I have heard the argument "Even if it is designed for 'normals' then they come to me about purchasing decisions and I will tell them to keep away, Apple needs to cater to the geeks or no one will buy it!" - so other than excluding products that may work for the person offering advice, and showing a huge lack of understanding about what other people might want from a device, it's really not working anyway. I wonder how many "don't buy an iPhone/iPad/iPod" geeks really affected the sales of those devices.
The direction I thought you were going with this post but didn't, is that Apple has largely cut out the need for 'normals' to grovel for wisdom from geeks. What tech-savvy folks see has a restrictive, brain-dead set of choices and functionality is actually a carefully-chosen experience which is intended to satisfy the vast majority of Apple's target users. The end result is fewer opportunities for folks to get lost down ratholes of options which cause them to be overwhelmed and ask for help. Instead, they are able to figure things out fairly intuitively rather than needing to memorize paths or having to learn implementation details to understand why things are the way they are. They just are because The Jobs made them that way.
Personally, as a certified geek who makes his living banging away in a shell all day, I am not at all threatened by this direction in personal computing. In fact, I find it highly refreshing to be able to see my friends and family using high technology without any need to constantly ask me how to do mundane tasks. My wife has been using macs for over a decade, as do both of her parents. I've gotten more phone calls for help with setting up and using the A/V equipment than computers (recently largely solved by getting them a Harmony remote).
Love or hate Apple, one has to admit that they have set the bar quite high for making technology accessible to 'normals'.
Now, to head off the trolls, yes I am now going to go put on a beret and fellate my Apple-branded pink unicorn while it sips a latte.
I am not saying the school administration should have coddled me etc. However they ABSOLUTELY should not have come into the fight on the side of the bullies. Looking back on all of the difficulties I went through as a child, this is the only thing that still makes me angry.
I apologize for what was a bit of wine-induced insensitivity. It sounds as if you had a really hard time of it due to bullies and clueless administrators, and I sympathize as someone who has long suffered from anxiety and insecurity.
My intent wasn't really to undermine your experiences, but to hijack your post to further my agenda of martial arts and general physical fitness as being a great way for males to experience the full range of their genetic potential. Or something like that.
I just wish I'd discovered the confidence-building experiences of martial arts and strength training when I was young and impressionable. I think I would have been a happier person, and I think that a lot of other guys suffer from social castration in our female-focused modern western societies. Don't get me wrong... I understand that this social model is more stable and generally better for the species; it just often leaves males aimless and impotent unless they're able to channel those energies effectively.
I was bullied once and (being the smaller and weaker kid) bit my attacker. The principal's approach was to bring out boxing gloves and to tell us to fight it out like men. I'm not joking......
I have to ask... Why is that such a bad thing?
Generally speaking, anyhow. I understand that you personally may not have been prepared for a physical fight against someone you perceived to be bigger and stronger, but I see this as a problem with our modern society. Males are effectively neutered in Western society. Evolution has bred us to be muscular and twitchy, and yet we are expected to always be thoughtful and... soft.
I was not a jock in high school. I did play soccer in middle school and did field/track in 9th grade, but nothing after that. It's not until the past 10 years that I've discovered that I was missing out. And for the past two years I've been doing Systema... It's totally changed my perception of the world. I feel that kids these days (gerroff mah lawn!) are missing out by not being physically active, and in particular they don't benefit from any martial arts. In the days of yore kids would have fights to settle spats, and it taught everyone their own limits as well as the usefulness (and uselessness in some situations) of fighting as conflict resolution. These days, fighting will get you detention or worse (a trip to the police station for popping some jerk in the mouth?)
This leads to seriously screwed-up kids with bottled emotions who decide that their only option is to come to school heavily armed and shoot the crap out of everyone. That's not right.
Let kids settle things out on the schoolyard. They'll learn a lot more from it than if we wait until they bring a bomb to school.
I grabbed a Samsung BD-P2500 around a year ago. Kinda wishing I'd waited another 6 months or so, but I wanted to stop watching Netflix on the xbox360 (all that electricity was mostly being wasted as heat and shortening the MTBRROD).
Anyhow, we canceled cable altogether last month. I built an attic antenna for OTA HDTV but haven't bothered to put together a recorder for that content. Mostly we use OTA for football and PBS stuff like NOVA. The rest of our content comes from Netflix, MS (via Live), and iTunes (via a macbook that is connected with an HDMI adapter). The main obstacle we had to overcome was the irrational resistance to purchasing content which had previously been "free".
I'm convinced that a la carte programming will the the norm in less than 10 years... Either by per-episode payments or via a subscription model. Content providers will have to work harder to find money to fund new programs, but I'm sure they'll figure it out. Broadcast TV (and radio) are going to have a harder and harder time competing as technology for accessing the long tail becomes easier and easier for average consumers to use. Hell, my wife's parents have been streaming content from Netflix since I bought them a Roku box last xmas... They're into their 70s and took to it very quickly.
ZFS is really awesome. Sadly, it's saddled with a lot of painful baggage in the form of Solaris/*BSD, so it's a big balancing act between ZFS and everything else.
Why is ZFS awesome? From an administration point of view, it makes managing large amounts of storage ridiculously easy. I recently acquired a couple of secondhand Sunfire x4500s (aka "Thumper"), each of which has 48 250GB drives. The next gen box (x4540, "Thor") has 48 2TB drives (!!). I briefly considered using Linux with MD/LVM to manage all of this, but having done a lot with MD/LVM in the past I knew I was looking at a world of pain in terms of flexibility and ongoing maintenance. I figured that all the ZFS fanboys might be onto something, so I grabbed OpenSolaris 2009.06 and threw it on there.
