment in california, and a perfect example of why the recall is (1) going forward, and (2) going to replace Davis with a Republican who's not afraid to protect business."
You know, you're absolutely right. With a Republican in office, California will finally be able to support some successful businesses and leap forward into the modern age! I can hardly wait!
Hook this bad boy up to a machine running ASCII Quake, and give new meaning to the term "Frag"!
Buy It Now
I help develop and maintain a project for computational structural biology, and our project stats look pretty similar to yours. We release, see an interest spike, then it dies down.
Factor in that you're in a very niche market -- real estate offices who have the need for a dedicated software package, who know enough about computers to use Linux/PHP/Apache, and who don't have in-house developers. Then, consider that you're not actually maintaining the original project, but a project that branched from the original so that users won't have to upgrade. It doesn't leave many interested users.
This is part of the justification behind "release early, release often" -- the more you release, the more hits you generate, and the more likely you are to find interested users. All the same, don't expect to get the hits of the next big RPG platform or internet chat application. The users just aren't there.
Seriously, when I was working a desk job, I was gaining weight, and now I'm losing weight. And this is despite the fact that I still sit on my duff 8+ hours a day while working. The differences are:
- I walk everywhere . Something about being in a college environment encourages this, but there's nothing preventing you from walking more often. Walk to the store, to the bus, to lunch, etc.
- I eat a lot less. When I was working, it wasn't uncommon to find myself eating high-Calorie fast food at my desk, sitting all day, then going home to eat a large dinner. These days, my schedule is less regular, and as a result, I eat smaller meals, more sporadically. I'm poor, so I often bring my leftover dinner to work (which reduces portion size). Finally, I just eat less now. I realize that this is harder when you're sitting at a desk all day long, but there's nothing stopping you from eating less food.
- When I get stressed, I go to the gym. This one is simple, deceptively so. You'd be amazed at how an hour of daily weight training or running can eliminate stress from your life. And it makes you healthier, too! The trick is getting in the habit, and that can be difficult. Try this: sign up for a gym with a friend. Go regularly, and go together, at least at first. You'll force each other to go in the beginning, but before long, you'll find that you need to go to feel healthy and productive. And that's when it becomes automatic.
I realize that this sounds a lot like the "eat less, exercise more" advice you're hearing from others. The thing is, they're right, but it seems impossible to follow their advice when you're out of shape and chained to a desk. You have to force these things to become habit. Start slowly (say, with walking daily), and gradually build up your exercise regimen. As you get bored, change what you're doing, and try something new. Before long, it will be an important component of your life (and as I said before, exercise is a great stress-reliever!)(Side note: whatever you do, you don't have to kill yourself doing it. I used to make the mistake of exercising way too hard, giving up from the pain, and as a result, rarely exercising. Whatever you do, stay in your aerobic heart rate range, and realize that the fact that you're not dying doesn't mean you aren't getting exercise.)