Opera 9.10 handles it quite gracefully (instant load and "render" and no UI problems besides the obviously wide/tall page).. I suppose using a 2048x1536 screen to start with kinda helps, though...
In the past I've run into a few coders on different projects, some who are just contributors, others who are the "main" coder on some project. More times than I can count, I've had coders tell me, "Oh, it's your hardware, my code works fine, sod off." That's just plain laziness, when the coder won't entertain the idea that maybe, just *maybe*, their program is buggy. Then, there's the other type I've encountered that says, basically, "I wrote this program for myself. You want Feature X, you code it!" All I have to say is that if the program was written for your own use and you didn't want people filing bug reports, why the hell did you release it to the world? All you're doing then is giving open source a black mark.
The final type of person, the one that bothers me perhaps the most, is the coder or contributor who simply doesn't answer bug reports or emails (whatever the appropriate method may be) at all, even after several weeks of waiting. Are you guys *trying* to turn your users away!?
People really do see those buggy programs, folks. They show up in lists of stuff at places like FM and SF. If you think your code is good and you want to release it, great! But if you won't consider bug fixes, keep the damn thing to yourself and/or contribute your code to an already-existing project instead.
I've been a programmer since 1986 on another platform, but stopped in around 2000 and haven't come back since (outdated platform anyway, so my "skillz" don't exactly translate to modern programming methods), and I have never once considered telling someone off like these examples. What went wrong? When did the F/OSS community start to gain this elitist attitude?
Mod me down if you want, I don't care. I've got the karma to burn.
Probably not but give other slashdotters some time and they'll come up with a new hat to wear *over* the helmet. Of course, then you have to worry about someone picking up signals being broadcast off the interface cable.....
On the C64, you can make changes in screen/sprite/background colors and a few other things midway across a line, but mode changes, re-positioning sprites, etc. will only change at the beginning of the next raster line.
You're talking about screen jitter - the brief appearance of vertical or horizontal "cuts" in the image when something is moved or redrawn. Even Commodore 64's have to deal with this (unless you feed updates to the screen buffer more than 8 raster lines ahead of the actual raster position). The G(GGG...)P is talking about random character "snow" - like a screenful of random characters appearing briefly over the actual content of the display, most commonly seen when the screen scrolls. My old 286 had such an adapter with the snow problem.
My experience was exactly the opposite - replaced the stock heat-sink+fan on my AMD 64x2 3800+ not that long ago with a Spire "DiamondCool II"...Wasn't difficult at all, but I did have to yank the mainboard out to replace that little 2"x4" mounting plate behind the CPU. Otherwise, a little grease, two screws, and a fan plug and I was all set (and about 27 degrees centigrade cooler, to boot)
Note to self: Get a case that gives me access to the heat-sink mounting plate through the mainboard backplane next time.
Microsoft (and the companies who develop for MS operating systems) is/are *precisely* who he should blame, for requiring that much RAM in the first place. Thing is, one should equally blame every other OS and application developer who can't seem to eliminate the bloat in their code, even if some of those vendors happen to be Linux-specific. (*waits for karma to drop like a rock*)
I got my start during a time when 64K RAM was adequate for most things, including a fairly decent single-tasking GUI, and 512-1024k expansion was enough to reach that same GUI's peak performance. A time when everything fit nicely on a couple of 800K floppy disks. Of course I realize today's software is far more complex and needs more than it did in the 80's and 90's, but it just seems to me that we've really fallen far in the last decade or so, when someone can use a phrase like "only 512MB of RAM" in a sentence, as if that's really such a tiny amount.
Mod me down if you want, but you know I'm right.
Disclaimer: My current box carries an AMD 64x2 3800+, 1GB RAM, 160GB SATA disk, and a decent video card, and runs Ubuntu Edgy, just so I won't have to fight with software bloat now or in the forseeable future.
[...] it is completely wrong to say software development requires no capital. This is true even for open source software. Computers, electricity, shelter (for the programmer), food, etc are not free.
Capital is defined as the initial cost to start a project or a business, and the costs associated directly with that project or business, until such time as you start to turn a profit.
I've coded on and off since around 1986, but have had to make a living for myself since about 1997. I stopped coding in 2001, meaning there's a 4-year overlap between making a living and coding. For some odd reason, I still have to make a living (well, my husband takes care of that now), yet I'm no longer actively programming. In other words, your argument is bullshit.
As geeks, practically all of us already have a computer that we use for everyday activities, which is perfectly capable of taking on a modern programming project (even low-end P2-P3 class stuff is still good enough). As common as computers are in our society, how many people do you realistically think would go out and buy a new computer, who didn't already have one, just to code on it? Probably almost none. I'd say that rules out the computer as a cost, as well as the OS and apps that came with it.