Ok, well, "threw it on there" is a bit of an oversimplification. I'll spare you all the nonsense involved, some of which was due to ignorance on my part, some of which was due to the fact that the OpenSolaris people have inexplicably chosen to try and out-Ubuntu Ubuntu and make OpenSolaris a killer desktop OS or something. There is no official text-based install, for example... Great fun to install from 2500 miles away over SSH.;P
To keep this simple, after all the pain of getting OpenSolaris installed and then experimenting with different layouts, I now have this:
root@host:~# zfs list tank NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT tank 321G 7.68T 58.5K/tank
What can I do with it? I can create new NFS shares:
root@host:~# zfs create -osharenfs=on tank/www
I can create volumes (block devices created from ZFS pools) and share via iSCSI:
Every one of these new filesystems/volumes is automatically snapshotted on an hourly/daily/weekly/monthly basis, and the snapshots are available via NFS. This is really awesome when it comes to home directories...
me@nfsclient:~$ ls -l.zfs/snapshot... drwxr-xr-x 54 me users 83 2009-12-22 06:56 zfs-auto-snap:hourly-2009-12-22-11:00
me@nfsclient:~$ ls -l.zfs/snapshot/zfs-auto-snap:hourly-2009-12-22-11:00/...my homedir contents from 11:00...
There's a lot of other stuff, but those are the high points. Using OpenSolaris was worth the pain because of the way ZFS is integrated into the management framework. I don't believe that NFS exports and iSCSI target mangement are integrated into ZFS on the BSD ports, but I could be wrong.
That's my experience. True ZFS/Solaris zealots will go on and on about data integrity and... ? I dunno what else. Compatibility with older releases? Maybe with real Solaris, but OpenSolaris threw all that out anyhow. I wouldn't recommend (Open)Solaris for small systems with a disk or two, unless you're the sort of person who jams tacks under your fingernails for fun.
First, because farmers can't use certain very safe and developed pesticides, they have to use older and much more toxic varieties. Not to mention the actual amount of pesticides residue you eat a year has less cancerogenic substances than a cup of coffee. The thing is, the human body is very resilient and such exposure just doesn't matter.
Care to provide any supporting information for your assertion that organic farmers use "older and much more toxic" pesticides? Talk about pure bullshit...
As for the issue of pesticide residue, I'm sure that the amount of pesticide residue for a given piece of produce usually falls below some FDA threshold, and I'm sure that washing produce helps even more. The point I was trying to make, though, was not that pesticides are eeeeevil. They have their place in agriculture, but there is growing evidence that they are being overused. In short, heavy use of pesticides (and fertilizers) is not sustainable agriculture.
When you need to dose the shit out of your plants (killing pollenating insects and doing other harm to the biosphere) to keep them from being eaten alive, you're doing it wrong. Your crops are too dense. When you need to pour on the fertilizer to make up for the fact that you've pulled all the nutrients out of the soil, you're doing it wrong. It's not sustainable. You're reliant on Monsanto for your engineered seed + RoundUp and Saudi Arabia for your petro-based fertilizers.
My concern is not based in some wooly-headed "o noes chemicals" fear. I would sign up to have a neighborhood-sized pebble-bed nuke plant next to my backyard if I could. I just believe that we can choose better ways to do things.
Actually, organic foods would definitely taste better when you're feeling morally superior. However you cannot taste the difference in a double-blinded test. Especially because YMMV, and the big problem to discerning the difference in taste is that when you *know* you're getting organic you attribute any goodness as organic, and when you *know* you're getting non-organic for all untastyness ou blame the non-organic origin of the food. You don't get better nutritional value, and especially for your money it's quite a bummer. Just buy better beef without regard of it being free-range or not.
If you don't eat junk food, then you'll get 99% of the health benefits of any food switch. Last 1% you can get if you have a local farmer that supplies you with good food every day, but that's practically impossible.
As I thought I made clear in my original post, my motivation for buying Organic food is not specifically for a perceived superiority in taste. High-quality produce is high-quality produce regardless of whether or not it's Organic. Meat, on the other hand, is a whole other ball of wax.
As an example, the "free range" chicken breasts I buy are far and away superior in taste and texture to the premium conventional breasts I buy every once in a while (depending on which grocery I get to). I usually make a chicken vindaloo several times a month (sometimes twice a week if we're fixated), and my wife can always tell when I've bought the Perdue chicken. I'd be willing to believe that it's simply a matter of freshness, but given the consistent discrepancy I'm not so sure. I know that often the factory chicken producers inject their meat with saline to plump it up, so maybe that's it... Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that one set of chickens is crammed into a pen so small they can't turn around and fed growth hormones their whole (short) lives, and the others are allowed to develop somewhat normally. I dunno. I don't really care -- I'm willing to pay more for chicken that tastes good.
As for steak... Have you ever had real grass-fed steak? The marbling is totally different. There's tons more flavor without needing to dress up the meat. If you haven't
Start out your presentation stating that you're willing to dive as low as the executives ask you to but you're going to give them a high level view.
This is a really REALLY important point for just about anyone, really. I suppose it's a rehash of the old aphorism: "Know your audience." It took me a while, but eventually I learned that most people (even technical people) really don't care that much about the gory details and supporting data. Boil it all down into factoids and front-load your presentation, email, whatever with the simple stuff. If people want more, they'll ask for it.
