Yet people still didn't figure there was anything interesting about Ballmer selling off $1.3B worth of MS stock with plans for a total $2B. I'm telling you, there's more to it than tax prep. You don't after something like 6 years make your first sell off of MS stock in excess of 1/8 of your total holdings for tax reasons. There's some trouble going on and they're having a hard time digging themselves out. Win Vista was the first real sign, now we're seeing even more. There was a bit too much complacency while various trends were progressing all around them. Now there's some serious catch up to do and they don't seem to be doing it very well. Kin, Windows Phone 7, Azure, now evidently Windows 7/Server 2008. I think we'll see some rather interesting goings on in the coming year or two with Microsoft.
I think we aren't necessarily speaking about the same type of people. I am not suggesting that people ought to fit the supermodel body type. For the average person that would be unhealthy and next to impossible to maintain. Regardless of what our culture says a modest amount of padding isn't necessarily a medical problem. It sounds as if you believe I'm lumping them and what physicians call obese and more specifically morbidly obese in the same basket. I'm definitely not. I am referring to people whose excessive body fat has a negative impact on their health.
Classic "dieting" as you seem to be referring by calorie restricted starvation diets are definitely unsustainable, definitely unhealthy and for the reasons you cite. However the simple act of switching to "quality" calories and not eating for the simple reason that it makes you feel good will yield significant improvements in a persons health over the long term. Adding even modest exercise to that will dramatically improve that person's health and size. This is what I am referring to by multi-year turn around, in contrast to your suggested starvation diet of significant calorie restriction. It took years to pack it on, it will take a good long while straighten things out again. If the approach taken switches the body into "survival" mode through calorie conservation it's the wrong approach. I'm talking about changes no more drastic than swapping a Big Mac, fries, and a 32oz soda, for a pork chop, salad, bake potato, and a 12oz glass of unsweetened iced tea. That's less than half the calories yet equally filling and satiating. If you want ice cream, fine then have ice cream, but don't eat it immediately before bed and don't eat a full pint of Ben and Jerry's! Common sense, moderate eating, not starvation coupled with modest exercise. If people did this I guarantee there wouldn't be talk about obesity epidemics, and people living shorter lives than their parents.
I very much agree that the problem exists at a social/cultural level. The American culture is oriented towards unhealthy, low quality calories and excessive portion sizes.
A person's physical build unfortunately does not provide a complete picture for the sake of like vs. like comparisons. People of similar builds may well have different caloric requirements for a number of reasons. I certainly wouldn't dispute that. Build and physical health do not necessarily go hand in hand for instance. Stronger (not necessarily larger) muscles tend to burn more calories even when at rest. Something as simple as how thoroughly food is masticated will affect the rate and efficiency of digestion. Models--such as my balloon example--will always overlook some of the nuanced details. But the principle is sound even if the values are personal.
The primary point of my argument was to explain the fallacy of the genetic excuse for why people are fat. As I mentioned, genetics can play a role, however with exceedingly rare exception, a person's lifestyle is the overwhelming contributor to their being fat. It is a known but shoved aside reality because people generally resist changes to their lifestyle, esp. if they perceive their existing lifestyle as comfortable. Even when people do come around to change, it is often with the expectation that the restoration of their health will come easily or at least with rapidity. A multi-year turn around does not provide the same immediate satisfaction as a bag of Cheetos and a nap on the couch. Eventually temptation reestablishes the status-quo.
Unless you manage to shut down the "metabolic furnace" so to speak with your crap diet and/or lack of movement your body will continue to consume relatively similar calories. So much like any balloon that has a hole letting more out than is being replace it will shrink. Being overweight is simply a product of too many calories coming in relative to those going out.
While genetics can play a role, food quality and physical activity will influence how hot furnace operates far more than any other factor for the overwhelming majority of the population. Highly available calories such as things consisting of fat, refined flours and esp. reduced sugars such as HFC cannot be used by the body for energy except for the relatively small quantity immediately required with the rest being stored as body fat. From that point forward the energy is no longer available and you feel that lack of energy, and of course soon will probably feel hungry again, thus rinse repeat.
I'm pretty sure this guy would have been poked at all the same even if he was Joe Average and the fee was $160/month. This guy was made subject to the "stupid tax," a progressive tax levied on all whom take a leave of absence from sound reasoning. Even if this fellow believed the whole virus story, why ever would he have entrusted his life and money to the local geek squad? There are federal (FBI) and private security organizations that are in a much better position to address the matter.