We all need food no matter what it is we do for a living, or what our hobbies are, which rules out that cost.
We all need shelter regardless of job or hobbies, so that's out.
Most people who program also use their computers for other things that consume lots of CPU - movie encoding, games, or just browsing the web. We're talking maybe $5 a month on top of your "normal" bill to account for the extra CPU usage that a compiler needs - that kind of cost isn't capital, that's statistical noise.
Somehow I doubt you're going to spend more money on car insurance, fuel, etc. just because you're a programmer - it costs money to drive to a construction site, a secretarial job, fast food, you name it, so don't even try adding those things in.
So what's left? Nothing.
I can't speak for those who code for a living except that if you do, that means someone is paying you for your time anyway - time that would have to be paid for no matter what the job is. It isn't capital if the business paying you is making a profit from your work, just as it isn't capital if you flip burgers for $6 an hour.
I'd venture a guess and say that most commercial programmers could just as easily have used gcc along with their/your favorite editor to get started, "upgrading" to commercial tools later in the programming cycle when or if the project begins to exceed the capabilities of open-source tools, but your employer is still paying you to code for them, which means they're paying for your upgrades, and still they make a profit... So again, where's the capital?
Sure, you all can say "only bid what you want to pay, idiot!" but so far no one has mentioned a rather glaring hole in this arguement: sudden or unexpected changes in your financial status.
Let's say I find something I want - it's rare, but not in particularly high demand - maybe no one else but me wants it. I check the "Completed listings", ignoring everything that didn't sell, then I further ignore the highest and lowest few prices, figuring those are extraordinary. Finally, I estimate the average price against everything that remains and round it up or down from there depending on the overall distribution of winning bids, trying to set my target price somewhere in the middle of the most commonly paid prices (is there a term for this whole process?), and set that final figure in my head as "fair market value". We'll call it $200 for this example.
My nature is to try to get a good deal on something I buy when possible, so I place my bid, gradually upping it each time I see that I've been outbid, to a maximum of $150, banking on two ideas: 1) It's all I can afford to pay without causing financial strain. 2) The person I'm bidding against is genuinely interested in the same item, making my original assumption wrong (about my being the only interested party). I really, *really* want the item in question, and I figure my estimate of a fair value of $200 is good, but I can only afford to pay $150 anyway, so it looks like my competitor is going to win the auction. So be it, I'll wait and find another of that item sometime in the future... or so I thought.
Enter financial instability: Suppose my paycheck arrives between the time I placed that bid, and the end of the auction, and it's bigger than I expected. Or perhaps some utility bill for this month just arrived, and shows a significantly lower than expected price. Or maybe I decided a couple of hours later not to order the $25 worth of pizza I'd previously planned to order. Any way you look at it, my total funds available for this purchase just went up a little.
Here's where the problem is - I still wanted to only pay $150, but now I can go up to say $175, figuring the other guy will drop out before I get that high. All of a sudden, at the last minute, some shill (or maybe that other supposedly legit bidder) cranks the price up beyond $175, then withdraws, leaving me holding the high bid AND CHEATING ME OUT OF $25. Why should I be expected to pay for his fraudulent act? That's why I generally increment my bids personally, rather than letting eBay do their proxy thing, so I *don't* get screwed.
I've had all three of those financial instability examples happen to me during an auction or at a time when I'm considering heading out and buying something from a Brick-and-Mortar store, and I've been lucky enough not to get screwed, maybe because I take the above steps to help ensure I'm paying a fair price.
What's making Americans in general fat has little to do with urban sprawl. My arthritic knees notwithstanding, nothing is stopping me from walking one block to the local corner store to get the basics, or to the Dollar General across the street from it. Those places are pretty expensive, but what should I do, walk 7 miles to the nearest Wal*Mart Supercenter? I could maybe walk 1.7 miles to the nearest regular grocery store, knees notwithstanding, but with their prices relative to our budget, I might as well buy from the corner convenience store instead.
The problem isn't lack of activity, and it's not entirely from eating too much food - it's mostly from the types of food we DO eat too much of, and what gets put in those foods. Pasta, rice, bread, etc. are all bad news as they are all empty calories, they provide little or no nutrition (except where they've been fortified).
A baked potato sounds pretty good instead of that bowl of spaghetti, other vegetables are equally good, lean meat is good, and some fat is absolutely necessary as well (your brain needs it). Most of these provide basic nutrients of course, but they also provide plenty of vitamins and minerals. The lack of these is part of what leads to weight gain - without them, your body won't work properly, period.