Really, it works. And it often leads to quicker meetings. You have to be able to back up your factoids with real data, of course, but over time people will learn to trust your high-level analysis and not ask for more (unless you're awful at it, in which case you've got other problems).
4. Learn to cook, because you'll learn to love food, you'll learn to actually taste things for flavours and recalibrate your palate for texture, flavour, spice, rather than sweet/salty/fatty and flavourless shite which is what contemporary palates have adapted to. You need food to live, and paradoxically it'll slowly kill you if you get it wrong.
Speaking as someone who never cooked anything more complicated than an omelette until I got married, I have to point out that it can be overwhelming to start. I married a half-italian woman who also works full-time. After we started a family, those two factors contributed toward me taking over for dinner duties and really putting effort into it. Over the past six years, I've found that I really enjoy the whole process, from selecting ingredients through savoring a meal that I made myself. Sure, it eats an hour or two of my day, but I can listen to NPR and drink wine while I'm doing it. If you don't have family responsibilities forcing you to take charge of your food, find some other motivation...
If nothing else, going through the process of selecting fresh ingredients, preparing them, and assembling them into a meal really makes it very difficult to ever rationalize eating crap "food" that comes out of containers. Unfortunately, it also resets one's standards for what makes an excellent restaurant meal. I know that I can cook tasty thai, indian, italian, french whatever stuff at home and therefore I'm not impressed when restaurants throw a bunch of stuff on a plate and charge $30 for an entree.
7. Organic food (when you can find it cheapish). Free range meat (compulsory). Before you roll your eyes, give it a chance. From my experience, organic food tastes better, if that's it's only advantage, infact sometimes epicly better to the point of night and day difference. I can't think how many bad pieces of fruit I've gotten from the
It usually does taste much better, and it is common sense that eating foods which haven't been doused with pesticides is better for you. Irrespective of those arguments, the weight of which vary wildly from person to person, I think that eating certified Organic foods is morally superior. I know, that sounds awfully hippy-dippy, but what cemented it for me was an article which pointed out that organic foods cost more because they're more expensive to produce. Duh, but why? Well, it's because they're produced in a sustainable fashion. The farmers can't use pesticides, so crop density has to be lower. The farmers can't use certain classes of fertilizers, so the yields are smaller. The animals are free-range and not crammed full of growth hormones and antibiotics, so it takes longer to grow fewer of them.
The result of choosing organic produce and meats is that we eat less meat. In my mind, this is a good thing. As a society, we've allowed the agribusiness industry to externalize costs, which results in artificially reduced prices for their products. They don't account for the increased societal health costs of a corn- and meat-heavy diet. They don't account for the pollution that results from factory farming (Fertilizer Runoff, Pigshit Lagoons, etc.), and they're doing it all with nice juicy federal subsidies. What is wrong with us?? We're paying them (via taxes and at the grocery store) to make us less healthy!!
I know that many people don't have the luxury of spending more for their calories. My family is fortunate enough that we can. I look at it as an investment in our own health and as an investment in sustainable agriculture. I'm under no illusions that we'll ever make factory farming go away, but if enough informed consumers choose to pay more for better product, then we'll at least put pressure on Big Ag to clean themselves up.
I believe you might be referring to the Channeled Scablands in Washington State? I remember seeing a documentary about that. Interesting stuff. The research happened a bit later than the 1800s, unless you're referring to something else. More pictures and information.
HOWEVER, governments do slightly better than individual companies at regulating environmental damage. It's faint praise, but that's all I've got in stock.
Yes. I never claimed that government regulation was perfect, and in fact I am often frustrated by the incredible amount of waste and buffoonery that goes on in the sausage factory that is government.
As you admit, though, government has had a more positive role on policing the commons than any other single entity. As someone who lives in the extreme Northeastern US, I benefit greatly from the clean air laws that "shackle" hard-working coal factory owners across the midwest who are upwind from us. We still deal with increased levels of mercury in our water which has been shown to be a direct result of coal-based power generation, but it's not nearly as bad as it could be (and used to be!).
Have you ever visited a national park? You can thank the government for them. Think private industry would provide that kind of resource, even if it could? You're naive if you do.
Finally, I'll grant that congress-critters are often corrupt and in the pocket of various industries. The beauty (ok, that's the wrong word for it) of the system is that they're mostly in DIFFERENT pockets. There Is No Cabal. Unions vs. owners, Big Pharma vs. Big Insurance vs. AMA, etc. True, the little guy often gets short shrift, but it's the best system we've managed to come up with so far, human nature being what it is.
The environment is not king of everything, people.
Trying to understand your point, here, but all I'm taking away from the rest of your rant is that you hate the gub'mint sticking its big-city nose in your hard-working rural business.
Since you're seemingly intelligent enough to work a computer, I'll assume you can figure out how to research something called the tragedy of the commons, if you're not already familiar with the concept.
I'll grant that there are some "hollywood moonbats" who "worship the environment" or something... But in reality what's happening is that government is the only thing that can force people to avoid short-sighted total exploitation of non- or slowly-renewing resources. It doesn't always work out perfectly, but I have greater faith in science-based policy implemented by government organizations than I do in individual wisdom when it comes to shared resources.
You seem extremely hostile to the idea that government might make better long-term choices than individuals. What's your solution to the problems of overfishing, pollution, hill-cutting mining, clear-cut logging, etc? Let the market sort it out somehow? Trust that Jebus will come back soon so our children's children won't have to deal with a polluted world barren of species diversity? What?