I'm pretty sure this guy would have been poked at all the same even if he was Joe Average and the fee was $160/month. This guy was made subject to the "stupid tax," a progressive tax levied on all whom take a leave of absence from sound reasoning. Even if this fellow believed the whole virus story, why ever would he have entrusted his life and money to the local geek squad? There are federal (FBI) and private security organizations that are in a much better position to address the matter.
My confusion isn't in the tax argument. I get the notion of reporting a loss to offset tax burdens. But selling roughly 20% or $2B of his stake in Microsoft isn't a "small fraction." Particularly with present discussions about Microsoft's future floating around.
People can throw up all manner of alternative languages as equal or superior but the problem isn't the language per-se. It's the fact that there is a massive ecosystem built around and on top of Java that doesn't exist for these alternatives. Oracle knew this, and other things and will be leveraging them to their full potential.
With Oracle no matter what their venture, it's always been about the money. They believe that their acquisition of Sun will net them more than their initial investment. They could care less about the long term health of Java so long as they can apply strategies to bring them ROI. Thanks to some beautiful foresight on Sun's part with the GPL and patent protections, Java for the time being is safe. I do not however, believe this will continue indefinitely. Oracle's task now will be to make what is available, and possible with open-source Java as limited and marginalized as possible so that moving forward the only reasonable choice will be to purchase their non-free offerings.
At this point it's difficult to predict where things will go. I think that the sector most in doubt at this point will not be the desktop but rather the enterprise. Java is a well established platform in the corporate world, and given the present investments of IBM, Red Hat, the Apache Foundation, etc. in enterprise Java I believe we'll see it continue on. However, with the innovation fracturing from the J2EE specification instead of being sown back in as it has in the past. Instead of being partners in innovation as was the case with Sun they will now be competing against Oracle. Whatever happens though, I think it is pretty much a given that the Java world will not flourish as it did when Sun was at the reigns.
It is their fourth generation technology. It is not the 4G specifications published by ITU. To call it 4G with the implied relationship to ITU's 4G specification is disingenuous. If they were to call it T-Mobile's fourth generation technology that would be different. However, it would also necessitate the publication of facts about their fourth generation technology, not marketing spin. With out technical details about capabilities--such as is defined in the ITU 4G spec.--it becomes yet another pissing competition based upon the ability of marketing rather than engineering.
condemn them harshly. I'm tired of marketing speech in lieu of specific, technical, facts. It become so much easier for average Joe consumer to believe in unicorns and white elephants when the marketing department is in charge. Unicorns and white elephants of course come with lofty price tags and a greater popularity which exclude legitimately superior products from the market.
You clearly have not looked at it lately. There is a very robust selection of content. Yes the independent content is large--best way for them to distribute really--however there is also a very large selection of current, recently released to disc content as well. The library of instant streaming content is growing very quickly and at a rate that makes me believe that Netflix could very well switch to primarily if not completely, streaming deliver. Ironically between my wife and I my Blu-ray player is being used more for delivering Netflix streaming than it is for actually playing discs.
Man I love FOX News and political campaign ads! It is so refreshing to see the products, well educated and informed citizens.
My opponent is a liar and a devil! He wants to instate death panels that will decide your medical fate. If he's in charge of the government he will take control of your life, and sell your children as slaves to Al Qaeda!
One word H1B. Additional stats.
The recession doubtlessly mucked about with things but it's a ripple in the stream of the past two+ decades. No one willingly bothers with the hassle of sponsoring H1Bs unless qualified fulfillment is difficult with the local pool of talent. Unemployment even for lower skilled S & E have historically been lower than most any other job sector. You will find anecdotal evidence abounding with respect to desperation of companies trying to find highly educated, usually highly specialized S & Es.
As for the second thing, you appear to largely be arguing in my direction (if indirectly), in that we should be teaching more, in particular, that which has been traditionally relegated to more specialized/advanced studies. There's a challenge though that really isn't being addressed by educators, which is that we're failing to inspire the pursuit of math. While equation manipulation is boring, it is also a gateway to other maths. Based on your sentiment it sounds as if you agree that we're teaching these prerequisites poorly. There needs to be a way for students to see the forest through the trees before they get fed up with "worthless math". If educators were succeeding in that I suspect we wouldn't have people writing articles such as TFA.
