As a resident of Palm Beach County, I find the widely-accepted claim that the ballot was complicated to be highly offensive.
You offend my sensibilities by suggesting that my neighbors have trouble adapting to poor user interfaces.
There was nothing novel about the ballot design (it has been used in PBC before).
We've always used poor interfaces; therefore, we must maintain this grand Floridian tradition.
There was nothing about the ballot design that an average 3rd grader could not grasp.
Furthermore, you insult my children's intelligence. They've always scored in the 97th percentile on standardized tests, and have absolutely no trouble filling in those bubbles with #2 pencils.
The fact that 19K ballots were discarded in the presidential tally for double-punching is not a surprise - because it happens every time there's a presidential election in PBC! (1996 it was 16K IIRC.)
As a matter of fact, we point to our poor user interface design with pride. Regardless of the fact that 16,000 voters were disenfranchised in 1996, we steadfastly stuck by our ballot. Maybe in 2004 we can set a new world record of invalid ballots!
Why is it that only after the fact, when it became apparent that Gore was going to lose, did these thousands of people turn up, hell-bent on telling the world that they screwed it up? If they're so certain, why didn't they address the problem at the appropriate time, when they were in the polling location casting their vote?
Our poorly-designed ballots have the wonderful side-effect of forcing voters to check and double-check the appropriate method with their polling monitors, thereby breaking up the monotony of the election official's boring day. What's more, the voting line will back up, which will help forge a community relationship with fellow voters. Too many Floridians live lonely, solitary lives -- we can help bring people together.
Why is the system unfair now, after the fact, when all the mechanisms were in place at the appropriate time to address their confusion? You can't change the rules after the game has been played - remember the ex post facto clause in the Constitution?
How dare disgruntled voters try to make their grievances heard! These protests and demonstrations threaten the sanctity of our poorly-designed ballot, a tradition which we must keep for future elections.
But find 19K (mostly Democrat) friends who made the same undeniably stupid mistake and it's not embarassing any more?
After all, if these nutty super-liberal Democrats don't have the intelligence to properly fill out a ballot, how educated could their opinion on who should run the country be?
1) The notion of voter registration is quaintly arranged to make voting more convenient for the government and the parties in power, not more convenient for the voters. Let's figure out a more efficient way to check the validity of a voter's identify at the polls, and scrap the idea of registration before voting day.
If voter registration isn't tied to a specific identification system, what's to prevent someone from voting multiple times, short of a real-time networked voting system (which is technilogically impossible at this time)? Perhaps you would suggest that voting location be restricted based on residence, but people move and location of residence is notoriously difficult to prove. I could vote in my neighborhood based on my driver's license address, and in my parents' neighborhood based on my Social Security address, for example.
3) Just exactly why isn't voting day a national holiday?!?
Or better still, why not hold elections on the weekend, or over several days? I still don't understand those who take off from work to vote -- surely one doesn't have to lose an 8-hour workday to cast a 5-minute vote.
The overwhelming fact often ignored when discussing North American tribal societies is that the incredible abundance of resources made most notions of ownership unnecessay.
Bingo.
Digital expressions of intellectual property are, for practical purposes, infinite. They can be copied and recopied endlessly, storage is almost free, and bandwidth is improving in leaps and bounds.
Is there any reason to hoard these resources through legislation?
Sorry for posting what is obviously old news. I should point out that the post in question was on a Saturday, and I am (like many/.ers) a weekday reader.
- Richard
Re:A must-read for any Open Source fan
on
Hackers
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· Score: 1
Maybe houses should be designed with room for a book case in the bathroom.
Wow! That's a great idea -- hey, wait a minute, the Sims aren't taking reading material before they pixelate! Darn....
Quite often, I find that I'm the latest native English speaker left in Brooklyn. I walk down the street and hear Russian, Chinese, Korean, Hebrew, Arabic, etc.
Only very rarely do I hear English (and everyone knows that Brooklyn English barely resembles what anyone else speaks).
I agree that TV is largely a waste of time, BUT -- any attempt on the FCC's part to put copy-protection in over-the-air broadcast must be seen as a battle in the larger war on our rights to our legitamitely acquired bits. And this applies to all bits -- video, music, literature, art, etc.
- Richie
...is the lack of a central packaging organization, I think.
