Bingo. Of course "obese" is a worthless word at this point. It as been solidly linked to BMI which is a total joke. Heck, I was "obese" just this last weekend, yet somehow you could see every muscle of my ripped legs, and the majority of my stomach muscles. Just to show how stupid BMI and the new definition of "obese" is, here is what obese can look like.
The lack of good studies is because these studies are almost always done for religious reasons. Group X finds activity Y to be immoral, so they conduct a "study" that "proves" their point. As you point out, even when there is a correlation, they never try to hunt down or isolate the cause.
Or just start getting the municipalities to run a pipe from the homes to a central hub. Yes I mean a pipe as in a cylinder of metal, plastic, or concrete. It would only have to be the size of your sewer line to allow for a dozen different providers. Municipalities are already experienced in the low tech job os running pipes to people's homes, and around cities. I know that my home has three different pipes running into it now. A forth pipe wouldn't be a big deal.
You can bet if all a startup had to do was pull a wire through a pipe to hook up new customers, we would see a lot more competition.
I have to say that I must be doing pretty good. I just did a speed test from my $60 Comcast Business account, and I am getting 23.11 Mb/s down and 6.44 Mb/s up with a 12ms ping from Santa Rosa, CA to San Francisco. This is with 5 static IP addresses, no throttling, and no port blocking. Apparently, if you call the Comcast Business line, you can skip most of the Comcast problems for an extra $10 or $15 dollars a month.
That being said, when I got this account, I was switching away from a local ISP going over AT&T's DSL at 1.2Mbs up/128Kbs up for $60/Month, and I had multi-day outages most months. I had considered uVerse, but AT&T refused to install it unless I canceled my account with their local competitor.
You might want to look into the power usage of that old machine. If it is running 24/7 at 100 watts average, you will be using 876 kwh per year. If like me, you are paying ~$.32 at the top scale of your power use, that equals. $280 a year in electric costs. Compared to $175 for the 20 watt Revo. You just might be able to pay off buying a smaller, quiter, more visually suited system in ~18 months.
That doesn't solve your s-video problem, but you should be able to get a converter for ~$50. As for the OS, who cares if it comes with an OS or not if the price is lower than other options.
So, your old PC might be the best choice for you, but if you calculate in the cost of electricity, you might be surprised to find that a new PC is competitively priced to keeping the old one running.
For an HTPC, I simply bought a single core Acer Revo. My TV is 720p. The Revo plays all the content I throw at it with no problems, came with a Windows XP license, and runs XBMC for $179 brand new. It is also extremely quite, very small, has HDMI output for A/V and only draws 20 watts at full power. This machine also works nice as a fileserver. Since it is always on anyway, the files are always accessible, and there are plenty of USB external cases that are attractive enough that they don't look horrible sitting next to it.
As for it's gaming abilities... It certainly won't handle newer titles, but it does handle older games surprisingly well. I would assume a newer dual core Revo would handle them better.
That is a wierd thing that goes on with people. Not just when it comes to computers, but across the board. This strange idea that somehow, all other things being equal, being incapable of doing something is better than just choosing not to do the same thing. So, people will actively seek out and buy products with less capability for more money, so that they can be incapable of doing X, and won't have to just choose not to do X, or just ignore X all together.
In my home, I run Ubuntu, Windows, and OSX (as well as some older ones just for retro fun). I can say out of the three modern OSes, OSX is definitely the least intuitive. When I bought the Mac, I was shocked at how poor the UI was. It's not that it is unusable, and by 1990 standards, it is quite good. It's just that for decades, the meme that Macs had the best UI had me convinced that it would be at least on par with Windows and Linux.
The inconsistencies and unitativeness are numerous, but the two most glaring are the fact that a green plus icon will make your windows smaller...sometimes. And, that a red X icon will leave the application running in the taskbar...sometimes.
