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Comment Re:How real is the risk? (Score 2) 340

Long periods of sitting have been known to be dangerous for a while. However, long periods of standing aren't necessarily better. Yes, we didn't evolve to sit in chairs all day, but we also didn't evolve to spend all day standing rigidly upright either. Varicose veins, knee damage, etc are all real issues with people who stand around all day.

This is another one of those cases where we collectively go: "A is bad. Therefore, !A is good." Then a decade or two later we realize that the new extreme is just as bad as the old one and that the happy reality is in the middle (a mix of sitting, standing and moving, with regular transitions) where it always is.

Comment Re:Or Red Hat? (Score 1) 300

PulseAudio still can't handle USB headsets properly. I had a bitch of a time getting mine to work at all, and it still won't play volume below 20%. It also still crashes more than any other service on my machine.
NetworkManager has this ungodly habit of forgetting/losing access to all of my VPN passwords at seemingly random intervals. This has been happening for over a year with more than one distro.

They are both far more stable than they were many years ago, but in both cases they only just border on being usable.

Comment Re:Why nobody cares about Zune (Score 0) 300

Why carry two devices when one will do the job just fine?

Sometimes you don't want to carry a $400 phone around when the risk of damage is high (though given how often my friends crack their iPhone screens, standing still in a carpeted room is apparently dangerous). I wouldn't go for a bike ride or a hike with an expensive phone in my pocket given the risk of breaking it, but I don't give a damn if my $40 no-brand MP3 player breaks out on the trail.

Comment Re:Mostly because our food is shit. (Score 1) 409

(1) What specifically is bullshit? That your taste buds become desensitized when consuming a liter of high-sugar soda every day for years? That carrots are sweet? That you don't taste the (comparably low) sugar in a carrot after consuming lots of high-sugar drinks?

(2) Could you name some of these myriad fruits? I know that dried fruits are typically high in sugar (though also eaten in much smaller quantities), but that's about it. A quick search doesn't turn up a single fruit that I'd find in a typical grocery store outside of the few dried varieties that can even match the 26g of sugar per 8oz serving of Dr. Pepper (and I'm being generous in calling a serving 8oz instead of a 12oz can), let alone surpass it.

Comment Re:Mostly because our food is shit. (Score 5, Interesting) 409

A couple years ago I decided to give up refined sugar in general for a few months, particularly soda (like any good dev, I consumed more than my share of the stuff). After 3 months without, I drank a Dr. Pepper (my favorite) and it was disgusting. Tasted like a mouthful of sugar. Amazing how much you become desensitized to sugar, and the same holds for salt.

The real surprise was one day when I discovered that carrots are actually sweet. They just don't seem that way when you consume a metric ton of refined sugar every week. That really made me start wondering just how badly my perception of foods had been corrupted over the years.

Comment Re:Quiet? (Score 1) 558

Two less-common changes that make a noticeable difference are using software to change the spin profile of the CPU fan and boost the standby time for the drives so they spin down faster when unused. Once I had done all the usual tricks (silent rear case fan, PSU that is rated as being a quiet model, etc), I still saw a noticeable difference by tweaking those settings.

Never realized how much I hate whirring fans until I had a setup that allowed me to not hear them.

Comment Near Silent PC (Score 1) 558

Mobo: ASRock B85M Pro4
CPU: Core i3-4150
RAM: 16GB DDR3
Video Card: Geforce 750 Ti
PSU: Corsair CX430
Drives: Samsung 840 Evo (250GB) and Samsung 850 Evo (250GB)
Case: Some cheap case
OS: Windows 7

The best part of this is that after tweaking the fan controls and drive standby settings, the machine runs almost silent. You can just barely pick up a hum when sitting at the desk, more than a couple feet away you can't hear anything.

Not sure how I feel about running Windows 7 as my main OS after 15 years as a Linux guy, but it has been acceptable so far.

Comment Re:EA got too greedy (as usual) (Score 3, Interesting) 256

If you're that paranoid, run separate instances. One that you use online for purchases and downloads only, then copy the Steamapps subfolder for your game over to your offline-gaming instance. No achievements, no gameplay tracking, etc. An inconvenience, sure, but a fairly minor one.

I do this to keeps games sync'ed between my gaming PC and my laptop for traveling, but IIRC there's nothing that'll prevent you from having two copies of Steam installed on one PC.

Comment Re:computers (Score 1) 277

Not always. My alarm clock doesn't. The time displays in my kitchen don't. The clock in my car doesn't. Even some software doesn't. Ever used an in-house corporate scheduling app that has some piece of shit homebrew datetime library and doesn't properly account for DST when sending out meeting invites? I have, it causes problems. I've seen mail servers block all logins because the local clock didn't adjust for DST and the one-hour difference in times is triggering clock skew errors for everyone.

Hell, my android phone sometimes can't figure out what time zone I'm in. Multiple times, I've been sitting here in Florida, nowhere even remotely close to the next zone, and watched my phone repeatedly switch back and forth between Eastern and Central.

in a perfect world, technology would just figure it out. But it doesn't, not reliably enough that we can completely ignore the change.

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