You know, you've got a lot of gall coming off the way you do.
Low or no-carb diets are bad.
Where's your data? Prove it.
Just get on your bike or lift dumbells. Killing your body by removing a required nutrient isn't a diet, it's stupid. Probably as much as vegans.
"Killing your body"? Again, where is your proof? I can't speak for the vegan/vegetarian dietary styles, but they work for some people.
Simple equation: energy in == energy consumed. If that is not the case, you're doing it wrong.
Sorry, that isn't how the body works. Protein and dietary fat do not turn into body fat (in significant amounts anyway), so the calories gained from them simply don't count. Body fat is generated primarily from carbohydrate intake, so if you take in too many carbs, regardless of your total caloric intake, you will get fat. That's how the body's *supposed* to work.
You obviously have enough self-discipline to prevent yourself from eating things you decide, so why not have the self-discipline to do the same using a healthy diet and some exercise?
Because the "healthy diet" as you're clearly pushing IS A LIE, told to you by people who insist on pushing cereals, sugar, bread, and so on.
I stand as a testament to a healthy low carb diet - I've lost 45 pounds since the end of February, without lifting a single dumbbell. All I did was cut back on my carbs. To make sure I'm not missing out on any nutrients, I take a multivitamin and eat plenty of veggies. My doctors seem to agree that I'm doing the right thing, and I'll take their opinion over yours, thanks.
I'm human like everyone else, so I fall off the wagon from time to time. When I do, I stop losing weight or even gain a tiny amount. When I get my ass back in gear and stop eating the excess carbs, I start losing weight within a few days. You can't sit there and tell me, with a straight face, that my body is doing something it isn't supposed to be doing.
So, if you're one of those folks that think "everything digital should be free", sorry, but you're just wrong and rather ignorant of the complex interplay between work, production, economics and entertainment yourself.
If you don't like how the major labels deal with production and distribution of their product, don't use them. Don't buy it. Don't steal it.
Translation: "I sell some kind of media I deem to be valuable, or I am affiliated with someone who sells media they deem to be valuable, and am being financially impacted by copyright infringement."
Seriously, you sound like a typical shill, so let me remind you that obtaining a copy of something without permission is NOT theft, it is copyright infringement, and the law makes a very clear distinction between the two (not that this did Jammie any good). PERIOD.
Suppose you're selling a CD in a kiosk in the mall, and I wander by and notice it (maybe the artwork caught my eye). I take a look at the contents and then decide right there that I don't like the idea of buying this particular CD - maybe it's too expensive, maybe the title is offensive to me, or maybe the music just doesn't look like it's to my taste. I am well within my rights to just walk away and spend my money elsewhere. No sale was made, but then no sale was possible - I didn't want it.
If I happen to run across a copy of it online later, and I download it, you've still lost nothing. In fact, you might stand to *gain* something by virtue of me changing my mind about not buying, after I've listened to the music.
Simply put, bits are easy to copy and are meant to be copied. Physical objects aren't. That's why we have laws governing theft, and different laws (however antiquated) governing copyright infringement.
That's not too bad of an idea, but there's a problem... The "cool" end of the Stirling engine could just be an elaborate, fanless heat sink, but what about a heat source at the "hot" end? A stirling engine won't run unless there's at least *some* temperature difference across it.
You could probably focus sunlight on the "hot" end, but how are you going to do that without replacing large portions of the car's body (perhaps, the hood) with lenses or mirrors?
Also bear in mind that if you heat up the "hot" end, it will eventually warm up the entire engine unless the "cold" end can remove that heat as fast as it's being added.
Or you needed to mix BASIC and assembly, or otherwise need some place to store a up to 4K of data (screens, sprites, more code, whatever) that was safe from BASIC and practically everything else that goes on inside a C64.
Maybe I've been a little particular about what I use to code with, but after 20 years, I've never run into an assembler, commercial or freeware, that wouldn't take decimal wherever another base was expected.
Because energy is being drawn from the battery to make the car move in the first place, you can't just put a generator into the drive train like you can with a petrol car; put 30 kW into turning it, and you might get 20 kW of electricity out of it, which is clearly a net loss. What you're asking for borders on perpetual motion.
When power is *not* being applied (i.e. you let go of the accelerator and/or hit the brakes), then you use regenerative braking to reclaim some of that kinetic energy. In this mode, the drive system controller uses the motor for a short while as a generator, which charges the battery for a while and introduces a significant amount of drag on the car, slowing it down in the process.