Need butter flavor? Use the real stuff, it's far healthier than margarine... even those that claim zero trans-fatty acids still contain them in the form of [partially] hydrogenated oil. Do you really want a can of soda? Find one with Splenda or real sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup (and pay twice as much for it). Oh, check that bottle of salad dressing you use, and that ketchup, they have HFCS too, sometimes along with sugar. Love ramen noodles? Use half the package and add a can of vegetables (ramen noodles have absolutely no nutritional value by themselves.)
The biggest problem I see is money, which affects all of the above decisions. For example, my husband and I currently pay $493 rent for an ~800 sqft apartment (not near the water, and without even access to a pool), about $90 for electricity, about $50 for water/sewer/gas, $69 for car insurance, $45 for 7Mbps/512kbps broadband, and $45 for phone. That adds up to $831. Out of the $1130 we get a month (fixed income sucks), that leaves less than $350 to cover food, fuel for the car, car repairs and maintainance, sundries, clothing, laundry, computer repairs (lost a critical hard drive recently), medicine, and entertainment (mostly the occasional $5 DVD). I'm sure there are more things to add to this list, but I think you get the idea.
I read a study yesterday (which concluded in 1998, so it's kind of old) that clearly shows that the poorer you are, the fatter you tend to be. What's my point? Simple, we can't afford to buy truely healthy food, in the quantities necessary for a healthy diet, with all of the other expenses that have to be covered in some way from the money left over after paying the big bills, so we live on ramen, rice, hamburger, whatever we can get from food banks, pasta, and so on. Basically, whatever's cheap, and when it's cheap, it's generally unhealthy.
Physical activity helps, but it's not the answer, not when you have to exercise heavily for hours at a time every single day just to lose a few pounds a week. Besides, such long hours of exercise is unhealthy too, especially if you're more than a just little overweight (I am so overweight that if I tried this, I'd most likely have a heart attack, seriously). Physical exercise is good for toning and helping to raise your base metabolism, but it is NOT appropriate for losing weight, and I have had doctors tell me this in no uncertain terms.
Last I knew, AIDS was not considered a contagious disease, under the definition that "contagious" means something that is infectious, easily spread as an airborne agent or by casual contact. You know, stuff like pneumonia, black plague, measles, and so on.
And then there's the problem of people who have a legitimate need to enter the US (such as the thousands who came over before and after the Holocaust), but who are deathly sick and likely to spread whatever it is they have... Should those people be shut out and left to die, or taken in and treated (perhaps in an isolated facility where said disease is unlikely to spread to the general populace) ?
Ok, this bugs me, and has for a very long time. I don't know what other religions teach, but according to some Hebrew scholars, the concept of Satan was invented for the book of Job to tell a story of the generic struggle between good and evil. That book is considered to be a work of fiction - satan is not a real entity, and his character did not exist before the book of Job was written, as far as I can remember. Heaven and hell are not places you can be sent or go to, they are states of being you can achieve, consisting of the ultimate and total oneness with G-d or the ultimate and total absence of Him, respectively.
Now, it's certainly convenient to boil down the essence of all that is wrong or bad in this world into a concept of "evil" and assign labels to it like "devil" or "satan". To then turn around and use that label here in The Real World(tm) as though it refers to a real, tangible entity of whom you should fear, is to distort the meaning of the biblical text.
To believe there is a negative entity, equal in omnipotence to G-d, who forces everything to be in some sort of good/evil balance, is to profess a belief in two dieties, which was expressly forbidden in the first commandment. That commandment means, in plain English, "I am your diety, Adonai. You shall consider no one else to be a diety except Me." Plain and simple, cut and dried.
To be exact, the biblical text indicates that G-d explicitly said He will not alter/remove mankind's free will. That is to say, G-d won't do it simply because He declares it wrong to do so, not because He has no such ability. Now, if a person is already inclined in a certain way, G-d might set feelings or impressions in that person's mind that will probably cause them to act, but we're still free to ignore those feelings and make the "wrong" choice.
This thought that we have free will forms a goodly portion of the basis for Reform Judaism, which I practice. In particular, from it stems the notion of tikkun olam, which means "repair the world" -- it's a way of saying that it's not G-d's job to make a paradise out of this planet - it's our job, and this just happens to fit in with the reality of life.
