My samplle set of one (yeah, I know) confirms that. I usually wake up before the clock goes off and get up about the same time on weekends, and I'm actually a little underweight (that's mostly genetic, though). Maybe I should start staying up late and make it up on the weekends so I can gain?
Nah, screw it, if I don't get enough sleep I'm irratable and my brain doesn't function as well.
In the timeframe TapeCutter was talking about, the only tube in a TV was the CRT. Before TVs became all solid-state (except the CRT) they took longer to warm up than a computer takes to boot. The "instant on" actually saved power, because people would actually shut them off once in a while. I leave my main computer on all the time, because I use it as a radio and I want sound when I'm making my coffee or eating my lunch.
You're confusing phones and tablets with desktops. I don't have a Mac but I'm pretty sure you can install pretty much anything you want on one. A PC that you can't install your own browser (or any other software) on is running a pretty shitty OS.
Tubes have their place, but I will gladly sacrifice all of their benefits for something that doesn't weigh more than an NFL linebacker.
That's a feature, not a bug. My house was burglarized last year, and if I'd had a lightweight flat screen instead of a 42 inch Trinitron they would have taken it, too. The weight is an anti-theft device.
I can't think of a single situation where driving agressively isn't dangerous. You just fiailed your "I'm a good driver" test.
The solution to most distracted driving is to implement hands-free features such as bluetooth, voice control, collision sensors, backup cameras, etc.
The problem with talking on the phone is that most people (not everyone, but most) don't concentrate on anything but the phone call. You haven't been walking down the sidewalk and had to get out of the way of some idiot jabbering on his phone not watching where he was walking? Or on his phone standing still, oblivious to the fact that he's blocking the doorway? You've never been run off the road by some nitwit jabbering on his phone and paying no attention whatever to his driving?
I won't even anser my phone when driving except in rare circumstances. I'll call them back when I can do so safely.
However, distracted driving has always been with us in one form or another (i.e. make-up, cute girls, spilled coffee, dogs, etc...)
True, but you can't minimize those distractions, and those distractions don't last as long as a typical phone call.
No matter what you do, there will always be that one idiot who does something stupid while driving.... There is no way to legislate away stupidity
True, idiots still drive 55 in a 30 during a pouring raiunstorm, they still drive drunk, but at least they can be punished for their stupidity if they don't kill themselves along with innocent people first.
When I had a big enough yard to grow a garden, the only things we bought at the grocery store were sugar, flour, coffee, tea, and meat. We froze some vegetables and canned some and dried a few, so they lasted through the winter.
On the upside, that means that people who do plumbing or electrical or whatever are really good at it. On the downside, your everyday guy doesn't do plumbing or electrical, even on their own home.
Plumbing and house wiring haven't changed much in a century, and house wiring is actually simpler than in 1912 when they had knob and post wiring. And I don't know about plumbers, but as long as I've been alive you have to be a certified electrician to do electrical contracting (my late friend Ralph, a WWII vet, was an indoor wireman since the war ended, you had to be certified even back then according to him).
Cars, otoh, hell it took a trained mechanic 45 minutes to change my car's battery, I could change the battery of an old car myself in less than five.
Then you started getting divisions into professions, with some people specializing in warfare, food production, toolmaking, religion, and so on.
None of that (except perhaps religion) came about until the invention of agriculture. The guy that planted the first seed changed the world.
Actually, I've found that people are more likely to be the opposite. They see something new, and they say...well, the old way was better
In many cases the old ways are better, but in my experience most new things are better. For instance, phones. Damn but my phone is a lot more useful than the one I had in 1970. Microwave ovens, the only things I use the stove for is deep frying, eggs, hamburgers, and pizza. Almost everything else I just use the microwave; I've even figured out how to make good chicken breasts in the nuker.
Usually when someone complains about a new thing it's because of tradeoffs. You mentiones cars -- yes, it was better that you could actually work on one yourself if you wanted to, but the gas mileage was far lower, the cars were far more dangerous, and they last a hell of a lot longer today.
As to TVs, you're still going to have black bars with an old one, or worse, the aspect ratio stretched making the picture look odd. They did last a lot longer though. One TV I bought in 1969 still worked when I left it behind in a house I moved out of in 1995.
I can't for the life of me figure out why people are still using incandescants. The drawbacks twirleybulbs had when they were new have been overcome; nobody visiting me says "hey, the light looks funny" and they're instanly on (and even when they were new they only took a second or two).