The reason this works in a petrol car is that burning the petrol is what does all the work. As an example, alternators for my 1997 Thunderbird put out about 130 amps at 13.8 volts. That translates to about 1.8kW at maximum load, or about 2.4HP drawn from the engine. Call it 5 HP to account for mechanical and electrical losses.
Since that car's 3.8L engine is rated at a modest 140 HP, that leaves 135 HP to turn the various accessories and move the vehicle, and that's only as long as the alternator is under maximum load.
Electric motor efficiency is already in the high 90% range, and batteries are already as good as they're going to get for the moment (save for these latest developments, which are still mostly on the drawing board). You could go with solar cells all over the car, but that has little effect and looks ugly at present. Go with a generator attached to a petrol-powered engine and you've just re-invented the series-hybrid vehicle.
So if you want to extend your range, you need to find ways to reduce the vehicle's weight (and that of its occupants), reduce the power needs of the vehicle's ancilliary systems (climate controls, lighting, dashboard displays, etc), find ways to improve the motors (if that's even possible), and find ways to improve the batteries (to hold more energy and waste less of it).
The horror! The inhumanity! Why, they'd have to violate their ever-so-precious HIPAA guidelines, or so they seem to think anyway.
Seriously, every time I've tried to get basic medical info over the phone, usually simple blood test results, I've had to make an appointment, and always because HIPAA somehow prevents it (or so they claim), even though they know perfectly well who is calling. My guess is that, despite the time saved by both parties by making a quick 30 second call, somehow they must figure that they can make more money by forcing me to make an appointment (even though they could just as easily give that time slot to someone else).
Just checking the size of the file (or, I suspect, just the size of the DCT data) won't always work. Sometimes an image can end up growing in size slightly while losing quality, depending on the nature of the image and the settings of the imaging program.
Things such as thin wires, multi-colored ribbon cable, close-ups of a circuit board, and other images with lots of similar details seem to benefit most from this kind of tweaking, mainly thanks to the placement and qualities of the artifacts, rather than their mere existence or apparent severity.
I've had this happen many times - set an icon for, say, 35% quality and it will probably look kinda grungy, but step it down by just one or two percent and suddenly the artifacts shift around or change their appearance, sometimes in a manner that better suits the image - almost like constructive interference.
Fortunately for me, none of the devices in my setup are crop the image - I am indeed receiving the complete frame. It's just that the TV stations are scaling and matting the video before broadcast, forcing me to scale/crop it back to the proper ratio for display.
What drives me nuts is when stations just can't figure out the concept of letting the viewer's receiver and display hardware handle the task of properly displaying the video.
In my area, two of the 8 or so digital stations are broadcasting 16:9 1080i as their main channel, even when the programming is SD 4:3. They scale the 480-line video up to 1080 lines, add black bars to the sides, and mark the stream as 16:9. My display devices are all normal 4:3 or 5:4 ratio, like the vast majority of others in my area (and across the country, I suspect), so that means my receiving hardware has to add a second set of black bars (to the top/bottom) to resize that "16:9" stream to fit a normal screen.
Sure I could just use the zoom feature my boxes all have, but that means I have to sit there cycling through several zoom settings every time the ratio changes or I change channels. In a real life setting, this becomes very annoying, so in this most common case, some 20% of my screen space goes unused and the video looks "just OK" because of the doubled scaling (once by the broadcaster, and once by my display hardware). The overall video quality also starts to suffer from compression artifacts (because of the wasted bandwidth from the pre-scaling).
To make matters worse, this area has frequent inclement weather, which necessitates adding a crawler and radar display over the pre-mutilated video. If I zoom, I'll lose enough of the crawler that it becomes useless.
To compound the problem even further, the broadcaster will occasionally show a 16:9 program that was already letterboxed before they got their hands on it, which means a third set of bars is being added. In the worst case, 60% of my screen is wasted, the video is blurry from having been scaled down once by the content provider, up once by the broadcaster, and then up again by my display hardware. The crawler becomes almost blindingly sharp at times and more distracting than it should be compared to the rest of the video.
To top it all off, most of the 4:3 stuff the content providers are sending to the local broadcasters (here anyway) clearly comes from older NTSC video tape, or some other low-quality analog sources, and thus doesn't look any better in digital than it did in analog. What's the point of all this SD-to-HD chazarai when the source looks like shit to start with?