This is not entirely true. Sure, things like double-pane windows might be common in your area, especially in new construction, but they're far from universal. Case in point: in 2003 when my husband and I came to Florida, we chose a small stand-alone cottage of around 430 sq ft (no time to find anything better) in St. Petersburg. Guessing about 20 years old, it was equipped with single-pane wood-framed glass windows, very little insulation, carpet of the type normally found in places of business, cheap exterior doors, and no central A/C or heating system, just wall/window units. Not sure of the amount/type of insulation in the attic, but the walls were certainly thin enough (probably just thick enough to meet whatever the building codes said back then). The house had wood siding and no plastic wrap as you've described. In other words, it was an old house that I doubt meets any modern building code.
Winter that year brought temps in the 34-36 degree range outside, and the inside temp was intolerably cold (maybe 40-45 degrees) without the heaters running. Similarly, inside temps during the Summer were unbearable if the A/C was off. We opted to add ceiling fans to help save energy, but this didn't help much.
When we moved into our next place, the windows there were also single-pane. Insulation was fair, temps were ok, but not something we could easily tolerate without heat/air. No ceiling fans (and no authority to install:( ). Central heat (electric...weird) and air. Ground-level. Eventually the electricity got too expensive for us to live there (plus they wanted to raise our rent), and the management wouldn't do anything about the noisy upstairs neighbor.
The next place after that, on the second floor in a multi-unit apartment of about 30 years old, was single-pane windows and central heat/air. I'd say the temps stayed fair in Winter or Summer but not something I'd like to put up with (in other words, turn that A/C on!). Moved to another unit in the same building - NO windows at all but it was ground-level. Had two large sliding glass doors that might have been double-pane, however old they were. This unit performed badly in summer - intolerably warm without the A/C.
The apartment we live in now is similar to the one with the electric heat. Ground floor, built a year or two ago (Google Earth still shows when this unit was under construction), and has central heat/air, but the windows are still single-pane (but with metal framing). Insulation is a little better, but the floors here are all hard vinyl tile (the kind you usually find in grocery stores). So far, Winter has been warmer than in previous years, so I can't say how well this building will handle it.
This thread begs the question: Why the hell does a program even read data into memory in such a way as to allow code found therein to be executeable in the first place?
Why can't text documents be filtered when they're loaded? Grossly oversimplifying the idea here, but can't you just run the document through some simple sequential reading routine, strip out what isn't text, and then finally store what remains into memory a byte/word at a time? And set that memory range as non-executeable (don't modern MMU's/CPU's do this?) before you start loading.
And if the document did contain invalid data, warn the user that the document is corrupt (or some other equally non-threatening term that implies an invalid but possibly displayable file) and offer them a chance to discard what was loaded. Sure everyone will just hit the "Continue Loading" button anyway, but that's ok - the document has already been filtered. All that's left, ideally, is good old-fashioned 7-bit ASCII text.
Yes it would be slower that using some sort of kernel block-load function, but it would also be safe. I don't know how you'd go about handling Unicode or stuff like UTF-8 (maybe translation tables?), but surely someone could figure out a similar solution.
I recognise the need to allocate memory before loading a document, and I don't see that being a problem with a filtering scheme.. sure, there would be some wasted memory should the document end up shorter once it's loaded (because something was filtered out), but who cares? We're only talking a few hundred K tops, probably far less (I'm not a virus/exploit coder, so I don't track stuff like that).
As for mixed-content documents like text+images, there's nothing that says you have to only have one filter that's good on the text portions - use additional filters to constrain the data being stored to valid images/sounds/whatever in addition to text.
Binary formats like MS.DOC? Well...tough one there, you'd probably have to interpret the document as it's being loaded, into something reasonably non-dangerous like XML or something, throwing out whatever you run into that's not valid data for that format.
You have obviously never been a victim of a rape. For almost 4 years I was periodically raped by my then stepfather. 25 years later, I still feel hurt and I still fight the demons he left me with. He spent something like 10 years behind bars for that crime, and has been in and out of jail since for other, lesser crimes. There is absolutely nothing whatsoever that a rapist or similar criminal can do to repay their debt to society, let alone their debt to me and the countless other rape victims there are out there today. NOTHING. Not even death is enough - his crime deserves an equally painfuland long-lasting punishment. Otherwise, where is the justice?
It also means that all the basic stuff (shifting gears, turning, accel/braking, etc) will work well on release and even better after the second generation comes out. The problem will be with the add-on (userspace) gadgets. The farther from the OEM the gadget is found, the less snug it fits into wherever it's supposed to go and the less of a match it is to the style of the rest of the car. If it/they don't fall off as soon as you pull out of the driveway, the fanciest of those gadgets will either leave out one or two different key features, forcing you to buy two or three similar gadgets to get everything you need, or everything is already there in the one gadget, and the gadget turns on, but it dies in a brief puff of smoke the first time you try to actually *use* some critical feature.