Ok, so after going through a bunch of documentation, and editing config files by hand with a text editor on the command line, I'll ask. How do I make only my company's IP addresses run across my VPN connection on the MAC, while having everything else not go through the VPN without hand editing arcane text files? I know there is the "Send all traffic over VPN" check box, but that control whether all traffic is sent over the VPN.
Mac is for the most part, in the same boat as Linux. Basic usage that would satisfy 90% of the population works just fine out of the box. Anything beyond that is going to be a bit trickier.
Using the 'Universal Key' (also known as a rock) on the sliding glass door in the back yard will get a crook into most homes. Heck, a battery operated reciprocal saw will take you right through the wall of most homes.
Ok, how about if we change "Flash" to "C64", "Atari 2600", "NES", or "Genesis". There are a ton systems that both allow joystick/gamepads, and have 100% reusable code. for the games.
It is indeed a balancing act. The smart developer, and smart companies know when to choose one path or the other. Heck, sometimes it is more efficient to write a slow bloated version today, making you enough more efficient over the manual process that you now have the time and budget to rewrite it faster and more efficient. There will always be overlap, and situations where one method or the other is preferred. Right now, we are still moving a lot of manual process to computers. This means that the efficiency gained by moving ten manual processes to computers in a bloated way is generally more efficient than moving 1 processes in a lean, highly optimized way.
I don't think the balance will fall on this line forever, but that is where it is now.
Your right. If I needed a soup cube delivered 20 miles away, and there was a perfectly good gassed up flatbed truck sitting outside for you to drive, and you chose to walk instead because using the flatbed is overkill, I would fire you. I do development in Lotus Notes. It is a bit of a hog, and certainly not the fastest running database on the planet. What it does do is allow me to write complicated secure replicated groupware applications at a speed that blows most other development environments out of the water. We have mainframe programmers at my work as well. I wouldn't dream of trying to put many of their applications into Notes, but many of the applications that I roll out in a month or two, would literally take them years to write. Applications that I roll out in a week would take them 8 months to a year. Frequently, if they were to write the applications instead of me, the need for the application would have already passed before they could even finish it.
That being said, I believe that efficient programming will return. We are getting diminishing returns on hardware. Users and businesses still want more from their computers. If that doesn't come from hardware, it will have to come from better software.
Software bloat was a good thing. It still is. We are in it's day. It's days are numbered though. I don't know when we will hit our heads on the upper bounds of hardware, but it will likely happen. When it does, there will be a whole generation of software development that is centered around optimization. New developers will wonder at the 'stupid' mistakes of the last generation, and the older developers will lament 'the good old days' of being able to focus first on business needs instead of code optimizations.
And that is why our education system sucks and is not going to get better. Criticizing teachers is considered taboo. Anyone who does it is considered a "jackass". It doesn't matter if they are right or not. As long as society takes a "teachers have the most important job in the world", and "your a jackass if you don't say they live under the poverty level and work 80 hours a week, 53 weeks a year", our public education system will never get better.
You think you are defending teachers while you unwittingly prove my point. I feel bad for your wife, if she teaches at the intellectual level and honesty that you defender her. Even more so, I feel sorry for her students.
Teaching pays an average amount. Not a lot, and definitely not a little. When the numbers are laid if front of people they start running to arguments about how much schooling the teacher has, or how much overtime the teachers work (which is another lie in teaching).
You showcase your ignorance. Any teacher is going to put a lot of hours in at home, making tests, grading papers, creating new lessons, doing committee work. I know because my wife teaches high school English and I have an aunt and a couple friends who teach. They also don't get the whole summer off - there are committee meetings to go to, inservice days to attend, and they come in about a week before the students do to get their rooms prepped and learn about what new madness the administration and legislature have decided on.
They work much more than 8 hours a day, for a comparative pittance. Sure, they're paid more than J. Random Schmuck at McDonald's, but it's a job that requires a college degree and a certification. Still, my wife makes about $40k/yr on her eleventh year of teaching, which is only slightly more than I make fixing computers for not quite half as long, and I never take my work home with me.