All I ask is that the content providers and broadcasters start using high-quality media and broadcast the programming in whatever aspect ratio and resolution it was originally meant for, as is usually done with other MPEG2-based formats. If a DVD can switch between 4:3 and 16:9 content freely, why can't a broadcaster do the same?
I brought this up (using much more pleasant language, of course) with both of the affected stations. I was given an answer more or less equivalent to "Your comment has been noted. Sucks to be you."
Real impressive people - it really makes me want to watch your stations.
Last I knew, virtually all modern PC peripherals, whether they be modems, printers, network cards, video cards, hard disks, sound cards, monitors, etc. all had some kind of reasonably powerful processor in them, if not a complete self-contained embedded computer. Other than my speakers, I can't think of a single device inside of or attached to any of my three PC's that does not contain a small, embedded computer of some sort. I'd bet even my optical mouse has one also. Even today, some of those peripherals are faster and more powerful than the PCs they go with (video cards being the prime example).
As for the C64, IEC floppy and hard disk devices for the C64 or C128 use a 6502 CPU running at whatever speed that the technology allowed for: 1 MHz for the C64 + 1541, 2 MHz for the C128 and all later drives, because it was the smartest way to build these devices. Whatever the technology of the era was capable of, that's what the manufacturers went with.
Since the programming model of the time, regardless of platform, meant tailoring your software to run on a specific model of computer running at a specific speed, with specific minimum peripheral requirements, expecting any manufacturer to have released new, faster versions of their otherwise old hardware as technology progresses is insane - it would break too many programs and cause too many problems for the users. They develop entirely new hardware that mostly retains backward compatibility instead, and market it as such. Think C128 versus C64, Spectrum 128k versus Spectrum 48k, 286 versus XT... you get the point.
As for the software, the Twitter client and OS do all the hard work of dealing with TCP/IP and communicating via whatever protocol Twitter uses. The only help they get from the hardware is the physical interface and Ethernet protocol layers (and whatever else goes with it)... just like any other computer.
The only tangible differences between running a Twitter (or IRC, email, web...) client on a 27 year old 8-bit platform and running one on a just-invented-yesterday top of the line PC are that one runs (a whole freaking lot) faster, while the other has an undeniable "cool" factor.
That "800" baud comment shows that you don't know that much about technology, especially as it relates to the C64. Aside from there not being any modems of that speed for any platform, the C64 is capable of much higher speeds anyway. Speeds up to about 460 kbps are possible via RS232 adaptors, with 115kbps being most common and practical. A properly designed application and hardware interface can pass data in and out of a stock C64 at up to around 40 kB/sec through PIO device. Add DMA to that, and the C64 passes data back and forth at about 1 MB/sec. Depending on the application, data can be processed at around 30 kB/sec.
Not to mention that, as stated in the summary, this program uses an Ethernet device. I don't own one myself, so I can't be sure of the maximum practical speed, but based on my own hacking and programming on the C64 with PIO and DMA devices, I would guess data moves around at 20-30 kB/sec including TCP/IP and Twitter protocol processing overhead, on an otherwise stock machine.
Although this particular application doesn't need anything beyond an Ethernet device, solutions also exist to counter any CPU, storage, or RAM constraints that a C64 user might run up against.
Being an "Ubuntu user" doesn't make you a GNU user, it makes you a Windows user temporarily using something different either because you thought it would make you cool or because you got mad at your beloved Microsoft and threw a hissy fit.
... or if you're just plain tired of having to be an admin on your own box, and would rather be a USER. Over the last 10+ years, I"ve used Slackware, Redhat (before FC), Gentoo, Mandr[ake|iva], PCLOS, SUSE, Ubuntu, and probably others that I can't remember right now. Hell, I even used FreeBSD for a while, and my first dial-up shell was some form of Sun OS.
So far, Ubuntu has the fewest questions, without sacrificing any flexibility.
The only time I use Windows is when I have no other choice.
Unless the eavesdropper has already thought of this and has configured his snooping tools to keep *all* of the received packets. A good tool would, of course, also run comparisons among packets, especially those having been re-sent. If "diff" can pick out the differing bits of text from two otherwise unknown sources, why couldn't one write a similar tool that's focused on pseudo-binary data?
My state's laws require that all gas stations provide no less than 10% ethanol if they can get it cheaper than pure gas. I've run my stock 1997 Thunderbird LX (3.8L V6) on it for a year and a half now, with no ill effects at all. That car is rated for 24 miles per US gallon on the highway (when using pure gas), and it gets that even using E10 (a surprise, to be sure!).