I think most would agree with the statement: "Math beyond 6th grade is not strictly required for 90% of all non-science based careers." However, there is a fallacy in the belief that that would mean we do not need to teach anything more advanced to the broad audience. Simply because there is no direct application to a person's day to day does not mean that there is no benefit in the exercise of learning it. The skills of abstraction and problem solving learned and exercised through mathematical study are invaluable tools for any skilled or semi-skilled labor. Further, a big part of pre-college schooling, and even to some extent the first few years of college, are meant to provide an exploration of possibilities for future careers. How would anyone ever discover the appeal of structural engineering, material science, pharmacology, software engineering, etc. if they weren't exposed early on to the precursor (prerequisite) subjects. As it is there is a shortage of scientists and engineers. If we make the doors and windows to these fields all the farther away even fewer people will be inspired to pursue such careers.
I can certainly sympathize with the customers' position. But can you with the vendor's? Lets say you created some software. You have a contract with the retailers who will sell your product that stipulates they were not to sell until a certain date but they sold it early anyway. Your team is set to push prerequisites to the server before that date but they're not in place before one of your retailers break contract and sells the software early. Unfortunately, the protection mechanism built into your server kicks in when it detects "bad behavior" from a system trying to connect to it. Should you now be on the hook? It's the retailer's fault and the recompense should come from the retailer not yourself.
Perhaps, however excess caloric intake is the overwhelming contributor. It is very easy to consume several times the number of calories your body requires for healthy function using the readily available food stuffs in western culture countries. It is also natural to think that hungry means "calories required" rather than "I ate the wrong thing, my stomach digested it too quickly and so it's telling me it's empty." It is also very natural to want to alleviate the discomfort of an empty stomach.
If you don't believe/understand what I'm saying, try this experiment. Drink a can of cola (obviously not diet), note the number of calories contained within then go hop on a treadmill and see what it takes to burn that many calories off. I think you'll be very surprised. Now, consider the number of calories that exist in a typical meal eaten at McDonalds. Use your treadmill experiment to calculate the time it would take to burn that off. Reflect on what a typical western culture person would consume, all meals, all snacks, all beverages on any given week. Without much difficulty you would soon realize that you would have to have the training regimen of an Olympic athlete (think swimming, bicycling, etc. not curling) to keep your caloric intake in balance with calories burned.
Slashdot Mirror
Yet people still didn't figure there was anything interesting about Ballmer selling off $1.3B worth of MS stock with plans for a total $2B. I'm telling you, there's more to it than tax prep. You don't after something like 6 years make your first sell off of MS stock in excess of 1/8 of your total holdings for tax reasons. There's some trouble going on and they're having a hard time digging themselves out. Win Vista was the first real sign, now we're seeing even more. There was a bit too much complacency while various trends were progressing all around them. Now there's some serious catch up to do and they don't seem to be doing it very well. Kin, Windows Phone 7, Azure, now evidently Windows 7/Server 2008. I think we'll see some rather interesting goings on in the coming year or two with Microsoft.
I think we aren't necessarily speaking about the same type of people. I am not suggesting that people ought to fit the supermodel body type. For the average person that would be unhealthy and next to impossible to maintain. Regardless of what our culture says a modest amount of padding isn't necessarily a medical problem. It sounds as if you believe I'm lumping them and what physicians call obese and more specifically morbidly obese in the same basket. I'm definitely not. I am referring to people whose excessive body fat has a negative impact on their health.
Classic "dieting" as you seem to be referring by calorie restricted starvation diets are definitely unsustainable, definitely unhealthy and for the reasons you cite. However the simple act of switching to "quality" calories and not eating for the simple reason that it makes you feel good will yield significant improvements in a persons health over the long term. Adding even modest exercise to that will dramatically improve that person's health and size. This is what I am referring to by multi-year turn around, in contrast to your suggested starvation diet of significant calorie restriction. It took years to pack it on, it will take a good long while straighten things out again. If the approach taken switches the body into "survival" mode through calorie conservation it's the wrong approach. I'm talking about changes no more drastic than swapping a Big Mac, fries, and a 32oz soda, for a pork chop, salad, bake potato, and a 12oz glass of unsweetened iced tea. That's less than half the calories yet equally filling and satiating. If you want ice cream, fine then have ice cream, but don't eat it immediately before bed and don't eat a full pint of Ben and Jerry's! Common sense, moderate eating, not starvation coupled with modest exercise. If people did this I guarantee there wouldn't be talk about obesity epidemics, and people living shorter lives than their parents.
I very much agree that the problem exists at a social/cultural level. The American culture is oriented towards unhealthy, low quality calories and excessive portion sizes.