IT was never good. What you really want to do is work for a software company. That way you work for the central product of the company rather than being the company's expense!
Bingo!
If you want to be valued by management as anything other than a necessary evil, then you absolutely MUST be directly connected to revenue generation. I realized this about 6 years ago and exited IT near the top (my own department with several minions, budget, etc.)... It was kinda fun, but I could see that doing it for another 20 years was going to be a drag. Clawing my way into middle management didn't really appeal, either.
As a (good?) sysadmin, I wrote lots of tools and libraries to automate stuff to make my life easier. So, I used connections and have reinvented myself as a developer (C and Ruby mostly). I'm back to where I was at the top in IT, salary-wise (large metro area, not west bumblefuck), and these days I suffer from too many options, rather than not enough. It's a good problem to have. Not having to wear an electronic leash anymore is pretty nice, too.
You'll note, on the page to which I helpfully linked, AT&T recommends the Global Data plan.
My thinking was that I'm already paying quite a premium for our iPhone plans, and paying that much more just to be able to check email or whatever was stupid. We were in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, so I knew we'd find wifi of some sort. This plan might not work so well in other places with less prevalence of open access points. YMMV VWP IANAL HAND
"Data usage pay-per-use rate is $.0195/KB, except in Canada where rate is $.015/KB."
2 cents/KB. That's $20 a MB!! Emails a few times and google maps here and there adds up to a few MB quickly.
As others have noted, there have been plenty of data-roaming horror stories, but I guess it still hasn't occurred to everyone to look this stuff up before traveling. My wife and I went to Scandanavia earlier this year, and we made sure to turn off data roaming and only used wifi when it was available. We also used occasional text messages to communicate with one another, rather than calls. $0.50/text, but still cheaper than calling.
So the choice seemed to be pretty and brain damaged, or ugly and smart.
I think they've redesigned the helmets since then.
I think the choice was more like "pretty, possibly brain-damaged, but ALIVE" and "face ground off by asphalt and DEAD".
I have personally witnessed two motorcycle accidents... In the first one, the guy dumped his bike while making a tight turn at a rain-slicked intersection. His (helmeted) head hit the pavement hard. Probably wouldn't have killed him, but he would definitely not have been getting up to ride after that without a helmet. Second one, the poor bastard hit a deer at about 70mph. Cut the thing right in two, and he slid on the highway for a while. I stopped to help him, and I saw up-close how badly chewed-up his helmet was. Lucky for him he wasn't one of those assholes who rides wearing nothing but shorts and a t-shirt. His gloved hands were a bit bloody, his knee was probably broken, and his helmet had been worn down in one spot so far that I could see the internal layers. But he was alive.
I know you were talking about older bike helmet designs, but I hate to see anything that could give no-helmet idiots more fuel for rationalizing their stupidity and selfishness.
Wow. If I had mod points today, I'd use them. Sadly, the best I can do is write this post with a recommendation that someone mod the parent up. It's quite a dense little rant, but I have to say that it's one of the most enlightening and insightful posts I've read on/. in a long time.
I keep trying to tell you that you are operating on faith because you have nothing to prove that god doesn't exist. That what religious faith is, a belief in something absent of fact or proof. You are willing to take a side in a debate that requires faith on way or another to participate.
It seems that we are talking past one another, or engaging in some weird exercise in pedantry. You keep claiming that my position on the question of God's (or leprechauns, etc.) existence is somehow based in faith. That I believe in their nonexistence, based on nothing other than my personal desire for my position to be true. If this were the case, I would agree with you that I am somehow a faithful atheist.
All that having been said, my position is not based in faith. It is based in pragmatism. I do not, in fact, believe, have faith, hope, pray, desire, etc. that God does not exist. I simply assume it is so, just as I assume likewise that neither leprechauns nor unicorns nor Zeus nor ghosts nor astral power centers exist. There is no evidence for these things, therefore I do not give any credence to the idea that they might exist. This is very, very different from a faith-based position, in that were solid evidence for their existence to be presented, I would happily change my outlook.
My original point, several posts ago, is that I will agree with anyone who says that it is possible that God exists. It IS possible! It's just unlikely, to the degree that it's irrelevant! Even if there is some higher power responsible for the creation of the universe, the idea that said power cares a rat's ass about whom I sleep with or whether or not I cook the flesh of a beast in its mother's milk or whether or not I attend church every Sunday is preposterous.
The reason I take a firm stance on this, rather than some wishy-washy "well, I don't really know, no one really knows, that nutjob who wants to stone my sister for having sex before she's married MIGHT be on to something, or at least it's OK in his religion" is that I am deeply troubled by the acceptance of a belief system which encourages uncritical acceptance of dogma and discourages logical evaluation of evidence. In the end, if one is not buying in to all of the baggage of a religion, then what's the fucking point? Either you believe that your god or gods want you do do shit to keep them happy and give you eternal life, or you don't. A vague belief in some higher power is harmless, but it's also useless.
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I have heard the argument "Even if it is designed for 'normals' then they come to me about purchasing decisions and I will tell them to keep away, Apple needs to cater to the geeks or no one will buy it!" - so other than excluding products that may work for the person offering advice, and showing a huge lack of understanding about what other people might want from a device, it's really not working anyway. I wonder how many "don't buy an iPhone/iPad/iPod" geeks really affected the sales of those devices.