The one time I put a tankful of E85 in it, eight months ago, the engine ran well and it showed a noticable, if small, boost in power. As with most cars not adapted for it, it caused the computer to throw bogus "fuel/air mixture too lean" (and similar) codes and the car got lower highway economy than it does on E10 (about 25% lower, in my case), but the E85 was just over *half* the price of pure gas in that area, so the loss of economy was definitely not an issue.
The real problem was that the E85 pissed off the fuel pump after about nine gallons had been used. It didn't damage it significantly, it just helped a bad bearing in the pump make itself known, so it has not been replaced yet. The engine still runs about the same as it did when I bought the car five years ago.
A friend of mine used to call mine "line noise" passwords, and aptly named they are. What I use for any given account is reasonably long, and as close to truly random as the login system in question will allow - "qK5N$1R6&w#k%g" and the like. If it doesn't look even enough after I've typed it, I just salt it with a few more characters. I wish I could use this kind of thing everywhere; I'm rather surprised at the number of systems out there that wouldn't be able to take a password like the above, either because of stupid shit like a ridiculously low maximum length or restrictions on symbols/punctuation.
I'm thankful that those passwords which I need frequently, I already remember. Those which I can't remember are stored in a strongly-encrypted file, again using a line noise password.
I'd like to think that's a secure enough setup for anyone not employed at the NSA or similar.
Oh, about as much as is lost by sleeping, eating, watching TV, going for a walk..., which is to say, little or none. Maybe if you're a hardliner business type, every minute not spent working is a minute wasted, but for the rest of the world out there, time != money, and spare time during the day even less so.
Nevermind the argument that can be raised that relaxing when you can, whatever it is you do to relax, generally helps you be more productive when you *are* at work.
I use a similar analogy when explaining dimensions:
0. a single character 1. a line of text 2. a full page of text 3. a book full of such pages 4. a room filled with stocked bookshelves 5. a building with many such rooms 6. A city with many such buildings
Except that it's not. A binary written for one distro will usually run on another of the same general age. This is, after all, why tools such as "alien" exist. If anything, the Windows market is more fragmented than Linux by virtue of programs being written explicitly for the most current version of Windows i.e. the entire OS must be current.
Linux programs tend to only target current versions of certain libraries, not the entire OS. When was the last time you saw a userland application that demanded a certain version of the kernel?
When a program won't run, it's usually because some library is too old, too new, or just missing on the user's box, a problem easily solved by firing up one's favorite package manager.
For the other 5% of the binary-only software out there (which I suspect isn't much), try asking the author/producer of the software for assistance. They might actually be willing to make an accommodation by re-compiling against more common libraries or something.
Because the government wants it all to be in real-time, with themselves being the only ones with access to the imagery. Google is just a private corporation whose data is just static images taken every so often, accessible to anyone with an internet connection. Society says the outside of your house is fair game. Don't want your house photographed? Tough.
Personally, I find it fascinating to be able to look at places I've lived, including my current residence. It just gives a sense of...scale.
First of all, recent studies have concluded that there is a genetic component to diabetes, and that the cause is not well connected to a person's diet. As for those who eat "crap", they do so because that's what they've been taught to eat! Just about all of us here remember the old food pyramid quite well: breads/grains at the bottom (12+ servings a day), fruits/vegetables and meats/nuts somewhere in the middle (depending on whose version of the pyramid you are looking at), dairy above that, and sweets and fats at the top in the 'sparingly' category.
It wasn't that long ago that the newer food pyramid was introduced, yet it's still about the same: base your meals around breads/grains, dairy, vegetables, and fruits (in that order), they're telling us, and be sparing with the meats, nuts, oils, etc.
We were taught that our diet should be composed primarily of the very things that make people gain weight, and the "experts" are still teaching this same crap to our kids. Kinda makes you wonder if they intended for us to get fat.
My husband and I had to force ourselves to throw ALL of that old information out and basically start anew. I've lost about 35 pounds, and he about 23, over the last ~2.5 months, and the weight just seems to keep falling off, almost without effort, albeit slowly. But then again, don't most of the "experts" agree that slow weight loss is best anyway? Most fat folks just haven't figured out how to fix the problem yet.
In response to the sub-thread about food cost... if you're on a fixed income like we are, it *is* more expensive to eat truly healthy.
Examples: The cheapest meat around here (southwest Missouri) is ground turkey, for about $1.20 a pound. Beef ranges from $1.38 to about $2.19 a pound at the local bulk discount store, double that at a regular grocer. Boneless skinless chicken breast ranges from about $1.62 to about $3 a pound, bone-in chicken is usually under a dollar a pound (but then you have to throw out half of it). Eggs are usually under a buck a dozen.