And how should the central packaging organization (the RPM police) handle alpha and beta versions and patches, not to mention coordinating with thousands of developers?
Never solve with bureaucracy what can be handled through coordination.
This, to my mind, is the single greatest failing of RPM -- the attempt by RHAT to classify every Linux package in a 2-level strict hierarchy, to create strict dependancies on RHAT-specific versions.
Why do the Windows users have it so much easier? Partially because they're only interested in installing specific applications, not libraries or frameworks. But think for a minute about the standard InstallShield (or similar) process. You're given the option of selecting an install directory, of searching (or pointing out) binary dependancies, and of selecting various components to install (or not).
Does RPM even come close to that kind of ease of configuration?
Rather than roll your own linker, I suggest you look at the extremely useful GNU utility stow, which can intelligently link all bin, lib, and man files -- and, more importantly, remove the symbolic links when it's time to upgrade.
I'm amazed that so many of the comments on/. (as well as in the article) focus on only 2 things:
Technology (2D hand-drawn vs. 3D CGI)
Money (expenditures and profits)
Does nobody judge a film based on its content??!! Granted, part of the composition of a movie -- story, dialogue, visuals, music (soundtrack & songs) -- is affected by the technology used to create it, but what it boils down to are the creative elements that have been employed (along with judicious editting).
People talk about the "success" of Disney in the late-80s/early-90s as a business artifact, as though Michael Eisner was responsible for crafting the gems that "The Little Mermaid" and "Beauty and the Beast" are. Come on! "Mermaid" and "B&tB" are the products of the genius of Alan Menken & Howard Ashman (largely Ashman story-wise, the team musically). Disney didn't magically go from "The Black Cauldron" and "The Great Mouse Detective" to "Mermaid" without a concerted creative effort.
Pixar's films (I refuse to call them Disney, other than Disney-distributed) are eye-popping treats thanks not only to their talented computer animation team, but also to their story and design teams. Face it, no matter how visually gorgeous "A Bug's Life" was, if it had had a banal storyline or flat dialogue, it would not be the masterpiece that it is.
Sadly, sometimes the bottom line does not correspond to artistic merit. "The Iron Giant" is one of the best movie's I have seen in the last decade; unfortunately, WB didn't have the guts to market it appropriately, and it was a box office failure.
Ask yourself: how many of these films have you seen, and why is watching one a more fulfulling experience than the other? Examine the elements carefully.
...is that what we need right now is a working browser! Most users are not dependant on Composer, Mail or News -- anyone who wants an easier to manage app has a wide variety of choices, such as Frontpage, Dreamweaver, Cyberstudio, Outlook (for the security-challanged), Lotus Notes, Eudora, or Agent. And that's just for the non-geeks who aren't using emacs for everything:) (psgml-mode, vm, bbdb, and gnus)
But the Mozilla team, for reasons that the remainder of the developer community has yet to fathom, is insistant on supporting every feature of NS4.x before releasing a product -- and more! "It's not a browser" is the party line: "It's an application framework". But a browser --specifically a HTML-rendering, Java(ECMA)script-interpreting, Java-plugin-friendly engine -- is what is desperately needed right now, especially for users of alternative operating systems.
What the WaSP is expressing is the frustration of being stuck waiting for the one component that matters most, simply because the Mozilla team feels that it's crucial to have everything for the initial release. Mozilla has certainly disobeyed ESR's cardinal rule of open source development: "Release early, release often."
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Team Mozilla is going to hear a lot more of these complaints.
It's clearly a conflict of interest to produce a brand survey, obstensibly to fairly and accurately gauge the strength of well-known brands, and to promote oneself as a Brand Name Developer. I mean, these are the guys that came up with Prozac!
The above notwithstanding, it's also somewhat ludicrous to rank the Top Brands(tm) across all products and industries. How can anyone compare Coke to MS, or Intel to General Mills (the maker of Cheerios, which doesn't seem to appear in the top 10)? This list really needs to broken out into industry sectors.
I suppose that if we accept that the American (or global, perhaps) consumer is dumb enough to be swayed by the power of a brand, rather than the quality of a product, then the American manufacturer's Marketing department will be dumb enough to buy this report.
I met Linus at the Transmeta/Crusoe pavillion. He seemed to be travelling (somewhat) incognito, but was accosted by several reporters and Linux enthusiasts. To give you an idea of how incognito he was, the neat little battery-powered fans that Transmeta was giving away attracted a much larger crowd.