I doubt you'll find a single person who thinks that ether was a better anasthetic than the drugs they use now. It was a true nightmare for the patient (and everyone who went under with it had the same nightmare) and ether is very flammable -- it's used as automotive starting fluid.
But then there are guys like my dad who says "I went without a cell phone and computer for eighty years, and I don't need one now." Then wonders why I snail mail send photos to him.
The solution is a paper receipt that shows how you voted.
Oddly, that's how it's done in Illinois. I say "oddly" because our government is so corrupt you'd think they'd want an uncountable system, but maybe they want it countable because both parties are crooks (Our two last Governors are in Federal prison, one is Republican and one is Democrat).
Some things were simpler, but some weren't, because we have technology that simplifies things. Take your car, for example. No cruise control, driving a long trip is lots simpler, you don't even have to touch the gas pedal. Farther back, say when my dad was a kid, just getting the damned thing started was a chore. Set the choke by hand, get out, crank start it manually, jump back in before it died because the choke made it run rich and readjust the choke... and that was even simpler than preparing the wagon and horses like they had to do previously. Take cooking; I asked my mom how to make gravy and she said she stopped making gravy years ago, now there's instant gravy that you mix with water and heat, and it tastes every bit as good as what she made by hand. Microwave ovens make cooking simpler. Computers make doing your taxes and balancing your checkbook simpler. Photos -- you used to have to open the camera, put film in, take a roll of pictures and change the film, take it and get the film developed, go back the next day for your pictures, then off to a post office to mail them to grandma. Now you just whip out your phone, shoot, and email it. Simple.
As to better? Only in a few ways were the old days better. Before 1970 the air and rivers and lakes were filthy and unhealthy, few had air conditioning, there were no microwaves, VCRs, personal computers, cell phones, robots, velcro, flat screen TVs, ABS, air bags, GPS, ziplock bags... not better by any means. And God help you if you were black or gay back then.
As to "cobbled on," tech has always been like that. Pottery making was an offshoot of weaving; the first pots were straw baskets that were covered in clay and burned in a kiln. The first cars were merely wagons with a gasoline engine bolted on. The first telephones had no dials, they were added later and later replaced with buttons, which made the phone more complex internally but much easier to use. The same with four stroke engines, far more complicated than a two stroke but far less fussy to maintain.
There are no innocent people on earth, either. We're all sinners. The only man ever born who wasn't a sinner was executed for the bad shit YOU do (yes, including being in the military). War is perhaps the biggest sin there is.
I was thinking the same thing, "ethernet", No wifi? No bluetooth? No USB? If not (no I didn't RTFA) this thing is a complete throwback except that it doesn't use a CRT.
I've never understood why people think that just because something is newer makes it better.
I wrote a humorous article about that very thing seven years ago -- Useful Dead Technologies. It's a bit out of date; they went back to knobs on radios, and shoelaces are now the best of both nylon and cotton.
Whenever we trade an old technology for a newer one, there are almost always tradeoffs. For example, a guy at Felber's had an old fashioned part for a furnace that cost $25 he was replacing a faulty $250 digital board with. I like my electronic thermostat on my hvac, but the old ones were nice in that they didn't need batteries.
Analog TV suffered ghosting, interference, static, and digital has a much sharper picture, but the interference, rather than making the picture snowy or ghosty or the sound staticy makes the digital picture freeze and the sound echo and stop.
I think way too many folks throw out perfectly good equipment when they could be repurposing it. Throw a couple of NICs and Linux in an old Celeron and you have a router.
"Toxin" is certainly often misused, but the term is accurately descriptive of many substances, like Roundup, Gasoline, chlorine bleach, lye, etc. Toxin should mean "poison" rather than "something that just might not be good for you".
The tables weren't nested and the images were small. I've always been a limited maximalist in design, minimalist in code. I laid it out so something interesting happened while loading; for example, one month I had a very small animated gif that tiled for the background that started as green ones and zeros wich changed and eventually disappeared as the page loaded. Very little javascript, always short programs, and only when needed. Its pages weiged in at far less than almost all of today's web pages.
Back in the real world, websites are the new storefront. They are usually the very first thing a potential customer will see when engaging with a company.