A person's physical build unfortunately does not provide a complete picture for the sake of like vs. like comparisons. People of similar builds may well have different caloric requirements for a number of reasons. I certainly wouldn't dispute that. Build and physical health do not necessarily go hand in hand for instance. Stronger (not necessarily larger) muscles tend to burn more calories even when at rest. Something as simple as how thoroughly food is masticated will affect the rate and efficiency of digestion. Models--such as my balloon example--will always overlook some of the nuanced details. But the principle is sound even if the values are personal.
The primary point of my argument was to explain the fallacy of the genetic excuse for why people are fat. As I mentioned, genetics can play a role, however with exceedingly rare exception, a person's lifestyle is the overwhelming contributor to their being fat. It is a known but shoved aside reality because people generally resist changes to their lifestyle, esp. if they perceive their existing lifestyle as comfortable. Even when people do come around to change, it is often with the expectation that the restoration of their health will come easily or at least with rapidity. A multi-year turn around does not provide the same immediate satisfaction as a bag of Cheetos and a nap on the couch. Eventually temptation reestablishes the status-quo.
that certainly didn't take long. Congratz.
Unless you manage to shut down the "metabolic furnace" so to speak with your crap diet and/or lack of movement your body will continue to consume relatively similar calories. So much like any balloon that has a hole letting more out than is being replace it will shrink. Being overweight is simply a product of too many calories coming in relative to those going out.
While genetics can play a role, food quality and physical activity will influence how hot furnace operates far more than any other factor for the overwhelming majority of the population. Highly available calories such as things consisting of fat, refined flours and esp. reduced sugars such as HFC cannot be used by the body for energy except for the relatively small quantity immediately required with the rest being stored as body fat. From that point forward the energy is no longer available and you feel that lack of energy, and of course soon will probably feel hungry again, thus rinse repeat.
I'm pretty sure this guy would have been poked at all the same even if he was Joe Average and the fee was $160/month. This guy was made subject to the "stupid tax," a progressive tax levied on all whom take a leave of absence from sound reasoning. Even if this fellow believed the whole virus story, why ever would he have entrusted his life and money to the local geek squad? There are federal (FBI) and private security organizations that are in a much better position to address the matter.
I'm pretty sure this guy would have been poked at all the same even if he was Joe Average and the fee was $160/month. This guy was made subject to the "stupid tax," a progressive tax levied on all whom take a leave of absence from sound reasoning. Even if this fellow believed the whole virus story, why ever would he have entrusted his life and money to the local geek squad? There are federal (FBI) and private security organizations that are in a much better position to address the matter.
My confusion isn't in the tax argument. I get the notion of reporting a loss to offset tax burdens. But selling roughly 20% or $2B of his stake in Microsoft isn't a "small fraction." Particularly with present discussions about Microsoft's future floating around.
Obviously the Navy got their dates confused as well...
'bout as easy as breaking a window and jamming a large screw driver into the ignition. Oh, wait... forget I said that.
Ballmer selling off $1.3B worth of Microsoft? With plans to clear 75 million share before years end? I must say, I'm thoroughly confused...
You're right, I've had my head stuck in the computer too long. I got my days off, was thinking it was the 10th already.
Times are in UTC not WST. They match.
People can throw up all manner of alternative languages as equal or superior but the problem isn't the language per-se. It's the fact that there is a massive ecosystem built around and on top of Java that doesn't exist for these alternatives. Oracle knew this, and other things and will be leveraging them to their full potential.
With Oracle no matter what their venture, it's always been about the money. They believe that their acquisition of Sun will net them more than their initial investment. They could care less about the long term health of Java so long as they can apply strategies to bring them ROI. Thanks to some beautiful foresight on Sun's part with the GPL and patent protections, Java for the time being is safe. I do not however, believe this will continue indefinitely. Oracle's task now will be to make what is available, and possible with open-source Java as limited and marginalized as possible so that moving forward the only reasonable choice will be to purchase their non-free offerings.
At this point it's difficult to predict where things will go. I think that the sector most in doubt at this point will not be the desktop but rather the enterprise. Java is a well established platform in the corporate world, and given the present investments of IBM, Red Hat, the Apache Foundation, etc. in enterprise Java I believe we'll see it continue on. However, with the innovation fracturing from the J2EE specification instead of being sown back in as it has in the past. Instead of being partners in innovation as was the case with Sun they will now be competing against Oracle. Whatever happens though, I think it is pretty much a given that the Java world will not flourish as it did when Sun was at the reigns.
I don't understand. What's wrong with Uhura?
It is their fourth generation technology. It is not the 4G specifications published by ITU. To call it 4G with the implied relationship to ITU's 4G specification is disingenuous. If they were to call it T-Mobile's fourth generation technology that would be different. However, it would also necessitate the publication of facts about their fourth generation technology, not marketing spin. With out technical details about capabilities--such as is defined in the ITU 4G spec.--it becomes yet another pissing competition based upon the ability of marketing rather than engineering.