Those might seem like good prices until you compare that to a $3 case of ramen noodles or a bag of rice. Which one do you think will last longer, per dollar spent?
Oh, for the record, and speaking for fat people everywhere:
We don't like "overflowing" our seats any more than you like seeing it.
The rest of the country not only seems not to know what 'moderation' means, those that do seem to know have a problem figuring out exactly *what* should be the target of said moderation. People (not you specifically, Shakrai) need to stop blathering on about calories or whether you are or are not a sedentary sort of person, and start focusing on the specific types of foods that make people fat (hint: it ain't the meat or the fat content).
My husband and I are living proof that the problem with Americans' health is due to excess carbs, not excess calories or lack of activity.
I'm in the market for a GPS, and hadn't taken notice of the TomTom until now; I was even less aware that it runs Linux. I'd like to extend a big thank you - Microsoft's antics (and subsequent coverage here on Slashdot) have made the TomTom the top item in my list of choices.
Somehow, I don't think Microsoft would appreciate the thanks.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Where's your data? Prove it.
"Killing your body"? Again, where is your proof? I can't speak for the vegan/vegetarian dietary styles, but they work for some people.
Sorry, that isn't how the body works. Protein and dietary fat do not turn into body fat (in significant amounts anyway), so the calories gained from them simply don't count. Body fat is generated primarily from carbohydrate intake, so if you take in too many carbs, regardless of your total caloric intake, you will get fat. That's how the body's *supposed* to work.
Because the "healthy diet" as you're clearly pushing IS A LIE, told to you by people who insist on pushing cereals, sugar, bread, and so on.
I stand as a testament to a healthy low carb diet - I've lost 45 pounds since the end of February, without lifting a single dumbbell. All I did was cut back on my carbs. To make sure I'm not missing out on any nutrients, I take a multivitamin and eat plenty of veggies. My doctors seem to agree that I'm doing the right thing, and I'll take their opinion over yours, thanks.
I'm human like everyone else, so I fall off the wagon from time to time. When I do, I stop losing weight or even gain a tiny amount. When I get my ass back in gear and stop eating the excess carbs, I start losing weight within a few days. You can't sit there and tell me, with a straight face, that my body is doing something it isn't supposed to be doing.
Translation: "I sell some kind of media I deem to be valuable, or I am affiliated with someone who sells media they deem to be valuable, and am being financially impacted by copyright infringement."
Seriously, you sound like a typical shill, so let me remind you that obtaining a copy of something without permission is NOT theft, it is copyright infringement, and the law makes a very clear distinction between the two (not that this did Jammie any good). PERIOD.
Suppose you're selling a CD in a kiosk in the mall, and I wander by and notice it (maybe the artwork caught my eye). I take a look at the contents and then decide right there that I don't like the idea of buying this particular CD - maybe it's too expensive, maybe the title is offensive to me, or maybe the music just doesn't look like it's to my taste. I am well within my rights to just walk away and spend my money elsewhere. No sale was made, but then no sale was possible - I didn't want it.
If I happen to run across a copy of it online later, and I download it, you've still lost nothing. In fact, you might stand to *gain* something by virtue of me changing my mind about not buying, after I've listened to the music.
Simply put, bits are easy to copy and are meant to be copied. Physical objects aren't. That's why we have laws governing theft, and different laws (however antiquated) governing copyright infringement.
You could probably focus sunlight on the "hot" end, but how are you going to do that without replacing large portions of the car's body (perhaps, the hood) with lenses or mirrors?
Also bear in mind that if you heat up the "hot" end, it will eventually warm up the entire engine unless the "cold" end can remove that heat as fast as it's being added.
Maybe I've been a little particular about what I use to code with, but after 20 years, I've never run into an assembler, commercial or freeware, that wouldn't take decimal wherever another base was expected.
When power is *not* being applied (i.e. you let go of the accelerator and/or hit the brakes), then you use regenerative braking to reclaim some of that kinetic energy. In this mode, the drive system controller uses the motor for a short while as a generator, which charges the battery for a while and introduces a significant amount of drag on the car, slowing it down in the process.
The reason this works in a petrol car is that burning the petrol is what does all the work. As an example, alternators for my 1997 Thunderbird put out about 130 amps at 13.8 volts. That translates to about 1.8kW at maximum load, or about 2.4HP drawn from the engine. Call it 5 HP to account for mechanical and electrical losses.