I didn't say that a page had to be ugly, but you know what? So many high profile sites are so f'ugly they make your eyes bleed (Yahoo is at the top of the list, followed by most other newspapers). Don't these people realize that if you write for a certain screen size and resolution it's going to look like effluent on any other size orr resolution? That nobody likes horizontal scrolls? That many folks are accessing their sites with feature phones? That everybody absolutely HATES popups and flashy, shiny, irritatingly distracting ads?
Who is to blame if not the W3C?
I'd say most of the blame belongs to the W3C. But much of the blame is on developers who don't realise that some displays are landscape and some portrait, that different screens have different aspect ratios, that different screens have different resolutions, and you simply can't make a web page look the same on two different devices as if you were designing a poster. The big reason for some (not all, mind you) of HTML's shortcomings (from an artistic designer's point of view) stem from that fact.
It would be nice to block wifi but still allow cellular signals.
It would also be extremely hard to do. You'd have to come up with something (a mesh, perhaps) that blocked one frequency while letting another in. Not sure how close the cell frequencies are to wifi frequencies, though. I guess if you made your apartment into a faraday cage (like using this wallpaper) and having a repeater outside your window with an antenna inside the apartment it might do the trick..
I figure either reflections, or more likely interference from spark plugs, since even a motorcycle will kill the picture and sound for a second. Perhaps both. Mostly, though, I think it's my shitty tuner.
Back in the analog TV days we called multimode interference "ghosting." It's a lot worse with digital, rather than two of something on the screen you don't get a picture at all (I have multimode interference whenever a car drives by my house).
If lightning hits your house, no surge protector is going to save you and it might even burn down. About twenty years ago my elderly next door neighbor's house was hit. It ruined every appliance in the house and he had to replace his breaker box and much of the house's wiring.
Slashdot Mirror
They have these things called "rechargable batteries" and walls all have these things called "power outlets."
My samplle set of one (yeah, I know) confirms that. I usually wake up before the clock goes off and get up about the same time on weekends, and I'm actually a little underweight (that's mostly genetic, though). Maybe I should start staying up late and make it up on the weekends so I can gain?
Nah, screw it, if I don't get enough sleep I'm irratable and my brain doesn't function as well.
In the timeframe TapeCutter was talking about, the only tube in a TV was the CRT. Before TVs became all solid-state (except the CRT) they took longer to warm up than a computer takes to boot. The "instant on" actually saved power, because people would actually shut them off once in a while. I leave my main computer on all the time, because I use it as a radio and I want sound when I'm making my coffee or eating my lunch.
You're confusing phones and tablets with desktops. I don't have a Mac but I'm pretty sure you can install pretty much anything you want on one. A PC that you can't install your own browser (or any other software) on is running a pretty shitty OS.
Tubes have their place, but I will gladly sacrifice all of their benefits for something that doesn't weigh more than an NFL linebacker.
That's a feature, not a bug. My house was burglarized last year, and if I'd had a lightweight flat screen instead of a 42 inch Trinitron they would have taken it, too. The weight is an anti-theft device.
and when to be aggressive vs defensive
I can't think of a single situation where driving agressively isn't dangerous. You just fiailed your "I'm a good driver" test.
The solution to most distracted driving is to implement hands-free features such as bluetooth, voice control, collision sensors, backup cameras, etc.
The problem with talking on the phone is that most people (not everyone, but most) don't concentrate on anything but the phone call. You haven't been walking down the sidewalk and had to get out of the way of some idiot jabbering on his phone not watching where he was walking? Or on his phone standing still, oblivious to the fact that he's blocking the doorway? You've never been run off the road by some nitwit jabbering on his phone and paying no attention whatever to his driving?
I won't even anser my phone when driving except in rare circumstances. I'll call them back when I can do so safely.
However, distracted driving has always been with us in one form or another (i.e. make-up, cute girls, spilled coffee, dogs, etc...)
True, but you can't minimize those distractions, and those distractions don't last as long as a typical phone call.
No matter what you do, there will always be that one idiot who does something stupid while driving.... There is no way to legislate away stupidity
True, idiots still drive 55 in a 30 during a pouring raiunstorm, they still drive drunk, but at least they can be punished for their stupidity if they don't kill themselves along with innocent people first.
Real national healthcare (Euro or Canadian style, not Obamacare's gift to the insurance companies) IS real health care. One in four Americans have no health care at all (except for the emergency room).