Exactly as predicted.
It is amazing how every single teacher that I have know personally, has been so super efficient that they could finish thier jobs in a normal work day, but every teacher that I haven't know personally, somehow is dramatically less competent. I know it is theoretically possible that I somehow influence people around me to super human levels of efficiency just through my presence, but that seems a bit far fetched. I just have a hard time adding "giving teachers super human efficiency" to my list of super powers.
So, what was the implementation? I also happen to know that ATI was selling All-In-Wonder cards before the Tivo, and they could record and playback at the same time.
Bzzt. The rock argument is for the stupid. As a human, you may have a right to marry a rock, but the rock has no right to marry you. When being a rock defines you as a person with rights, then marring a rock SHOULD be legal. Until then, it isn't. Marriage isn't the issue in either case. The subjects having rights is. So, which of the gay men do you not believe has the right to get married?
You touch on the BIGGEST lie in education. Teachers are not under paid. In most places in the country, the average teachers salary yearly is just slightly below the average salary in the area, and the average hourly pay of teachers is above the average of the general public. Teaching pays an average amount. Not a lot, and definitely not a little. When the numbers are laid if front of people they start running to arguments about how much schooling the teacher has, or how much overtime the teachers work (which is another lie in teaching). My wife spent many years working in lending. She reviewed a lot of public school teachers W-2s from many different states, what she found was that teachers do just fine in the salary department.
Of course, we should be asking how good of teachers they are if they cannot handle the simple math it requires to see that they make decent money.
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Bingo. Of course "obese" is a worthless word at this point. It as been solidly linked to BMI which is a total joke. Heck, I was "obese" just this last weekend, yet somehow you could see every muscle of my ripped legs, and the majority of my stomach muscles. Just to show how stupid BMI and the new definition of "obese" is, here is what obese can look like.
obesity is caused by taking in more energy than you burn, period!
What is it like living without an anus?
The lack of good studies is because these studies are almost always done for religious reasons. Group X finds activity Y to be immoral, so they conduct a "study" that "proves" their point. As you point out, even when there is a correlation, they never try to hunt down or isolate the cause.
Don't forget to add super hot college chicks to the list of distractions....
Or just start getting the municipalities to run a pipe from the homes to a central hub. Yes I mean a pipe as in a cylinder of metal, plastic, or concrete. It would only have to be the size of your sewer line to allow for a dozen different providers. Municipalities are already experienced in the low tech job os running pipes to people's homes, and around cities. I know that my home has three different pipes running into it now. A forth pipe wouldn't be a big deal.
You can bet if all a startup had to do was pull a wire through a pipe to hook up new customers, we would see a lot more competition.
Make it "NewEgg sent me a counterfeit Intel processor and all I got was this a replacement and a stupid T-shirt", and it might just be worth while.
I have to say that I must be doing pretty good. I just did a speed test from my $60 Comcast Business account, and I am getting 23.11 Mb/s down and 6.44 Mb/s up with a 12ms ping from Santa Rosa, CA to San Francisco. This is with 5 static IP addresses, no throttling, and no port blocking. Apparently, if you call the Comcast Business line, you can skip most of the Comcast problems for an extra $10 or $15 dollars a month.
That being said, when I got this account, I was switching away from a local ISP going over AT&T's DSL at 1.2Mbs up/128Kbs up for $60/Month, and I had multi-day outages most months. I had considered uVerse, but AT&T refused to install it unless I canceled my account with their local competitor.
You might want to look into the power usage of that old machine. If it is running 24/7 at 100 watts average, you will be using 876 kwh per year. If like me, you are paying ~$.32 at the top scale of your power use, that equals. $280 a year in electric costs. Compared to $175 for the 20 watt Revo. You just might be able to pay off buying a smaller, quiter, more visually suited system in ~18 months.