The direction I thought you were going with this post but didn't, is that Apple has largely cut out the need for 'normals' to grovel for wisdom from geeks. What tech-savvy folks see has a restrictive, brain-dead set of choices and functionality is actually a carefully-chosen experience which is intended to satisfy the vast majority of Apple's target users. The end result is fewer opportunities for folks to get lost down ratholes of options which cause them to be overwhelmed and ask for help. Instead, they are able to figure things out fairly intuitively rather than needing to memorize paths or having to learn implementation details to understand why things are the way they are. They just are because The Jobs made them that way.
Personally, as a certified geek who makes his living banging away in a shell all day, I am not at all threatened by this direction in personal computing. In fact, I find it highly refreshing to be able to see my friends and family using high technology without any need to constantly ask me how to do mundane tasks. My wife has been using macs for over a decade, as do both of her parents. I've gotten more phone calls for help with setting up and using the A/V equipment than computers (recently largely solved by getting them a Harmony remote).
Love or hate Apple, one has to admit that they have set the bar quite high for making technology accessible to 'normals'.
Now, to head off the trolls, yes I am now going to go put on a beret and fellate my Apple-branded pink unicorn while it sips a latte.
I am not saying the school administration should have coddled me etc. However they ABSOLUTELY should not have come into the fight on the side of the bullies. Looking back on all of the difficulties I went through as a child, this is the only thing that still makes me angry.
I apologize for what was a bit of wine-induced insensitivity. It sounds as if you had a really hard time of it due to bullies and clueless administrators, and I sympathize as someone who has long suffered from anxiety and insecurity.
My intent wasn't really to undermine your experiences, but to hijack your post to further my agenda of martial arts and general physical fitness as being a great way for males to experience the full range of their genetic potential. Or something like that.
I just wish I'd discovered the confidence-building experiences of martial arts and strength training when I was young and impressionable. I think I would have been a happier person, and I think that a lot of other guys suffer from social castration in our female-focused modern western societies. Don't get me wrong... I understand that this social model is more stable and generally better for the species; it just often leaves males aimless and impotent unless they're able to channel those energies effectively.
I was bullied once and (being the smaller and weaker kid) bit my attacker. The principal's approach was to bring out boxing gloves and to tell us to fight it out like men. I'm not joking......
I have to ask... Why is that such a bad thing?
Generally speaking, anyhow. I understand that you personally may not have been prepared for a physical fight against someone you perceived to be bigger and stronger, but I see this as a problem with our modern society. Males are effectively neutered in Western society. Evolution has bred us to be muscular and twitchy, and yet we are expected to always be thoughtful and ... soft.
I was not a jock in high school. I did play soccer in middle school and did field/track in 9th grade, but nothing after that. It's not until the past 10 years that I've discovered that I was missing out. And for the past two years I've been doing Systema... It's totally changed my perception of the world. I feel that kids these days (gerroff mah lawn!) are missing out by not being physically active, and in particular they don't benefit from any martial arts. In the days of yore kids would have fights to settle spats, and it taught everyone their own limits as well as the usefulness (and uselessness in some situations) of fighting as conflict resolution. These days, fighting will get you detention or worse (a trip to the police station for popping some jerk in the mouth?)
This leads to seriously screwed-up kids with bottled emotions who decide that their only option is to come to school heavily armed and shoot the crap out of everyone. That's not right.
Let kids settle things out on the schoolyard. They'll learn a lot more from it than if we wait until they bring a bomb to school.
Oy WILL kill yew!
Hmm. The plutonium-based design was tested, but not the U-235 design. Should have read the entire entry. Fascinating, scary stuff.
He goes into the strangeness of the U.S. never testing the uranium bomb before actually dropping it on Japan
Eh?
What was the Trinity Test then?
Oh, you... With your "logic" and "facts". Way to ruin a rant, Pointdexter.
I grabbed a Samsung BD-P2500 around a year ago. Kinda wishing I'd waited another 6 months or so, but I wanted to stop watching Netflix on the xbox360 (all that electricity was mostly being wasted as heat and shortening the MTBRROD).
Anyhow, we canceled cable altogether last month. I built an attic antenna for OTA HDTV but haven't bothered to put together a recorder for that content. Mostly we use OTA for football and PBS stuff like NOVA. The rest of our content comes from Netflix, MS (via Live), and iTunes (via a macbook that is connected with an HDMI adapter). The main obstacle we had to overcome was the irrational resistance to purchasing content which had previously been "free".
I'm convinced that a la carte programming will the the norm in less than 10 years... Either by per-episode payments or via a subscription model. Content providers will have to work harder to find money to fund new programs, but I'm sure they'll figure it out. Broadcast TV (and radio) are going to have a harder and harder time competing as technology for accessing the long tail becomes easier and easier for average consumers to use. Hell, my wife's parents have been streaming content from Netflix since I bought them a Roku box last xmas... They're into their 70s and took to it very quickly.
ZFS is really awesome. Sadly, it's saddled with a lot of painful baggage in the form of Solaris/*BSD, so it's a big balancing act between ZFS and everything else.
Why is ZFS awesome? From an administration point of view, it makes managing large amounts of storage ridiculously easy. I recently acquired a couple of secondhand Sunfire x4500s (aka "Thumper"), each of which has 48 250GB drives. The next gen box (x4540, "Thor") has 48 2TB drives (!!). I briefly considered using Linux with MD/LVM to manage all of this, but having done a lot with MD/LVM in the past I knew I was looking at a world of pain in terms of flexibility and ongoing maintenance. I figured that all the ZFS fanboys might be onto something, so I grabbed OpenSolaris 2009.06 and threw it on there.