Poor Iran, they're between Iraq and a hard place.
When I had a big enough yard to grow a garden, the only things we bought at the grocery store were sugar, flour, coffee, tea, and meat. We froze some vegetables and canned some and dried a few, so they lasted through the winter.
On the upside, that means that people who do plumbing or electrical or whatever are really good at it. On the downside, your everyday guy doesn't do plumbing or electrical, even on their own home.
Plumbing and house wiring haven't changed much in a century, and house wiring is actually simpler than in 1912 when they had knob and post wiring. And I don't know about plumbers, but as long as I've been alive you have to be a certified electrician to do electrical contracting (my late friend Ralph, a WWII vet, was an indoor wireman since the war ended, you had to be certified even back then according to him).
Cars, otoh, hell it took a trained mechanic 45 minutes to change my car's battery, I could change the battery of an old car myself in less than five.
Then you started getting divisions into professions, with some people specializing in warfare, food production, toolmaking, religion, and so on.
None of that (except perhaps religion) came about until the invention of agriculture. The guy that planted the first seed changed the world.
Actually, I've found that people are more likely to be the opposite. They see something new, and they say...well, the old way was better
In many cases the old ways are better, but in my experience most new things are better. For instance, phones. Damn but my phone is a lot more useful than the one I had in 1970. Microwave ovens, the only things I use the stove for is deep frying, eggs, hamburgers, and pizza. Almost everything else I just use the microwave; I've even figured out how to make good chicken breasts in the nuker.
Usually when someone complains about a new thing it's because of tradeoffs. You mentiones cars -- yes, it was better that you could actually work on one yourself if you wanted to, but the gas mileage was far lower, the cars were far more dangerous, and they last a hell of a lot longer today.
As to TVs, you're still going to have black bars with an old one, or worse, the aspect ratio stretched making the picture look odd. They did last a lot longer though. One TV I bought in 1969 still worked when I left it behind in a house I moved out of in 1995.
I can't for the life of me figure out why people are still using incandescants. The drawbacks twirleybulbs had when they were new have been overcome; nobody visiting me says "hey, the light looks funny" and they're instanly on (and even when they were new they only took a second or two).
I doubt you'll find a single person who thinks that ether was a better anasthetic than the drugs they use now. It was a true nightmare for the patient (and everyone who went under with it had the same nightmare) and ether is very flammable -- it's used as automotive starting fluid.
But then there are guys like my dad who says "I went without a cell phone and computer for eighty years, and I don't need one now." Then wonders why I snail mail send photos to him.
Speed! When the polls close, you know your vote tally.
How fast do you need them? Even sixty years ago the returns were in before the morning (In '52, huge computer called Univac changed election night)
The solution is a paper receipt that shows how you voted.
Oddly, that's how it's done in Illinois. I say "oddly" because our government is so corrupt you'd think they'd want an uncountable system, but maybe they want it countable because both parties are crooks (Our two last Governors are in Federal prison, one is Republican and one is Democrat).
The old days were simpler, not better.
Some things were simpler, but some weren't, because we have technology that simplifies things. Take your car, for example. No cruise control, driving a long trip is lots simpler, you don't even have to touch the gas pedal. Farther back, say when my dad was a kid, just getting the damned thing started was a chore. Set the choke by hand, get out, crank start it manually, jump back in before it died because the choke made it run rich and readjust the choke... and that was even simpler than preparing the wagon and horses like they had to do previously. Take cooking; I asked my mom how to make gravy and she said she stopped making gravy years ago, now there's instant gravy that you mix with water and heat, and it tastes every bit as good as what she made by hand. Microwave ovens make cooking simpler. Computers make doing your taxes and balancing your checkbook simpler. Photos -- you used to have to open the camera, put film in, take a roll of pictures and change the film, take it and get the film developed, go back the next day for your pictures, then off to a post office to mail them to grandma. Now you just whip out your phone, shoot, and email it. Simple.
As to better? Only in a few ways were the old days better. Before 1970 the air and rivers and lakes were filthy and unhealthy, few had air conditioning, there were no microwaves, VCRs, personal computers, cell phones, robots, velcro, flat screen TVs, ABS, air bags, GPS, ziplock bags... not better by any means. And God help you if you were black or gay back then.