Since that car's 3.8L engine is rated at a modest 140 HP, that leaves 135 HP to turn the various accessories and move the vehicle, and that's only as long as the alternator is under maximum load.
Electric motor efficiency is already in the high 90% range, and batteries are already as good as they're going to get for the moment (save for these latest developments, which are still mostly on the drawing board). You could go with solar cells all over the car, but that has little effect and looks ugly at present. Go with a generator attached to a petrol-powered engine and you've just re-invented the series-hybrid vehicle.
So if you want to extend your range, you need to find ways to reduce the vehicle's weight (and that of its occupants), reduce the power needs of the vehicle's ancilliary systems (climate controls, lighting, dashboard displays, etc), find ways to improve the motors (if that's even possible), and find ways to improve the batteries (to hold more energy and waste less of it).
Nonono - if you're going to offend, go for the gold: Jesus H. ben Joseph in a fucking handbasket.
What, no mass hysteria? Damn.
The horror! The inhumanity! Why, they'd have to violate their ever-so-precious HIPAA guidelines, or so they seem to think anyway.
Seriously, every time I've tried to get basic medical info over the phone, usually simple blood test results, I've had to make an appointment, and always because HIPAA somehow prevents it (or so they claim), even though they know perfectly well who is calling. My guess is that, despite the time saved by both parties by making a quick 30 second call, somehow they must figure that they can make more money by forcing me to make an appointment (even though they could just as easily give that time slot to someone else).
Things such as thin wires, multi-colored ribbon cable, close-ups of a circuit board, and other images with lots of similar details seem to benefit most from this kind of tweaking, mainly thanks to the placement and qualities of the artifacts, rather than their mere existence or apparent severity.
I've had this happen many times - set an icon for, say, 35% quality and it will probably look kinda grungy, but step it down by just one or two percent and suddenly the artifacts shift around or change their appearance, sometimes in a manner that better suits the image - almost like constructive interference.
Incorrect - both X and Y registers support immediate mode loads, same as the accumulator.
Fortunately for me, none of the devices in my setup are crop the image - I am indeed receiving the complete frame. It's just that the TV stations are scaling and matting the video before broadcast, forcing me to scale/crop it back to the proper ratio for display.
What drives me nuts is when stations just can't figure out the concept of letting the viewer's receiver and display hardware handle the task of properly displaying the video.
In my area, two of the 8 or so digital stations are broadcasting 16:9 1080i as their main channel, even when the programming is SD 4:3. They scale the 480-line video up to 1080 lines, add black bars to the sides, and mark the stream as 16:9. My display devices are all normal 4:3 or 5:4 ratio, like the vast majority of others in my area (and across the country, I suspect), so that means my receiving hardware has to add a second set of black bars (to the top/bottom) to resize that "16:9" stream to fit a normal screen.
Sure I could just use the zoom feature my boxes all have, but that means I have to sit there cycling through several zoom settings every time the ratio changes or I change channels. In a real life setting, this becomes very annoying, so in this most common case, some 20% of my screen space goes unused and the video looks "just OK" because of the doubled scaling (once by the broadcaster, and once by my display hardware). The overall video quality also starts to suffer from compression artifacts (because of the wasted bandwidth from the pre-scaling).
To make matters worse, this area has frequent inclement weather, which necessitates adding a crawler and radar display over the pre-mutilated video. If I zoom, I'll lose enough of the crawler that it becomes useless.
To compound the problem even further, the broadcaster will occasionally show a 16:9 program that was already letterboxed before they got their hands on it, which means a third set of bars is being added. In the worst case, 60% of my screen is wasted, the video is blurry from having been scaled down once by the content provider, up once by the broadcaster, and then up again by my display hardware. The crawler becomes almost blindingly sharp at times and more distracting than it should be compared to the rest of the video.
To top it all off, most of the 4:3 stuff the content providers are sending to the local broadcasters (here anyway) clearly comes from older NTSC video tape, or some other low-quality analog sources, and thus doesn't look any better in digital than it did in analog. What's the point of all this SD-to-HD chazarai when the source looks like shit to start with?
All I ask is that the content providers and broadcasters start using high-quality media and broadcast the programming in whatever aspect ratio and resolution it was originally meant for, as is usually done with other MPEG2-based formats. If a DVD can switch between 4:3 and 16:9 content freely, why can't a broadcaster do the same?