On extremely rare occasion, the one gadget you bought that goes in the engine compartment, the one just happens not to be open-source, causes your engine to seize or dash board to go dark. The problem is that without that closed-source gadget, you're restricted either to a text display full of numbers and stats that are impossible to read while driving, or the display is too grainy or doesn't keep up with live road/engine/fuel conditions.
But you can be damned sure that the data recorder that you asked the factory to install will preserve everything you've put on it safely, but you won't be able to use your neighbor's car/interface to read your data back should you total your car, despite the design of the recorder and everything associated with it being fully open source and available to everyone for the past few years, because noone has seen fit to design an adaptor for the neighbor's interface.
Seriously, after some 10 years using open source software (save for video drivers of course), the last couple of years has really started to follow this pattern in the Linux world, and it's becoming very discouraging.
...or they need to upgrade because of missing/broken support for certain hardware (ULi SATA), while not being able to downgrade to a previous version that does work, because then you're running too old of a kernel to work with the latest version of your video driver (nVidia), which is needed because older versions of said driver break the driver for an unrelated piece of hardware (Pinnacle DC10plus).
...or if you need to update because of some critical security bug that could break things that are very important to you (I've been lucky in that respect).
...or if you just don't trust a certain version of the kernel because of reports of buggy drivers (anything dealing with AGP, really).
...or if you want to run a specific version of a program because it finally adds support for some random piece of hardware that you just happen to have, but can't use yet because your distro is out of date.
There are plenty of legitimate reasons to upgrade your kernel or your entire distribution, it just depends on what you use your box for. My and my husband's workstations run Edgy with the most recent stable kernel because we need them to work just right, yet our server is still running Breezy (with a fairly recent kernel) just because that old box doesn't really need anything newer.
"The word LEGO® is a brand name and is very special to all of us in the LEGO Group Companies. We would sincerely like your help in keeping it special. Please always refer to our bricks as 'LEGO Bricks or Toys' and not 'LEGOS.' By doing so, you will be helping to protect and preserve a brand of which we are very proud and that stands for quality the world over. Thank you! Susan Williams, Consumer Services."
That should settle this arguement once and for all, as this exact statement can be found on some boxes of bricks as well (though neither of the two I have handy).
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Opera 9.10 handles it quite gracefully (instant load and "render" and no UI problems besides the obviously wide/tall page).. I suppose using a 2048x1536 screen to start with kinda helps, though...
I'm an assembly programmer and I still don't know what a heap is, you insensitive clod!
The final type of person, the one that bothers me perhaps the most, is the coder or contributor who simply doesn't answer bug reports or emails (whatever the appropriate method may be) at all, even after several weeks of waiting. Are you guys *trying* to turn your users away!?
People really do see those buggy programs, folks. They show up in lists of stuff at places like FM and SF. If you think your code is good and you want to release it, great! But if you won't consider bug fixes, keep the damn thing to yourself and/or contribute your code to an already-existing project instead.
I've been a programmer since 1986 on another platform, but stopped in around 2000 and haven't come back since (outdated platform anyway, so my "skillz" don't exactly translate to modern programming methods), and I have never once considered telling someone off like these examples. What went wrong? When did the F/OSS community start to gain this elitist attitude?
Mod me down if you want, I don't care. I've got the karma to burn.
Probably not but give other slashdotters some time and they'll come up with a new hat to wear *over* the helmet. Of course, then you have to worry about someone picking up signals being broadcast off the interface cable.....
"It looks like, they are connected..." [puts on sunglasses] "...and it's serial."
On the C64, you can make changes in screen/sprite/background colors and a few other things midway across a line, but mode changes, re-positioning sprites, etc. will only change at the beginning of the next raster line.
You're talking about screen jitter - the brief appearance of vertical or horizontal "cuts" in the image when something is moved or redrawn. Even Commodore 64's have to deal with this (unless you feed updates to the screen buffer more than 8 raster lines ahead of the actual raster position). The G(GGG...)P is talking about random character "snow" - like a screenful of random characters appearing briefly over the actual content of the display, most commonly seen when the screen scrolls. My old 286 had such an adapter with the snow problem.
Note to self: Get a case that gives me access to the heat-sink mounting plate through the mainboard backplane next time.
I got my start during a time when 64K RAM was adequate for most things, including a fairly decent single-tasking GUI, and 512-1024k expansion was enough to reach that same GUI's peak performance. A time when everything fit nicely on a couple of 800K floppy disks. Of course I realize today's software is far more complex and needs more than it did in the 80's and 90's, but it just seems to me that we've really fallen far in the last decade or so, when someone can use a phrase like "only 512MB of RAM" in a sentence, as if that's really such a tiny amount.
