I've lost over 45 pounds and kept it off for over three years so far. And best of all, I didn't do it by starving myself.
I've considered myself overweight for most of my adult and childhood life. Oddly enough, I had always been fairly athletic, and exercised regularly throughout my life. I had strong willpower. But I just couldn't seem to keep weight off.
I lost my weight by signing up for weight watchers online. Weight watchers online is a program that allows you to conveniently keep track of the food you eat. All of it. I don't think weight watchers is magic; instead, I think the process of making eating a deliberate and measured action is what helped me. I like numbers. I can do numbers.
What I found by recording everything I ate is that a small number of foods accounted for a large amount of calories. Beef, fries, bread, snacks. I've largely eliminated these foods from my diet. It's not that I can't eat them, I just don't feel that the value is high enough for the calories to eat them a lot. I was able to decrease the number of calories I ate without starving myself by eating smart. The other benefit of recording food is that there are some replacement foods that are significantly healthier. For me, I started snacking more on pretzels, which I found a lot more filling, but contained less calories than many of the other snacks I ate.
After about a year, I stopped using weight watchers. I had internalized most of the good behaviors, and no longer needed to record everything I ate. I continued to lose weight, slowly but steadily. Eventually I stopped at a healthy weight, and I feel great. Over time, even though I was never starving myself, I started eating higher calorie foods and exercising more regularly to offset it. On that note, for burning calories, exercising longer and with lower intensity is better than short, intense workouts. I like to use the elliptical; I can exercise for 90 minutes without killing myself, and burn over 1000 calories. I've found that playing video games at the same time really distracts me from the act of exercising, and even makes it enjoyable.
If you're skeptical, and think you know enough about dieting to not record everything, think again. There are simply too many surprises. Go to your favorite restuarant's website and look at the nutrition information. I used to go to Chili's quite often. I haven't been there for a long time. I don't know how they cook their food, but it's insanely high in calories. Even seemingly safe foods like salad can be high in calories depending on the dressing. The opposite is true as well. Some fast food, like KFC, can be very low in calories (although probably bad for other reasons). Over time, you'll learn what fills you up and doesn't have a ton of calories. If you just start "eating less" without any data, you'll still be eating the same inefficient foods, and you'll probably gain your weight back after you can't take it anymore.
As others have pointed out, deploying EC2 instances automatically is fairly easy using the well-documented EC2 APIs.
The difficult part about distributed computing is synchronizing the work between available instances. For this, you might want to look at RabbitMQ or other queueing servers. One way to do this would be to have one thread (on your computer) generating problem instances, while you spawn spot instances on EC2 as desired, which consume the work and report the results. I suspect you could accomplish something similar using Hadoop/MapReduce.
The second class will not be very useful to you. I've heard this rumor propagated time and again, and no one can ever give me a convincing argument why such a class would be useful, other than for graphics and numeric computation.
The first class would be much more useful. Algorithms is the more or less the study of the math of programming. If you are seriously considering programming, you should learn this topic in great detail. Judging by the number of topics covered, I am assuming this is a lower-level course. You should definitely take at least one low-level computer science theory course!
One other area you may want to look at is logic -- look for Dijkstra's book "A Discipline of Programming".
First, this is pretty cool. Enough said about that.
Unfortunately, I don't think this will be useful for solving NP-complete problems. For those of you who don't know much about algorithms, NP-complete problems are hard to solve because they become much harder as you make the problem "bigger". It is perfectly possible for problems to be solvable in a reasonable amount of time for small problem sizes, like n=3 that the authors of this article solved.
The paper explains that because bacteria can multiply exponentially, they can multiply until they have enough nodes to solve the problem. Well, there's a problem with that thinking. Bacteria, like computers, need resources. Presumably, if you double the bacteria's food/resources, you will not find an exponential growth in the number of bacteria that can be sustained. If this is true, then there is certainly a problem size that will make using bacteria intractable, which negates the benefits of using bacteria.
What stops someone from recording a human looking at the page, and then replaying that behavior from a bot?
Also, will humans actually want to send the information needed for this to remote websites? I don't really want a website to know what part of the page I'm looking at.
I was at the competition, on Millersville's team. Overall, I'd like to say the competition is awesome. Casey and the rest of the white team organizers did another awesome job. The competition was fun, challenging and educational, as it should be!
However, there are several things that could be improved. If you think the 3 hours of "prep time" could be used to secure our systems, you are mistaken. The three hours were actually used to complete business injects. Obviously, the systems were very "pre fucked up" as someone else said, and we didn't have enough time to secure everything. I think allowing the teams time to actually secure their systems would be very helpful.
However, as Tim from Whitewolf Security said, if no one gets hacked, it's a very boring competition.
We were also given multitudes of business injects to complete during this prep time. Each team only had three terminals to work on, as well. All in all, the odds are stacked (heavily) against the defending teams.