I brought this up (using much more pleasant language, of course) with both of the affected stations. I was given an answer more or less equivalent to "Your comment has been noted. Sucks to be you."
Real impressive people - it really makes me want to watch your stations.
And this differs from modern PC hardware ... how?
Last I knew, virtually all modern PC peripherals, whether they be modems, printers, network cards, video cards, hard disks, sound cards, monitors, etc. all had some kind of reasonably powerful processor in them, if not a complete self-contained embedded computer. Other than my speakers, I can't think of a single device inside of or attached to any of my three PC's that does not contain a small, embedded computer of some sort. I'd bet even my optical mouse has one also. Even today, some of those peripherals are faster and more powerful than the PCs they go with (video cards being the prime example).
As for the C64, IEC floppy and hard disk devices for the C64 or C128 use a 6502 CPU running at whatever speed that the technology allowed for: 1 MHz for the C64 + 1541, 2 MHz for the C128 and all later drives, because it was the smartest way to build these devices. Whatever the technology of the era was capable of, that's what the manufacturers went with.
Since the programming model of the time, regardless of platform, meant tailoring your software to run on a specific model of computer running at a specific speed, with specific minimum peripheral requirements, expecting any manufacturer to have released new, faster versions of their otherwise old hardware as technology progresses is insane - it would break too many programs and cause too many problems for the users. They develop entirely new hardware that mostly retains backward compatibility instead, and market it as such. Think C128 versus C64, Spectrum 128k versus Spectrum 48k, 286 versus XT... you get the point.
As for the software, the Twitter client and OS do all the hard work of dealing with TCP/IP and communicating via whatever protocol Twitter uses. The only help they get from the hardware is the physical interface and Ethernet protocol layers (and whatever else goes with it)... just like any other computer.
The only tangible differences between running a Twitter (or IRC, email, web...) client on a 27 year old 8-bit platform and running one on a just-invented-yesterday top of the line PC are that one runs (a whole freaking lot) faster, while the other has an undeniable "cool" factor.
Not to mention that, as stated in the summary, this program uses an Ethernet device. I don't own one myself, so I can't be sure of the maximum practical speed, but based on my own hacking and programming on the C64 with PIO and DMA devices, I would guess data moves around at 20-30 kB/sec including TCP/IP and Twitter protocol processing overhead, on an otherwise stock machine.
Although this particular application doesn't need anything beyond an Ethernet device, solutions also exist to counter any CPU, storage, or RAM constraints that a C64 user might run up against.
So far, Ubuntu has the fewest questions, without sacrificing any flexibility.
The only time I use Windows is when I have no other choice.
Unless the eavesdropper has already thought of this and has configured his snooping tools to keep *all* of the received packets. A good tool would, of course, also run comparisons among packets, especially those having been re-sent. If "diff" can pick out the differing bits of text from two otherwise unknown sources, why couldn't one write a similar tool that's focused on pseudo-binary data?
My state's laws require that all gas stations provide no less than 10% ethanol if they can get it cheaper than pure gas. I've run my stock 1997 Thunderbird LX (3.8L V6) on it for a year and a half now, with no ill effects at all. That car is rated for 24 miles per US gallon on the highway (when using pure gas), and it gets that even using E10 (a surprise, to be sure!).
The one time I put a tankful of E85 in it, eight months ago, the engine ran well and it showed a noticable, if small, boost in power. As with most cars not adapted for it, it caused the computer to throw bogus "fuel/air mixture too lean" (and similar) codes and the car got lower highway economy than it does on E10 (about 25% lower, in my case), but the E85 was just over *half* the price of pure gas in that area, so the loss of economy was definitely not an issue.
The real problem was that the E85 pissed off the fuel pump after about nine gallons had been used. It didn't damage it significantly, it just helped a bad bearing in the pump make itself known, so it has not been replaced yet. The engine still runs about the same as it did when I bought the car five years ago.
A friend of mine used to call mine "line noise" passwords, and aptly named they are. What I use for any given account is reasonably long, and as close to truly random as the login system in question will allow - "qK5N$1R6&w#k%g" and the like. If it doesn't look even enough after I've typed it, I just salt it with a few more characters. I wish I could use this kind of thing everywhere; I'm rather surprised at the number of systems out there that wouldn't be able to take a password like the above, either because of stupid shit like a ridiculously low maximum length or restrictions on symbols/punctuation.
I'm thankful that those passwords which I need frequently, I already remember. Those which I can't remember are stored in a strongly-encrypted file, again using a line noise password.