As to "cobbled on," tech has always been like that. Pottery making was an offshoot of weaving; the first pots were straw baskets that were covered in clay and burned in a kiln. The first cars were merely wagons with a gasoline engine bolted on. The first telephones had no dials, they were added later and later replaced with buttons, which made the phone more complex internally but much easier to use. The same with four stroke engines, far more complicated than a two stroke but far less fussy to maintain.
There are no innocent people on earth, either. We're all sinners. The only man ever born who wasn't a sinner was executed for the bad shit YOU do (yes, including being in the military). War is perhaps the biggest sin there is.
I was thinking the same thing, "ethernet", No wifi? No bluetooth? No USB? If not (no I didn't RTFA) this thing is a complete throwback except that it doesn't use a CRT.
I've never understood why people think that just because something is newer makes it better.
I wrote a humorous article about that very thing seven years ago -- Useful Dead Technologies. It's a bit out of date; they went back to knobs on radios, and shoelaces are now the best of both nylon and cotton.
Whenever we trade an old technology for a newer one, there are almost always tradeoffs. For example, a guy at Felber's had an old fashioned part for a furnace that cost $25 he was replacing a faulty $250 digital board with. I like my electronic thermostat on my hvac, but the old ones were nice in that they didn't need batteries.
Analog TV suffered ghosting, interference, static, and digital has a much sharper picture, but the interference, rather than making the picture snowy or ghosty or the sound staticy makes the digital picture freeze and the sound echo and stop.
I think way too many folks throw out perfectly good equipment when they could be repurposing it. Throw a couple of NICs and Linux in an old Celeron and you have a router.
"Oil and Gas exploration and development expensing ($7.1 billion)"
Let the damned oil companies pay for their own exploration and development. They earn billions every year and the government is broke.
"Toxin" is certainly often misused, but the term is accurately descriptive of many substances, like Roundup, Gasoline, chlorine bleach, lye, etc. Toxin should mean "poison" rather than "something that just might not be good for you".
The tables weren't nested and the images were small. I've always been a limited maximalist in design, minimalist in code. I laid it out so something interesting happened while loading; for example, one month I had a very small animated gif that tiled for the background that started as green ones and zeros wich changed and eventually disappeared as the page loaded. Very little javascript, always short programs, and only when needed. Its pages weiged in at far less than almost all of today's web pages.
Back in the real world, websites are the new storefront. They are usually the very first thing a potential customer will see when engaging with a company.
I didn't say that a page had to be ugly, but you know what? So many high profile sites are so f'ugly they make your eyes bleed (Yahoo is at the top of the list, followed by most other newspapers). Don't these people realize that if you write for a certain screen size and resolution it's going to look like effluent on any other size orr resolution? That nobody likes horizontal scrolls? That many folks are accessing their sites with feature phones? That everybody absolutely HATES popups and flashy, shiny, irritatingly distracting ads?
Who is to blame if not the W3C?
I'd say most of the blame belongs to the W3C. But much of the blame is on developers who don't realise that some displays are landscape and some portrait, that different screens have different aspect ratios, that different screens have different resolutions, and you simply can't make a web page look the same on two different devices as if you were designing a poster. The big reason for some (not all, mind you) of HTML's shortcomings (from an artistic designer's point of view) stem from that fact.
It would be nice to block wifi but still allow cellular signals.
It would also be extremely hard to do. You'd have to come up with something (a mesh, perhaps) that blocked one frequency while letting another in. Not sure how close the cell frequencies are to wifi frequencies, though. I guess if you made your apartment into a faraday cage (like using this wallpaper) and having a repeater outside your window with an antenna inside the apartment it might do the trick..
That heavily aliased approximation can be "perfectly" reconstructed by 40 kHz sampling. Really.
With only three samples? How?
I figure either reflections, or more likely interference from spark plugs, since even a motorcycle will kill the picture and sound for a second. Perhaps both. Mostly, though, I think it's my shitty tuner.
I'm far from being a Linux expert, so it'll likely take more than a few hours to set up. I think I'll give it a try anyway.
Back in the analog TV days we called multimode interference "ghosting." It's a lot worse with digital, rather than two of something on the screen you don't get a picture at all (I have multimode interference whenever a car drives by my house).
If lightning hits your house, no surge protector is going to save you and it might even burn down. About twenty years ago my elderly next door neighbor's house was hit. It ruined every appliance in the house and he had to replace his breaker box and much of the house's wiring.
Your homeowner's insurance will pay the bill.