He definitely seemed out of his element, confessing to a reporter that this was his first time at PC Expo. When pressed for "the thing that impressed him most at the show", he hesitated, then answered that the huge IBM displays were "nice". I was having a hard time believing that this was the same guy who walked out to thunderous applause at LinuxWorld...
The USPS is a fairly poor example of modernization in government, particularly since it's the most "privitized" branch. They brag about how self-sufficient they are (whoa-- time for another $.01 raise in postage), while trying to create a need to keep themselves in business. Electronic bill payment will diminish the need for pricey 1st-class-mailed statements? No problem, let the USPS (??!) be your e-paying service -- at twice the price of non-e-payment (stamps and checks). Spam, replacing junk mail? Never! The USPS makes it even easier to buy bulk postage online!
I have no sympathy for a superfluous branch of the government that fights its own natural demise. More power to the FedExes and UPSes of the world.
The US Department of Justice called for the breakup of Microsoft into 2 companies weeks ago.
Today's big new is that Judge Jackson issued his ruling, agreeing with the DoJ on practically every point.
Remember, the case is DoJ vs. MSFT, with federal judge Thomas P. Jackson as the final arbiter. Well, at least Jackson was the final arbiter -- now, it's up to the Court of Appeals or Supreme Court (depending on whether the DoJ requests a "fast track" appeal and whether Jackson agrees to it).
To some extent, this already happened: You probably have a watch, an alarm clock and maybe a calculator. Your computer can tell the time, sound alarms and add up. Why did you buy those things then?
"Second, and equally important, is the fact that our pay site is an adult site. It is for adults only and we mean it. We take the responsibility of limiting access to our site and our content to adults very seriously. Once material is stolen from our site and posted to a global newsgroup we have no control whatsoever over who sees it. We certainly cannot tolerate or abet such a situation.
Sure, it's easy for Penthouse to claim the moral high ground when they're being ripped off. But if adult content providers are so concerned about minors having access to inappropriate material, how could Playboy bring a case to the Supreme Court (and win!), bemoaning the fact that their "freedom of expression" is violated by forcing cable providers to scramble adult channels?
I realize that Playboy and Penthouse are 2 distinct and rivaling entities, but the Supreme Court ruling applies to the entire adult entertainment industry. And the fact is that that entire industry doesn't give a damn about kids.
this is at AP's website: http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTI D=TECHNOLOGY&STORYID=APIS73DP9A00
I'm on the team that manages the AP's news site (wire.ap.org). The truth is, you can't go directly to the URL that was posted here. The Wire is designed such that you need to enter a member's co-branded site, but as a non-profit orginization, we don't promote ourselves. Sorry!
(I don't make the rules; I just carry them out technically. The opinions here are mine alone and not my employers'.)
As a side note, I'd like to point out that this release is really big news because the GnuCash team finally realized that deploying on 3 GUI widget platforms simultaneously (Motif, GTK, and Qt) was sapping at their development time and just leading to breakage. The previous post-xacc releases were a huge pain to build, which lead to the emergence of other Quicken substitutes like Gnofin.
From my initial test run, it looks like GnuCash has a new customer. Congratulations!
"The Secret of NIMH" was Don Bluth's work, not Disney's. It remains perhaps his most best work, with the possible exception of "An American Tail". The rest of the lot ("Penguin and the Pebble", "All Dogs Go to Heaven", etc.) aren't even up to the level of Disney's direct-to-TV/video productions, both animation-wise and story-wise.
Hopefully the RealPlayer for Linux won't hijack all my netscape/system settings like the mac version did. (NO I don't want to use RealPlayer to play WAVs. NO I don't want to use it to play MP3s...)
It can't. Remember that Linux user don't have a ridiculously convoluted mechanism for determining default apps for file types (suffixes/mime types) yet. RealPlayer can't take over MP3s according to the "system" because there's no such thing as an associated system file type. Perhaps your GNOME or KDE settings can be changed, but that's on a user-by-user basis. And you can always change them back.
NetCenter and the default home page
on
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There's tons of money to be made in browsers, but you probably don't like this way either: the money is in giving away browsers that try to point users to certain portals. The reason for the dearth of them is that Microsoft abused its monopoly power. If other players had equal opportunity to cut deals with hardware vendors and/or ISPs to use their customized browsers, you would see more competition in the short run.