Ok, well, "threw it on there" is a bit of an oversimplification. I'll spare you all the nonsense involved, some of which was due to ignorance on my part, some of which was due to the fact that the OpenSolaris people have inexplicably chosen to try and out-Ubuntu Ubuntu and make OpenSolaris a killer desktop OS or something. There is no official text-based install, for example... Great fun to install from 2500 miles away over SSH. ;P
To keep this simple, after all the pain of getting OpenSolaris installed and then experimenting with different layouts, I now have this:
root@host:~# zfs list tank /tank
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
tank 321G 7.68T 58.5K
What can I do with it? I can create new NFS shares:
root@host:~# zfs create -osharenfs=on tank/www
I can create volumes (block devices created from ZFS pools) and share via iSCSI:
root@host:~# zfs create -s -V16G -o shareiscsi=on tank/vol/build_centos5.4-x86_64
Every one of these new filesystems/volumes is automatically snapshotted on an hourly/daily/weekly/monthly basis, and the snapshots are available via NFS. This is really awesome when it comes to home directories...
me@nfsclient:~$ ls -l .zfs/snapshot ...
drwxr-xr-x 54 me users 83 2009-12-22 06:56 zfs-auto-snap:hourly-2009-12-22-11:00
me@nfsclient:~$ ls -l .zfs/snapshot/zfs-auto-snap:hourly-2009-12-22-11:00/ ...my homedir contents from 11:00...
There's a lot of other stuff, but those are the high points. Using OpenSolaris was worth the pain because of the way ZFS is integrated into the management framework. I don't believe that NFS exports and iSCSI target mangement are integrated into ZFS on the BSD ports, but I could be wrong.
That's my experience. True ZFS/Solaris zealots will go on and on about data integrity and ... ? I dunno what else. Compatibility with older releases? Maybe with real Solaris, but OpenSolaris threw all that out anyhow. I wouldn't recommend (Open)Solaris for small systems with a disk or two, unless you're the sort of person who jams tacks under your fingernails for fun.
In that case though it wouldn't be you, it would just be someone who thinks he's you.
Ah, one of the great philosophical quandaries: Where Am I?
I read this in Philosophy 101 (15-odd years ago) and it blew my mind then. I like to re-read it every few years.
The movie is "Office Space", you retard.
(yeah, Powertalk!)
First, because farmers can't use certain very safe and developed pesticides, they have to use older and much more toxic varieties. Not to mention the actual amount of pesticides residue you eat a year has less cancerogenic substances than a cup of coffee. The thing is, the human body is very resilient and such exposure just doesn't matter.
Care to provide any supporting information for your assertion that organic farmers use "older and much more toxic" pesticides? Talk about pure bullshit...
Here's what the EPA has to say about it.
As for the issue of pesticide residue, I'm sure that the amount of pesticide residue for a given piece of produce usually falls below some FDA threshold, and I'm sure that washing produce helps even more. The point I was trying to make, though, was not that pesticides are eeeeevil. They have their place in agriculture, but there is growing evidence that they are being overused. In short, heavy use of pesticides (and fertilizers) is not sustainable agriculture.
When you need to dose the shit out of your plants (killing pollenating insects and doing other harm to the biosphere) to keep them from being eaten alive, you're doing it wrong. Your crops are too dense. When you need to pour on the fertilizer to make up for the fact that you've pulled all the nutrients out of the soil, you're doing it wrong. It's not sustainable. You're reliant on Monsanto for your engineered seed + RoundUp and Saudi Arabia for your petro-based fertilizers.
My concern is not based in some wooly-headed "o noes chemicals" fear. I would sign up to have a neighborhood-sized pebble-bed nuke plant next to my backyard if I could. I just believe that we can choose better ways to do things.
Actually, organic foods would definitely taste better when you're feeling morally superior. However you cannot taste the difference in a double-blinded test. Especially because YMMV, and the big problem to discerning the difference in taste is that when you *know* you're getting organic you attribute any goodness as organic, and when you *know* you're getting non-organic for all untastyness ou blame the non-organic origin of the food. You don't get better nutritional value, and especially for your money it's quite a bummer. Just buy better beef without regard of it being free-range or not.
If you don't eat junk food, then you'll get 99% of the health benefits of any food switch. Last 1% you can get if you have a local farmer that supplies you with good food every day, but that's practically impossible.
As I thought I made clear in my original post, my motivation for buying Organic food is not specifically for a perceived superiority in taste. High-quality produce is high-quality produce regardless of whether or not it's Organic. Meat, on the other hand, is a whole other ball of wax.
As an example, the "free range" chicken breasts I buy are far and away superior in taste and texture to the premium conventional breasts I buy every once in a while (depending on which grocery I get to). I usually make a chicken vindaloo several times a month (sometimes twice a week if we're fixated), and my wife can always tell when I've bought the Perdue chicken. I'd be willing to believe that it's simply a matter of freshness, but given the consistent discrepancy I'm not so sure. I know that often the factory chicken producers inject their meat with saline to plump it up, so maybe that's it... Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that one set of chickens is crammed into a pen so small they can't turn around and fed growth hormones their whole (short) lives, and the others are allowed to develop somewhat normally. I dunno. I don't really care -- I'm willing to pay more for chicken that tastes good.
As for steak... Have you ever had real grass-fed steak? The marbling is totally different. There's tons more flavor without needing to dress up the meat. If you haven't
Start out your presentation stating that you're willing to dive as low as the executives ask you to but you're going to give them a high level view.