I think Debian made a terrible mistake when they decided that more than source code had to be free. Sure, it's nice to have great principles like that, but it's better to have a usable distribution.
I've been a Debian supporter for a long time, but when Firefox is no longer called Firefox I will no longer be a supporter. With the more practical Ubuntu around, it's not a hard decision to make.
Do you want to hire someone that can't solve the puzzle? For the linked website, do you want to hire someone who can't a) append a string to the end of their url b) look at the html code for a funny tag c) Write php?
That Verizon is a huge company and not all regions operate in the same way. Where I live (central pennsylvania) Verizon won't let you "buy" a higher speed service than they can provide. I havn't heard of anyone receiving less bandwidth than they purchased here. That could be different where you live, though.
If you don't like it, don't put it on the internet. I'm not sure why D-Link is made to look like a villain. That's why these things are on the net: to be used.
is to fork over some money to AOL to phish. You'd think this would stop them, but since the mail is now "certified" or whatever you want to call it, people will believe it and probably increase their response proportions.
It's true, the more you can upload affects how much you get sent to you.. but it's hardly 1 to 1! I have a 40 KB/s upload and a 350 KB/s download, and I often saturate my downstream. I also usually cap uploads to 30 KB/s.
That is odd that you are getting slow bt speeds. How many seeds are there? Make sure you are not firewalling your incoming bt port. That makes a huge different.
The system will use a 500MHz processor from Advanced Micro Devices with 128MB of memory. It will use 512MB of flash memory and no hard drive, he said. The biggest remaining cost is the display.
Before RTFA, I thought they were talking about the kernel. Clearly based on the flash drive size, what they mean is just the size of having so many libraries that often do the same thing!
I am somewhat skeptical of there being a real problem, though. Knoppix fits many, many things on 700MB using compression. Many of the things that Knoppix includes would probably not be much use for the laptops, such a development tools. The nice thing about "Linux" (being purposely vague as the article) is that you can choose what "Linux" is. If you don't like something, take it out!
It is interesting to note that they mentioned they are currently working with Microsoft to modify Windows CE to operate on the laptop.
Slashdot Mirror
I've lost over 45 pounds and kept it off for over three years so far. And best of all, I didn't do it by starving myself.
I've considered myself overweight for most of my adult and childhood life. Oddly enough, I had always been fairly athletic, and exercised regularly throughout my life. I had strong willpower. But I just couldn't seem to keep weight off.
I lost my weight by signing up for weight watchers online. Weight watchers online is a program that allows you to conveniently keep track of the food you eat. All of it. I don't think weight watchers is magic; instead, I think the process of making eating a deliberate and measured action is what helped me. I like numbers. I can do numbers.
What I found by recording everything I ate is that a small number of foods accounted for a large amount of calories. Beef, fries, bread, snacks. I've largely eliminated these foods from my diet. It's not that I can't eat them, I just don't feel that the value is high enough for the calories to eat them a lot. I was able to decrease the number of calories I ate without starving myself by eating smart. The other benefit of recording food is that there are some replacement foods that are significantly healthier. For me, I started snacking more on pretzels, which I found a lot more filling, but contained less calories than many of the other snacks I ate.
After about a year, I stopped using weight watchers. I had internalized most of the good behaviors, and no longer needed to record everything I ate. I continued to lose weight, slowly but steadily. Eventually I stopped at a healthy weight, and I feel great. Over time, even though I was never starving myself, I started eating higher calorie foods and exercising more regularly to offset it. On that note, for burning calories, exercising longer and with lower intensity is better than short, intense workouts. I like to use the elliptical; I can exercise for 90 minutes without killing myself, and burn over 1000 calories. I've found that playing video games at the same time really distracts me from the act of exercising, and even makes it enjoyable.
If you're skeptical, and think you know enough about dieting to not record everything, think again. There are simply too many surprises. Go to your favorite restuarant's website and look at the nutrition information. I used to go to Chili's quite often. I haven't been there for a long time. I don't know how they cook their food, but it's insanely high in calories. Even seemingly safe foods like salad can be high in calories depending on the dressing. The opposite is true as well. Some fast food, like KFC, can be very low in calories (although probably bad for other reasons). Over time, you'll learn what fills you up and doesn't have a ton of calories. If you just start "eating less" without any data, you'll still be eating the same inefficient foods, and you'll probably gain your weight back after you can't take it anymore.
Take a look at this list of practice or permanent CTFs. The root of the site also has a great archive of past CTFs, and other useful stuff.
As others have pointed out, deploying EC2 instances automatically is fairly easy using the well-documented EC2 APIs.
The difficult part about distributed computing is synchronizing the work between available instances. For this, you might want to look at RabbitMQ or other queueing servers. One way to do this would be to have one thread (on your computer) generating problem instances, while you spawn spot instances on EC2 as desired, which consume the work and report the results. I suspect you could accomplish something similar using Hadoop/MapReduce.
We will miss you.