That doesn't solve your s-video problem, but you should be able to get a converter for ~$50. As for the OS, who cares if it comes with an OS or not if the price is lower than other options.
So, your old PC might be the best choice for you, but if you calculate in the cost of electricity, you might be surprised to find that a new PC is competitively priced to keeping the old one running.
No, what was being sold in 1985 was the full Windows package. It was not a stripped down crippled version. So, the fair comparison would be with Windows 7 Ultimate at almost $300. That while everyone else in the industry has had dramatic price drops.
For an HTPC, I simply bought a single core Acer Revo. My TV is 720p. The Revo plays all the content I throw at it with no problems, came with a Windows XP license, and runs XBMC for $179 brand new. It is also extremely quite, very small, has HDMI output for A/V and only draws 20 watts at full power. This machine also works nice as a fileserver. Since it is always on anyway, the files are always accessible, and there are plenty of USB external cases that are attractive enough that they don't look horrible sitting next to it.
As for it's gaming abilities... It certainly won't handle newer titles, but it does handle older games surprisingly well. I would assume a newer dual core Revo would handle them better.
That is a wierd thing that goes on with people. Not just when it comes to computers, but across the board. This strange idea that somehow, all other things being equal, being incapable of doing something is better than just choosing not to do the same thing. So, people will actively seek out and buy products with less capability for more money, so that they can be incapable of doing X, and won't have to just choose not to do X, or just ignore X all together.
In my home, I run Ubuntu, Windows, and OSX (as well as some older ones just for retro fun). I can say out of the three modern OSes, OSX is definitely the least intuitive. When I bought the Mac, I was shocked at how poor the UI was. It's not that it is unusable, and by 1990 standards, it is quite good. It's just that for decades, the meme that Macs had the best UI had me convinced that it would be at least on par with Windows and Linux.
The inconsistencies and unitativeness are numerous, but the two most glaring are the fact that a green plus icon will make your windows smaller...sometimes. And, that a red X icon will leave the application running in the taskbar...sometimes.
Ok, so after going through a bunch of documentation, and editing config files by hand with a text editor on the command line, I'll ask. How do I make only my company's IP addresses run across my VPN connection on the MAC, while having everything else not go through the VPN without hand editing arcane text files? I know there is the "Send all traffic over VPN" check box, but that control whether all traffic is sent over the VPN.
Mac is for the most part, in the same boat as Linux. Basic usage that would satisfy 90% of the population works just fine out of the box. Anything beyond that is going to be a bit trickier.
Using the 'Universal Key' (also known as a rock) on the sliding glass door in the back yard will get a crook into most homes. Heck, a battery operated reciprocal saw will take you right through the wall of most homes.
Ok, how about if we change "Flash" to "C64", "Atari 2600", "NES", or "Genesis". There are a ton systems that both allow joystick/gamepads, and have 100% reusable code. for the games.
It is indeed a balancing act. The smart developer, and smart companies know when to choose one path or the other. Heck, sometimes it is more efficient to write a slow bloated version today, making you enough more efficient over the manual process that you now have the time and budget to rewrite it faster and more efficient. There will always be overlap, and situations where one method or the other is preferred. Right now, we are still moving a lot of manual process to computers. This means that the efficiency gained by moving ten manual processes to computers in a bloated way is generally more efficient than moving 1 processes in a lean, highly optimized way.
I don't think the balance will fall on this line forever, but that is where it is now.
Your right. If I needed a soup cube delivered 20 miles away, and there was a perfectly good gassed up flatbed truck sitting outside for you to drive, and you chose to walk instead because using the flatbed is overkill, I would fire you. I do development in Lotus Notes. It is a bit of a hog, and certainly not the fastest running database on the planet. What it does do is allow me to write complicated secure replicated groupware applications at a speed that blows most other development environments out of the water. We have mainframe programmers at my work as well. I wouldn't dream of trying to put many of their applications into Notes, but many of the applications that I roll out in a month or two, would literally take them years to write. Applications that I roll out in a week would take them 8 months to a year. Frequently, if they were to write the applications instead of me, the need for the application would have already passed before they could even finish it.