The only page that a distinct browser (say, the CNet browser, for example) would be able to "dictate" would be the default home page. This is the only reason that Netscape was able to use NetCenter as its chief money-maker during the last few months of its life as an independent company.
Curiously enough, this first page pole-position doesn't seem to apply to TV, as no one would imply that channel 2 has an advantage from being the first channel that a viewer will see when he plugs in his set. As Net newbies become more experienced, the default home page advantage will erode further.
Then again, I'll let you try to explain that to my father-in-law who feels most comfortable when he can start at AT&T Worldnet's default home page, "just like the software set it up to be"....
AOL now holds the lion's share of the ISP markets (their own and Time-Warner cable), tons of content (Time-Warner), the entire Instant Messaging arena (AIM and ICQ), the future of streaming (WinAmp and Spinner), and, of course, the once-and-future king of browsers, Netscape(/Mozilla).
By my reckoning, all that AOL lacks is:
A hardware manufacturer (and distribution channel)
Productivity software
Let's say that Steve Case comes to you with a sweet buyout offer. Do you sell, or gracefully decline? And if Corel does become part of the AOL Empire, would you stay on?
Slashdot Mirror
- Richie
As a resident of Palm Beach County, I find the widely-accepted claim that the ballot was complicated to be highly offensive.
You offend my sensibilities by suggesting that my neighbors have trouble adapting to poor user interfaces.
There was nothing novel about the ballot design (it has been used in PBC before).
We've always used poor interfaces; therefore, we must maintain this grand Floridian tradition.
There was nothing about the ballot design that an average 3rd grader could not grasp.
Furthermore, you insult my children's intelligence. They've always scored in the 97th percentile on standardized tests, and have absolutely no trouble filling in those bubbles with #2 pencils.
The fact that 19K ballots were discarded in the presidential tally for double-punching is not a surprise - because it happens every time there's a presidential election in PBC! (1996 it was 16K IIRC.)
As a matter of fact, we point to our poor user interface design with pride. Regardless of the fact that 16,000 voters were disenfranchised in 1996, we steadfastly stuck by our ballot. Maybe in 2004 we can set a new world record of invalid ballots!
Why is it that only after the fact, when it became apparent that Gore was going to lose, did these thousands of people turn up, hell-bent on telling the world that they screwed it up? If they're so certain, why didn't they address the problem at the appropriate time, when they were in the polling location casting their vote?
Our poorly-designed ballots have the wonderful side-effect of forcing voters to check and double-check the appropriate method with their polling monitors, thereby breaking up the monotony of the election official's boring day. What's more, the voting line will back up, which will help forge a community relationship with fellow voters. Too many Floridians live lonely, solitary lives -- we can help bring people together.
Why is the system unfair now, after the fact, when all the mechanisms were in place at the appropriate time to address their confusion? You can't change the rules after the game has been played - remember the ex post facto clause in the Constitution?
How dare disgruntled voters try to make their grievances heard! These protests and demonstrations threaten the sanctity of our poorly-designed ballot, a tradition which we must keep for future elections.
But find 19K (mostly Democrat) friends who made the same undeniably stupid mistake and it's not embarassing any more?
After all, if these nutty super-liberal Democrats don't have the intelligence to properly fill out a ballot, how educated could their opinion on who should run the country be?
(no offense intended, other than to elitism)
- Richie
If voter registration isn't tied to a specific identification system, what's to prevent someone from voting multiple times, short of a real-time networked voting system (which is technilogically impossible at this time)? Perhaps you would suggest that voting location be restricted based on residence, but people move and location of residence is notoriously difficult to prove. I could vote in my neighborhood based on my driver's license address, and in my parents' neighborhood based on my Social Security address, for example.
3) Just exactly why isn't voting day a national holiday?!?
Or better still, why not hold elections on the weekend, or over several days? I still don't understand those who take off from work to vote -- surely one doesn't have to lose an 8-hour workday to cast a 5-minute vote.
- Richie
Bingo.
Digital expressions of intellectual property are, for practical purposes, infinite. They can be copied and recopied endlessly, storage is almost free, and bandwidth is improving in leaps and bounds.
Is there any reason to hoard these resources through legislation?