Mod me down if you want, but you know I'm right.
Disclaimer: My current box carries an AMD 64x2 3800+, 1GB RAM, 160GB SATA disk, and a decent video card, and runs Ubuntu Edgy, just so I won't have to fight with software bloat now or in the forseeable future.
Oy... it's times like this that I wish slashdot had a "-1, Bad Joke" mod option...
Capital is defined as the initial cost to start a project or a business, and the costs associated directly with that project or business, until such time as you start to turn a profit.
I've coded on and off since around 1986, but have had to make a living for myself since about 1997. I stopped coding in 2001, meaning there's a 4-year overlap between making a living and coding. For some odd reason, I still have to make a living (well, my husband takes care of that now), yet I'm no longer actively programming. In other words, your argument is bullshit.
As geeks, practically all of us already have a computer that we use for everyday activities, which is perfectly capable of taking on a modern programming project (even low-end P2-P3 class stuff is still good enough). As common as computers are in our society, how many people do you realistically think would go out and buy a new computer, who didn't already have one, just to code on it? Probably almost none. I'd say that rules out the computer as a cost, as well as the OS and apps that came with it.
We all need food no matter what it is we do for a living, or what our hobbies are, which rules out that cost.
We all need shelter regardless of job or hobbies, so that's out.
Most people who program also use their computers for other things that consume lots of CPU - movie encoding, games, or just browsing the web. We're talking maybe $5 a month on top of your "normal" bill to account for the extra CPU usage that a compiler needs - that kind of cost isn't capital, that's statistical noise.
Somehow I doubt you're going to spend more money on car insurance, fuel, etc. just because you're a programmer - it costs money to drive to a construction site, a secretarial job, fast food, you name it, so don't even try adding those things in.
So what's left? Nothing.
I can't speak for those who code for a living except that if you do, that means someone is paying you for your time anyway - time that would have to be paid for no matter what the job is. It isn't capital if the business paying you is making a profit from your work, just as it isn't capital if you flip burgers for $6 an hour.
I'd venture a guess and say that most commercial programmers could just as easily have used gcc along with their/your favorite editor to get started, "upgrading" to commercial tools later in the programming cycle when or if the project begins to exceed the capabilities of open-source tools, but your employer is still paying you to code for them, which means they're paying for your upgrades, and still they make a profit... So again, where's the capital?
Let's say I find something I want - it's rare, but not in particularly high demand - maybe no one else but me wants it. I check the "Completed listings", ignoring everything that didn't sell, then I further ignore the highest and lowest few prices, figuring those are extraordinary. Finally, I estimate the average price against everything that remains and round it up or down from there depending on the overall distribution of winning bids, trying to set my target price somewhere in the middle of the most commonly paid prices (is there a term for this whole process?), and set that final figure in my head as "fair market value". We'll call it $200 for this example.
My nature is to try to get a good deal on something I buy when possible, so I place my bid, gradually upping it each time I see that I've been outbid, to a maximum of $150, banking on two ideas: 1) It's all I can afford to pay without causing financial strain. 2) The person I'm bidding against is genuinely interested in the same item, making my original assumption wrong (about my being the only interested party). I really, *really* want the item in question, and I figure my estimate of a fair value of $200 is good, but I can only afford to pay $150 anyway, so it looks like my competitor is going to win the auction. So be it, I'll wait and find another of that item sometime in the future... or so I thought.
Enter financial instability: Suppose my paycheck arrives between the time I placed that bid, and the end of the auction, and it's bigger than I expected. Or perhaps some utility bill for this month just arrived, and shows a significantly lower than expected price. Or maybe I decided a couple of hours later not to order the $25 worth of pizza I'd previously planned to order. Any way you look at it, my total funds available for this purchase just went up a little.
Here's where the problem is - I still wanted to only pay $150, but now I can go up to say $175, figuring the other guy will drop out before I get that high. All of a sudden, at the last minute, some shill (or maybe that other supposedly legit bidder) cranks the price up beyond $175, then withdraws, leaving me holding the high bid AND CHEATING ME OUT OF $25. Why should I be expected to pay for his fraudulent act? That's why I generally increment my bids personally, rather than letting eBay do their proxy thing, so I *don't* get screwed.
I've had all three of those financial instability examples happen to me during an auction or at a time when I'm considering heading out and buying something from a Brick-and-Mortar store, and I've been lucky enough not to get screwed, maybe because I take the above steps to help ensure I'm paying a fair price.