That being said, I believe that efficient programming will return. We are getting diminishing returns on hardware. Users and businesses still want more from their computers. If that doesn't come from hardware, it will have to come from better software.
Software bloat was a good thing. It still is. We are in it's day. It's days are numbered though. I don't know when we will hit our heads on the upper bounds of hardware, but it will likely happen. When it does, there will be a whole generation of software development that is centered around optimization. New developers will wonder at the 'stupid' mistakes of the last generation, and the older developers will lament 'the good old days' of being able to focus first on business needs instead of code optimizations.
Have you seen the condition of their used games? If you got a used game from them, you would have noticed.
Again...
I feel bad for your wife, if she teaches at the intellectual level and honesty that you defender her. Even more so, I feel sorry for her students.
Your intellect is dizzying! Teachers must be underpaid and over worked because I am a jackass. It all makes sense now!
And that is why our education system sucks and is not going to get better. Criticizing teachers is considered taboo. Anyone who does it is considered a "jackass". It doesn't matter if they are right or not. As long as society takes a "teachers have the most important job in the world", and "your a jackass if you don't say they live under the poverty level and work 80 hours a week, 53 weeks a year", our public education system will never get better.
You think you are defending teachers while you unwittingly prove my point. I feel bad for your wife, if she teaches at the intellectual level and honesty that you defender her. Even more so, I feel sorry for her students.
Teaching pays an average amount. Not a lot, and definitely not a little. When the numbers are laid if front of people they start running to arguments about how much schooling the teacher has, or how much overtime the teachers work (which is another lie in teaching).
You showcase your ignorance. Any teacher is going to put a lot of hours in at home, making tests, grading papers, creating new lessons, doing committee work. I know because my wife teaches high school English and I have an aunt and a couple friends who teach. They also don't get the whole summer off - there are committee meetings to go to, inservice days to attend, and they come in about a week before the students do to get their rooms prepped and learn about what new madness the administration and legislature have decided on.
They work much more than 8 hours a day, for a comparative pittance. Sure, they're paid more than J. Random Schmuck at McDonald's, but it's a job that requires a college degree and a certification. Still, my wife makes about $40k/yr on her eleventh year of teaching, which is only slightly more than I make fixing computers for not quite half as long, and I never take my work home with me.
Exactly as predicted.
It is amazing how every single teacher that I have know personally, has been so super efficient that they could finish thier jobs in a normal work day, but every teacher that I haven't know personally, somehow is dramatically less competent. I know it is theoretically possible that I somehow influence people around me to super human levels of efficiency just through my presence, but that seems a bit far fetched. I just have a hard time adding "giving teachers super human efficiency" to my list of super powers.
So, what was the implementation? I also happen to know that ATI was selling All-In-Wonder cards before the Tivo, and they could record and playback at the same time.
Bzzt. The rock argument is for the stupid. As a human, you may have a right to marry a rock, but the rock has no right to marry you. When being a rock defines you as a person with rights, then marring a rock SHOULD be legal. Until then, it isn't. Marriage isn't the issue in either case. The subjects having rights is. So, which of the gay men do you not believe has the right to get married?
You touch on the BIGGEST lie in education. Teachers are not under paid. In most places in the country, the average teachers salary yearly is just slightly below the average salary in the area, and the average hourly pay of teachers is above the average of the general public. Teaching pays an average amount. Not a lot, and definitely not a little. When the numbers are laid if front of people they start running to arguments about how much schooling the teacher has, or how much overtime the teachers work (which is another lie in teaching). My wife spent many years working in lending. She reviewed a lot of public school teachers W-2s from many different states, what she found was that teachers do just fine in the salary department.
Of course, we should be asking how good of teachers they are if they cannot handle the simple math it requires to see that they make decent money.