The second class will not be very useful to you. I've heard this rumor propagated time and again, and no one can ever give me a convincing argument why such a class would be useful, other than for graphics and numeric computation.
The first class would be much more useful. Algorithms is the more or less the study of the math of programming. If you are seriously considering programming, you should learn this topic in great detail. Judging by the number of topics covered, I am assuming this is a lower-level course. You should definitely take at least one low-level computer science theory course!
One other area you may want to look at is logic -- look for Dijkstra's book "A Discipline of Programming".
I like Clipperz. You don't need to have anything installed, which is nice. They host your passwords in encrypted form.
First, this is pretty cool. Enough said about that.
Unfortunately, I don't think this will be useful for solving NP-complete problems. For those of you who don't know much about algorithms, NP-complete problems are hard to solve because they become much harder as you make the problem "bigger". It is perfectly possible for problems to be solvable in a reasonable amount of time for small problem sizes, like n=3 that the authors of this article solved.
The paper explains that because bacteria can multiply exponentially, they can multiply until they have enough nodes to solve the problem. Well, there's a problem with that thinking. Bacteria, like computers, need resources. Presumably, if you double the bacteria's food/resources, you will not find an exponential growth in the number of bacteria that can be sustained. If this is true, then there is certainly a problem size that will make using bacteria intractable, which negates the benefits of using bacteria.
The people that wrote the article in the story you mention had no idea what they are talking about.
Peter Gutmann, one of the experts in this area, specifically responded to that article (see further epilogue).
What stops someone from recording a human looking at the page, and then replaying that behavior from a bot?
Also, will humans actually want to send the information needed for this to remote websites? I don't really want a website to know what part of the page I'm looking at.
I knew all of those "... PROFIT!" jokes would count for something one day!
Many "computer people" that I know are often fascinated with music. If you've had an itch to perform or record, now would be a good time to do it.
I was at the competition, on Millersville's team. Overall, I'd like to say the competition is awesome. Casey and the rest of the white team organizers did another awesome job. The competition was fun, challenging and educational, as it should be!
However, there are several things that could be improved. If you think the 3 hours of "prep time" could be used to secure our systems, you are mistaken. The three hours were actually used to complete business injects. Obviously, the systems were very "pre fucked up" as someone else said, and we didn't have enough time to secure everything. I think allowing the teams time to actually secure their systems would be very helpful.
However, as Tim from Whitewolf Security said, if no one gets hacked, it's a very boring competition.
We were also given multitudes of business injects to complete during this prep time. Each team only had three terminals to work on, as well. All in all, the odds are stacked (heavily) against the defending teams.
I think Debian made a terrible mistake when they decided that more than source code had to be free. Sure, it's nice to have great principles like that, but it's better to have a usable distribution.
I've been a Debian supporter for a long time, but when Firefox is no longer called Firefox I will no longer be a supporter. With the more practical Ubuntu around, it's not a hard decision to make.
Do you want to hire someone that can't solve the puzzle? For the linked website, do you want to hire someone who can't a) append a string to the end of their url b) look at the html code for a funny tag c) Write php?
I should be able to sue the RIAA for not actively preventing murders in my country.
Putting something into Google and getting results implies that your argument is correct.
That Verizon is a huge company and not all regions operate in the same way. Where I live (central pennsylvania) Verizon won't let you "buy" a higher speed service than they can provide. I havn't heard of anyone receiving less bandwidth than they purchased here. That could be different where you live, though.
If you don't like it, don't put it on the internet. I'm not sure why D-Link is made to look like a villain. That's why these things are on the net: to be used.
is to fork over some money to AOL to phish. You'd think this would stop them, but since the mail is now "certified" or whatever you want to call it, people will believe it and probably increase their response proportions.
It's true, the more you can upload affects how much you get sent to you.. but it's hardly 1 to 1! I have a 40 KB/s upload and a 350 KB/s download, and I often saturate my downstream. I also usually cap uploads to 30 KB/s.
That is odd that you are getting slow bt speeds. How many seeds are there? Make sure you are not firewalling your incoming bt port. That makes a huge different.
For debian, try Jigdo
And, just to stay on topic: Some distributions are very large.
The system will use a 500MHz processor from Advanced Micro Devices with 128MB of memory. It will use 512MB of flash memory and no hard drive, he said. The biggest remaining cost is the display.
Before RTFA, I thought they were talking about the kernel. Clearly based on the flash drive size, what they mean is just the size of having so many libraries that often do the same thing!
I am somewhat skeptical of there being a real problem, though. Knoppix fits many, many things on 700MB using compression. Many of the things that Knoppix includes would probably not be much use for the laptops, such a development tools. The nice thing about "Linux" (being purposely vague as the article) is that you can choose what "Linux" is. If you don't like something, take it out!
It is interesting to note that they mentioned they are currently working with Microsoft to modify Windows CE to operate on the laptop.
Yes, they were used.