I'd like to think that's a secure enough setup for anyone not employed at the NSA or similar.
Oh, about as much as is lost by sleeping, eating, watching TV, going for a walk..., which is to say, little or none. Maybe if you're a hardliner business type, every minute not spent working is a minute wasted, but for the rest of the world out there, time != money, and spare time during the day even less so.
Nevermind the argument that can be raised that relaxing when you can, whatever it is you do to relax, generally helps you be more productive when you *are* at work.
I use a similar analogy when explaining dimensions:
0. a single character
1. a line of text
2. a full page of text
3. a book full of such pages
4. a room filled with stocked bookshelves
5. a building with many such rooms
6. A city with many such buildings
Except that it's not. A binary written for one distro will usually run on another of the same general age. This is, after all, why tools such as "alien" exist. If anything, the Windows market is more fragmented than Linux by virtue of programs being written explicitly for the most current version of Windows i.e. the entire OS must be current.
Linux programs tend to only target current versions of certain libraries, not the entire OS. When was the last time you saw a userland application that demanded a certain version of the kernel?
When a program won't run, it's usually because some library is too old, too new, or just missing on the user's box, a problem easily solved by firing up one's favorite package manager.
For the other 5% of the binary-only software out there (which I suspect isn't much), try asking the author/producer of the software for assistance. They might actually be willing to make an accommodation by re-compiling against more common libraries or something.
Because the government wants it all to be in real-time, with themselves being the only ones with access to the imagery. Google is just a private corporation whose data is just static images taken every so often, accessible to anyone with an internet connection. Society says the outside of your house is fair game. Don't want your house photographed? Tough.
Personally, I find it fascinating to be able to look at places I've lived, including my current residence. It just gives a sense of...scale.
First of all, recent studies have concluded that there is a genetic component to diabetes, and that the cause is not well connected to a person's diet. As for those who eat "crap", they do so because that's what they've been taught to eat! Just about all of us here remember the old food pyramid quite well: breads/grains at the bottom (12+ servings a day), fruits/vegetables and meats/nuts somewhere in the middle (depending on whose version of the pyramid you are looking at), dairy above that, and sweets and fats at the top in the 'sparingly' category.
It wasn't that long ago that the newer food pyramid was introduced, yet it's still about the same: base your meals around breads/grains, dairy, vegetables, and fruits (in that order), they're telling us, and be sparing with the meats, nuts, oils, etc.
We were taught that our diet should be composed primarily of the very things that make people gain weight, and the "experts" are still teaching this same crap to our kids. Kinda makes you wonder if they intended for us to get fat.
My husband and I had to force ourselves to throw ALL of that old information out and basically start anew. I've lost about 35 pounds, and he about 23, over the last ~2.5 months, and the weight just seems to keep falling off, almost without effort, albeit slowly. But then again, don't most of the "experts" agree that slow weight loss is best anyway? Most fat folks just haven't figured out how to fix the problem yet.
In response to the sub-thread about food cost... if you're on a fixed income like we are, it *is* more expensive to eat truly healthy.
Examples: The cheapest meat around here (southwest Missouri) is ground turkey, for about $1.20 a pound. Beef ranges from $1.38 to about $2.19 a pound at the local bulk discount store, double that at a regular grocer. Boneless skinless chicken breast ranges from about $1.62 to about $3 a pound, bone-in chicken is usually under a dollar a pound (but then you have to throw out half of it). Eggs are usually under a buck a dozen.
Those might seem like good prices until you compare that to a $3 case of ramen noodles or a bag of rice. Which one do you think will last longer, per dollar spent?
Oh, for the record, and speaking for fat people everywhere:
We don't like "overflowing" our seats any more than you like seeing it.
The rest of the country not only seems not to know what 'moderation' means, those that do seem to know have a problem figuring out exactly *what* should be the target of said moderation. People (not you specifically, Shakrai) need to stop blathering on about calories or whether you are or are not a sedentary sort of person, and start focusing on the specific types of foods that make people fat (hint: it ain't the meat or the fat content).
My husband and I are living proof that the problem with Americans' health is due to excess carbs, not excess calories or lack of activity.
I'm in the market for a GPS, and hadn't taken notice of the TomTom until now; I was even less aware that it runs Linux. I'd like to extend a big thank you - Microsoft's antics (and subsequent coverage here on Slashdot) have made the TomTom the top item in my list of choices.
Somehow, I don't think Microsoft would appreciate the thanks. :-)