This is a really REALLY important point for just about anyone, really. I suppose it's a rehash of the old aphorism: "Know your audience." It took me a while, but eventually I learned that most people (even technical people) really don't care that much about the gory details and supporting data. Boil it all down into factoids and front-load your presentation, email, whatever with the simple stuff. If people want more, they'll ask for it.
Really, it works. And it often leads to quicker meetings. You have to be able to back up your factoids with real data, of course, but over time people will learn to trust your high-level analysis and not ask for more (unless you're awful at it, in which case you've got other problems).
4. Learn to cook, because you'll learn to love food, you'll learn to actually taste things for flavours and recalibrate your palate for texture, flavour, spice, rather than sweet/salty/fatty and flavourless shite which is what contemporary palates have adapted to. You need food to live, and paradoxically it'll slowly kill you if you get it wrong.
Speaking as someone who never cooked anything more complicated than an omelette until I got married, I have to point out that it can be overwhelming to start. I married a half-italian woman who also works full-time. After we started a family, those two factors contributed toward me taking over for dinner duties and really putting effort into it. Over the past six years, I've found that I really enjoy the whole process, from selecting ingredients through savoring a meal that I made myself. Sure, it eats an hour or two of my day, but I can listen to NPR and drink wine while I'm doing it. If you don't have family responsibilities forcing you to take charge of your food, find some other motivation...
If nothing else, going through the process of selecting fresh ingredients, preparing them, and assembling them into a meal really makes it very difficult to ever rationalize eating crap "food" that comes out of containers. Unfortunately, it also resets one's standards for what makes an excellent restaurant meal. I know that I can cook tasty thai, indian, italian, french whatever stuff at home and therefore I'm not impressed when restaurants throw a bunch of stuff on a plate and charge $30 for an entree.
7. Organic food (when you can find it cheapish). Free range meat (compulsory). Before you roll your eyes, give it a chance. From my experience, organic food tastes better, if that's it's only advantage, infact sometimes epicly better to the point of night and day difference. I can't think how many bad pieces of fruit I've gotten from the
It usually does taste much better, and it is common sense that eating foods which haven't been doused with pesticides is better for you. Irrespective of those arguments, the weight of which vary wildly from person to person, I think that eating certified Organic foods is morally superior. I know, that sounds awfully hippy-dippy, but what cemented it for me was an article which pointed out that organic foods cost more because they're more expensive to produce. Duh, but why? Well, it's because they're produced in a sustainable fashion. The farmers can't use pesticides, so crop density has to be lower. The farmers can't use certain classes of fertilizers, so the yields are smaller. The animals are free-range and not crammed full of growth hormones and antibiotics, so it takes longer to grow fewer of them.
The result of choosing organic produce and meats is that we eat less meat. In my mind, this is a good thing. As a society, we've allowed the agribusiness industry to externalize costs, which results in artificially reduced prices for their products. They don't account for the increased societal health costs of a corn- and meat-heavy diet. They don't account for the pollution that results from factory farming (Fertilizer Runoff, Pigshit Lagoons, etc.), and they're doing it all with nice juicy federal subsidies. What is wrong with us?? We're paying them (via taxes and at the grocery store) to make us less healthy!!
I know that many people don't have the luxury of spending more for their calories. My family is fortunate enough that we can. I look at it as an investment in our own health and as an investment in sustainable agriculture. I'm under no illusions that we'll ever make factory farming go away, but if enough informed consumers choose to pay more for better product, then we'll at least put pressure on Big Ag to clean themselves up.
I believe you might be referring to the Channeled Scablands in Washington State? I remember seeing a documentary about that. Interesting stuff. The research happened a bit later than the 1800s, unless you're referring to something else. More pictures and information.
HOWEVER, governments do slightly better than individual companies at regulating environmental damage. It's faint praise, but that's all I've got in stock.
Yes. I never claimed that government regulation was perfect, and in fact I am often frustrated by the incredible amount of waste and buffoonery that goes on in the sausage factory that is government.
As you admit, though, government has had a more positive role on policing the commons than any other single entity. As someone who lives in the extreme Northeastern US, I benefit greatly from the clean air laws that "shackle" hard-working coal factory owners across the midwest who are upwind from us. We still deal with increased levels of mercury in our water which has been shown to be a direct result of coal-based power generation, but it's not nearly as bad as it could be (and used to be!).
Have you ever visited a national park? You can thank the government for them. Think private industry would provide that kind of resource, even if it could? You're naive if you do.
Finally, I'll grant that congress-critters are often corrupt and in the pocket of various industries. The beauty (ok, that's the wrong word for it) of the system is that they're mostly in DIFFERENT pockets. There Is No Cabal. Unions vs. owners, Big Pharma vs. Big Insurance vs. AMA, etc. True, the little guy often gets short shrift, but it's the best system we've managed to come up with so far, human nature being what it is.
Trying to understand your point, here, but all I'm taking away from the rest of your rant is that you hate the gub'mint sticking its big-city nose in your hard-working rural business.
Since you're seemingly intelligent enough to work a computer, I'll assume you can figure out how to research something called the tragedy of the commons, if you're not already familiar with the concept.
I'll grant that there are some "hollywood moonbats" who "worship the environment" or something... But in reality what's happening is that government is the only thing that can force people to avoid short-sighted total exploitation of non- or slowly-renewing resources. It doesn't always work out perfectly, but I have greater faith in science-based policy implemented by government organizations than I do in individual wisdom when it comes to shared resources.