That depends upon an informed cost/benefit evaluation.
condemn them harshly. I'm tired of marketing speech in lieu of specific, technical, facts. It become so much easier for average Joe consumer to believe in unicorns and white elephants when the marketing department is in charge. Unicorns and white elephants of course come with lofty price tags and a greater popularity which exclude legitimately superior products from the market.
You clearly have not looked at it lately. There is a very robust selection of content. Yes the independent content is large--best way for them to distribute really--however there is also a very large selection of current, recently released to disc content as well. The library of instant streaming content is growing very quickly and at a rate that makes me believe that Netflix could very well switch to primarily if not completely, streaming deliver. Ironically between my wife and I my Blu-ray player is being used more for delivering Netflix streaming than it is for actually playing discs.
Man I love FOX News and political campaign ads! It is so refreshing to see the products, well educated and informed citizens.
My opponent is a liar and a devil! He wants to instate death panels that will decide your medical fate. If he's in charge of the government he will take control of your life, and sell your children as slaves to Al Qaeda!
...so you're saying they're Republican?
One word H1B. Additional stats. The recession doubtlessly mucked about with things but it's a ripple in the stream of the past two+ decades. No one willingly bothers with the hassle of sponsoring H1Bs unless qualified fulfillment is difficult with the local pool of talent. Unemployment even for lower skilled S & E have historically been lower than most any other job sector. You will find anecdotal evidence abounding with respect to desperation of companies trying to find highly educated, usually highly specialized S & Es.
As for the second thing, you appear to largely be arguing in my direction (if indirectly), in that we should be teaching more, in particular, that which has been traditionally relegated to more specialized/advanced studies. There's a challenge though that really isn't being addressed by educators, which is that we're failing to inspire the pursuit of math. While equation manipulation is boring, it is also a gateway to other maths. Based on your sentiment it sounds as if you agree that we're teaching these prerequisites poorly. There needs to be a way for students to see the forest through the trees before they get fed up with "worthless math". If educators were succeeding in that I suspect we wouldn't have people writing articles such as TFA.
I think most would agree with the statement: "Math beyond 6th grade is not strictly required for 90% of all non-science based careers." However, there is a fallacy in the belief that that would mean we do not need to teach anything more advanced to the broad audience. Simply because there is no direct application to a person's day to day does not mean that there is no benefit in the exercise of learning it. The skills of abstraction and problem solving learned and exercised through mathematical study are invaluable tools for any skilled or semi-skilled labor. Further, a big part of pre-college schooling, and even to some extent the first few years of college, are meant to provide an exploration of possibilities for future careers. How would anyone ever discover the appeal of structural engineering, material science, pharmacology, software engineering, etc. if they weren't exposed early on to the precursor (prerequisite) subjects. As it is there is a shortage of scientists and engineers. If we make the doors and windows to these fields all the farther away even fewer people will be inspired to pursue such careers.
I can certainly sympathize with the customers' position. But can you with the vendor's? Lets say you created some software. You have a contract with the retailers who will sell your product that stipulates they were not to sell until a certain date but they sold it early anyway. Your team is set to push prerequisites to the server before that date but they're not in place before one of your retailers break contract and sells the software early. Unfortunately, the protection mechanism built into your server kicks in when it detects "bad behavior" from a system trying to connect to it. Should you now be on the hook? It's the retailer's fault and the recompense should come from the retailer not yourself.
Perhaps, however excess caloric intake is the overwhelming contributor. It is very easy to consume several times the number of calories your body requires for healthy function using the readily available food stuffs in western culture countries. It is also natural to think that hungry means "calories required" rather than "I ate the wrong thing, my stomach digested it too quickly and so it's telling me it's empty." It is also very natural to want to alleviate the discomfort of an empty stomach.
If you don't believe/understand what I'm saying, try this experiment. Drink a can of cola (obviously not diet), note the number of calories contained within then go hop on a treadmill and see what it takes to burn that many calories off. I think you'll be very surprised. Now, consider the number of calories that exist in a typical meal eaten at McDonalds. Use your treadmill experiment to calculate the time it would take to burn that off. Reflect on what a typical western culture person would consume, all meals, all snacks, all beverages on any given week. Without much difficulty you would soon realize that you would have to have the training regimen of an Olympic athlete (think swimming, bicycling, etc. not curling) to keep your caloric intake in balance with calories burned.