The problem isn't lack of activity, and it's not entirely from eating too much food - it's mostly from the types of food we DO eat too much of, and what gets put in those foods. Pasta, rice, bread, etc. are all bad news as they are all empty calories, they provide little or no nutrition (except where they've been fortified).
A baked potato sounds pretty good instead of that bowl of spaghetti, other vegetables are equally good, lean meat is good, and some fat is absolutely necessary as well (your brain needs it). Most of these provide basic nutrients of course, but they also provide plenty of vitamins and minerals. The lack of these is part of what leads to weight gain - without them, your body won't work properly, period.
Need butter flavor? Use the real stuff, it's far healthier than margarine... even those that claim zero trans-fatty acids still contain them in the form of [partially] hydrogenated oil. Do you really want a can of soda? Find one with Splenda or real sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup (and pay twice as much for it). Oh, check that bottle of salad dressing you use, and that ketchup, they have HFCS too, sometimes along with sugar. Love ramen noodles? Use half the package and add a can of vegetables (ramen noodles have absolutely no nutritional value by themselves.)
The biggest problem I see is money, which affects all of the above decisions. For example, my husband and I currently pay $493 rent for an ~800 sqft apartment (not near the water, and without even access to a pool), about $90 for electricity, about $50 for water/sewer/gas, $69 for car insurance, $45 for 7Mbps/512kbps broadband, and $45 for phone. That adds up to $831. Out of the $1130 we get a month (fixed income sucks), that leaves less than $350 to cover food, fuel for the car, car repairs and maintainance, sundries, clothing, laundry, computer repairs (lost a critical hard drive recently), medicine, and entertainment (mostly the occasional $5 DVD). I'm sure there are more things to add to this list, but I think you get the idea.
I read a study yesterday (which concluded in 1998, so it's kind of old) that clearly shows that the poorer you are, the fatter you tend to be. What's my point? Simple, we can't afford to buy truely healthy food, in the quantities necessary for a healthy diet, with all of the other expenses that have to be covered in some way from the money left over after paying the big bills, so we live on ramen, rice, hamburger, whatever we can get from food banks, pasta, and so on. Basically, whatever's cheap, and when it's cheap, it's generally unhealthy.
Physical activity helps, but it's not the answer, not when you have to exercise heavily for hours at a time every single day just to lose a few pounds a week. Besides, such long hours of exercise is unhealthy too, especially if you're more than a just little overweight (I am so overweight that if I tried this, I'd most likely have a heart attack, seriously). Physical exercise is good for toning and helping to raise your base metabolism, but it is NOT appropriate for losing weight, and I have had doctors tell me this in no uncertain terms.
Oh, you mean like this young lady. (I wonder which came first?)
Yeah, but installing Gentoo is already slow enough on modern hardware!
And then there's the problem of people who have a legitimate need to enter the US (such as the thousands who came over before and after the Holocaust), but who are deathly sick and likely to spread whatever it is they have... Should those people be shut out and left to die, or taken in and treated (perhaps in an isolated facility where said disease is unlikely to spread to the general populace) ?
Now, it's certainly convenient to boil down the essence of all that is wrong or bad in this world into a concept of "evil" and assign labels to it like "devil" or "satan". To then turn around and use that label here in The Real World(tm) as though it refers to a real, tangible entity of whom you should fear, is to distort the meaning of the biblical text.
To believe there is a negative entity, equal in omnipotence to G-d, who forces everything to be in some sort of good/evil balance, is to profess a belief in two dieties, which was expressly forbidden in the first commandment. That commandment means, in plain English, "I am your diety, Adonai. You shall consider no one else to be a diety except Me." Plain and simple, cut and dried.
This thought that we have free will forms a goodly portion of the basis for Reform Judaism, which I practice. In particular, from it stems the notion of tikkun olam, which means "repair the world" -- it's a way of saying that it's not G-d's job to make a paradise out of this planet - it's our job, and this just happens to fit in with the reality of life.
Winter that year brought temps in the 34-36 degree range outside, and the inside temp was intolerably cold (maybe 40-45 degrees) without the heaters running. Similarly, inside temps during the Summer were unbearable if the A/C was off. We opted to add ceiling fans to help save energy, but this didn't help much.
When we moved into our next place, the windows there were also single-pane. Insulation was fair, temps were ok, but not something we could easily tolerate without heat/air. No ceiling fans (and no authority to install :( ). Central heat (electric...weird) and air. Ground-level. Eventually the electricity got too expensive for us to live there (plus they wanted to raise our rent), and the management wouldn't do anything about the noisy upstairs neighbor.