You seem extremely hostile to the idea that government might make better long-term choices than individuals. What's your solution to the problems of overfishing, pollution, hill-cutting mining, clear-cut logging, etc? Let the market sort it out somehow? Trust that Jebus will come back soon so our children's children won't have to deal with a polluted world barren of species diversity? What?
<dr. nick>Inflammable means flammable?!? What a country!</dr. nick>
IT was never good. What you really want to do is work for a software company. That way you work for the central product of the company rather than being the company's expense!
Bingo!
If you want to be valued by management as anything other than a necessary evil, then you absolutely MUST be directly connected to revenue generation. I realized this about 6 years ago and exited IT near the top (my own department with several minions, budget, etc.)... It was kinda fun, but I could see that doing it for another 20 years was going to be a drag. Clawing my way into middle management didn't really appeal, either.
As a (good?) sysadmin, I wrote lots of tools and libraries to automate stuff to make my life easier. So, I used connections and have reinvented myself as a developer (C and Ruby mostly). I'm back to where I was at the top in IT, salary-wise (large metro area, not west bumblefuck), and these days I suffer from too many options, rather than not enough. It's a good problem to have. Not having to wear an electronic leash anymore is pretty nice, too.
You'll note, on the page to which I helpfully linked, AT&T recommends the Global Data plan.
My thinking was that I'm already paying quite a premium for our iPhone plans, and paying that much more just to be able to check email or whatever was stupid. We were in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, so I knew we'd find wifi of some sort. This plan might not work so well in other places with less prevalence of open access points. YMMV VWP IANAL HAND
AT&T Roaming Info:
"Data usage pay-per-use rate is $.0195/KB , except in Canada where rate is $.015/KB."
2 cents/KB. That's $20 a MB!! Emails a few times and google maps here and there adds up to a few MB quickly.
As others have noted, there have been plenty of data-roaming horror stories, but I guess it still hasn't occurred to everyone to look this stuff up before traveling. My wife and I went to Scandanavia earlier this year, and we made sure to turn off data roaming and only used wifi when it was available. We also used occasional text messages to communicate with one another, rather than calls. $0.50/text, but still cheaper than calling.
So the choice seemed to be pretty and brain damaged, or ugly and smart.
I think they've redesigned the helmets since then.
I think the choice was more like "pretty, possibly brain-damaged, but ALIVE" and "face ground off by asphalt and DEAD".
I have personally witnessed two motorcycle accidents... In the first one, the guy dumped his bike while making a tight turn at a rain-slicked intersection. His (helmeted) head hit the pavement hard. Probably wouldn't have killed him, but he would definitely not have been getting up to ride after that without a helmet. Second one, the poor bastard hit a deer at about 70mph. Cut the thing right in two, and he slid on the highway for a while. I stopped to help him, and I saw up-close how badly chewed-up his helmet was. Lucky for him he wasn't one of those assholes who rides wearing nothing but shorts and a t-shirt. His gloved hands were a bit bloody, his knee was probably broken, and his helmet had been worn down in one spot so far that I could see the internal layers. But he was alive.
I know you were talking about older bike helmet designs, but I hate to see anything that could give no-helmet idiots more fuel for rationalizing their stupidity and selfishness.
Wow. If I had mod points today, I'd use them. Sadly, the best I can do is write this post with a recommendation that someone mod the parent up. It's quite a dense little rant, but I have to say that it's one of the most enlightening and insightful posts I've read on /. in a long time.
Thanks, AC (now git off mah lawn!).
I keep trying to tell you that you are operating on faith because you have nothing to prove that god doesn't exist. That what religious faith is, a belief in something absent of fact or proof. You are willing to take a side in a debate that requires faith on way or another to participate.
It seems that we are talking past one another, or engaging in some weird exercise in pedantry. You keep claiming that my position on the question of God's (or leprechauns, etc.) existence is somehow based in faith. That I believe in their nonexistence, based on nothing other than my personal desire for my position to be true. If this were the case, I would agree with you that I am somehow a faithful atheist.
All that having been said, my position is not based in faith. It is based in pragmatism. I do not, in fact, believe, have faith, hope, pray, desire, etc. that God does not exist. I simply assume it is so, just as I assume likewise that neither leprechauns nor unicorns nor Zeus nor ghosts nor astral power centers exist. There is no evidence for these things, therefore I do not give any credence to the idea that they might exist. This is very, very different from a faith-based position, in that were solid evidence for their existence to be presented, I would happily change my outlook.
My original point, several posts ago, is that I will agree with anyone who says that it is possible that God exists. It IS possible! It's just unlikely, to the degree that it's irrelevant! Even if there is some higher power responsible for the creation of the universe, the idea that said power cares a rat's ass about whom I sleep with or whether or not I cook the flesh of a beast in its mother's milk or whether or not I attend church every Sunday is preposterous.
The reason I take a firm stance on this, rather than some wishy-washy "well, I don't really know, no one really knows, that nutjob who wants to stone my sister for having sex before she's married MIGHT be on to something, or at least it's OK in his religion" is that I am deeply troubled by the acceptance of a belief system which encourages uncritical acceptance of dogma and discourages logical evaluation of evidence. In the end, if one is not buying in to all of the baggage of a religion, then what's the fucking point? Either you believe that your god or gods want you do do shit to keep them happy and give you eternal life, or you don't. A vague belief in some higher power is harmless, but it's also useless.
Yes, because we all know everybody has a cow in their back yard and a generator in their basement.
I have a generator in my basement (well, my garage, anyhow). And my next-door neighbor is kind of a cow...