The next place after that, on the second floor in a multi-unit apartment of about 30 years old, was single-pane windows and central heat/air. I'd say the temps stayed fair in Winter or Summer but not something I'd like to put up with (in other words, turn that A/C on!). Moved to another unit in the same building - NO windows at all but it was ground-level. Had two large sliding glass doors that might have been double-pane, however old they were. This unit performed badly in summer - intolerably warm without the A/C.
The apartment we live in now is similar to the one with the electric heat. Ground floor, built a year or two ago (Google Earth still shows when this unit was under construction), and has central heat/air, but the windows are still single-pane (but with metal framing). Insulation is a little better, but the floors here are all hard vinyl tile (the kind you usually find in grocery stores). So far, Winter has been warmer than in previous years, so I can't say how well this building will handle it.
Why can't text documents be filtered when they're loaded? Grossly oversimplifying the idea here, but can't you just run the document through some simple sequential reading routine, strip out what isn't text, and then finally store what remains into memory a byte/word at a time? And set that memory range as non-executeable (don't modern MMU's/CPU's do this?) before you start loading.
And if the document did contain invalid data, warn the user that the document is corrupt (or some other equally non-threatening term that implies an invalid but possibly displayable file) and offer them a chance to discard what was loaded. Sure everyone will just hit the "Continue Loading" button anyway, but that's ok - the document has already been filtered. All that's left, ideally, is good old-fashioned 7-bit ASCII text.
Yes it would be slower that using some sort of kernel block-load function, but it would also be safe. I don't know how you'd go about handling Unicode or stuff like UTF-8 (maybe translation tables?), but surely someone could figure out a similar solution.
I recognise the need to allocate memory before loading a document, and I don't see that being a problem with a filtering scheme.. sure, there would be some wasted memory should the document end up shorter once it's loaded (because something was filtered out), but who cares? We're only talking a few hundred K tops, probably far less (I'm not a virus/exploit coder, so I don't track stuff like that).
As for mixed-content documents like text+images, there's nothing that says you have to only have one filter that's good on the text portions - use additional filters to constrain the data being stored to valid images/sounds/whatever in addition to text.
Binary formats like MS .DOC? Well...tough one there, you'd probably have to interpret the document as it's being loaded, into something reasonably non-dangerous like XML or something, throwing out whatever you run into that's not valid data for that format.
You have obviously never been a victim of a rape. For almost 4 years I was periodically raped by my then stepfather. 25 years later, I still feel hurt and I still fight the demons he left me with. He spent something like 10 years behind bars for that crime, and has been in and out of jail since for other, lesser crimes. There is absolutely nothing whatsoever that a rapist or similar criminal can do to repay their debt to society, let alone their debt to me and the countless other rape victims there are out there today. NOTHING. Not even death is enough - his crime deserves an equally painfuland long-lasting punishment. Otherwise, where is the justice?
On extremely rare occasion, the one gadget you bought that goes in the engine compartment, the one just happens not to be open-source, causes your engine to seize or dash board to go dark. The problem is that without that closed-source gadget, you're restricted either to a text display full of numbers and stats that are impossible to read while driving, or the display is too grainy or doesn't keep up with live road/engine/fuel conditions.
But you can be damned sure that the data recorder that you asked the factory to install will preserve everything you've put on it safely, but you won't be able to use your neighbor's car/interface to read your data back should you total your car, despite the design of the recorder and everything associated with it being fully open source and available to everyone for the past few years, because noone has seen fit to design an adaptor for the neighbor's interface.
Seriously, after some 10 years using open source software (save for video drivers of course), the last couple of years has really started to follow this pattern in the Linux world, and it's becoming very discouraging.
There are plenty of legitimate reasons to upgrade your kernel or your entire distribution, it just depends on what you use your box for. My and my husband's workstations run Edgy with the most recent stable kernel because we need them to work just right, yet our server is still running Breezy (with a fairly recent kernel) just because that old box doesn't really need anything newer.
"The word LEGO® is a brand name and is very special to all of us in the LEGO Group Companies. We would sincerely like your help in keeping it special. Please always refer to our bricks as 'LEGO Bricks or Toys' and not 'LEGOS.' By doing so, you will be helping to protect and preserve a brand of which we are very proud and that stands for quality the world over. Thank you! Susan Williams, Consumer Services."
That should settle this arguement once and for all, as this exact statement can be found on some boxes of bricks as well (though neither of the two I have handy).
He pulled those numbers out of Carl Sagan's ass, like he said!