- Richie
- Richard
Wow! That's a great idea -- hey, wait a minute, the Sims aren't taking reading material before they pixelate! Darn....
- Richie
Only very rarely do I hear English (and everyone knows that Brooklyn English barely resembles what anyone else speaks).
- Richie
I agree that TV is largely a waste of time, BUT -- any attempt on the FCC's part to put copy-protection in over-the-air broadcast must be seen as a battle in the larger war on our rights to our legitamitely acquired bits. And this applies to all bits -- video, music, literature, art, etc. - Richie
And how should the central packaging organization (the RPM police) handle alpha and beta versions and patches, not to mention coordinating with thousands of developers?
Never solve with bureaucracy what can be handled through coordination.
This, to my mind, is the single greatest failing of RPM -- the attempt by RHAT to classify every Linux package in a 2-level strict hierarchy, to create strict dependancies on RHAT-specific versions.
Why do the Windows users have it so much easier? Partially because they're only interested in installing specific applications, not libraries or frameworks. But think for a minute about the standard InstallShield (or similar) process. You're given the option of selecting an install directory, of searching (or pointing out) binary dependancies, and of selecting various components to install (or not).
Does RPM even come close to that kind of ease of configuration?
- Richie
I only wish that RPM was as sane....
- Richie
Does nobody judge a film based on its content??!! Granted, part of the composition of a movie -- story, dialogue, visuals, music (soundtrack & songs) -- is affected by the technology used to create it, but what it boils down to are the creative elements that have been employed (along with judicious editting).
People talk about the "success" of Disney in the late-80s/early-90s as a business artifact, as though Michael Eisner was responsible for crafting the gems that "The Little Mermaid" and "Beauty and the Beast" are. Come on! "Mermaid" and "B&tB" are the products of the genius of Alan Menken & Howard Ashman (largely Ashman story-wise, the team musically). Disney didn't magically go from "The Black Cauldron" and "The Great Mouse Detective" to "Mermaid" without a concerted creative effort.
Pixar's films (I refuse to call them Disney, other than Disney-distributed) are eye-popping treats thanks not only to their talented computer animation team, but also to their story and design teams. Face it, no matter how visually gorgeous "A Bug's Life" was, if it had had a banal storyline or flat dialogue, it would not be the masterpiece that it is.
Sadly, sometimes the bottom line does not correspond to artistic merit. "The Iron Giant" is one of the best movie's I have seen in the last decade; unfortunately, WB didn't have the guts to market it appropriately, and it was a box office failure.
Ask yourself: how many of these films have you seen, and why is watching one a more fulfulling experience than the other? Examine the elements carefully.
- Richie
But the Mozilla team, for reasons that the remainder of the developer community has yet to fathom, is insistant on supporting every feature of NS4.x before releasing a product -- and more! "It's not a browser" is the party line: "It's an application framework". But a browser --specifically a HTML-rendering, Java(ECMA)script-interpreting, Java-plugin-friendly engine -- is what is desperately needed right now, especially for users of alternative operating systems.
What the WaSP is expressing is the frustration of being stuck waiting for the one component that matters most, simply because the Mozilla team feels that it's crucial to have everything for the initial release. Mozilla has certainly disobeyed ESR's cardinal rule of open source development: "Release early, release often."
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Team Mozilla is going to hear a lot more of these complaints.
- Richie
A simple perusal of Interbrand, including their summary of the survey in the BBC article, demonstrates one thing:
These guys are hardly impartial.
It's clearly a conflict of interest to produce a brand survey, obstensibly to fairly and accurately gauge the strength of well-known brands, and to promote oneself as a Brand Name Developer. I mean, these are the guys that came up with Prozac!
The above notwithstanding, it's also somewhat ludicrous to rank the Top Brands(tm) across all products and industries. How can anyone compare Coke to MS, or Intel to General Mills (the maker of Cheerios, which doesn't seem to appear in the top 10)? This list really needs to broken out into industry sectors.
I suppose that if we accept that the American (or global, perhaps) consumer is dumb enough to be swayed by the power of a brand, rather than the quality of a product, then the American manufacturer's Marketing department will be dumb enough to buy this report.
- Richie
He definitely seemed out of his element, confessing to a reporter that this was his first time at PC Expo. When pressed for "the thing that impressed him most at the show", he hesitated, then answered that the huge IBM displays were "nice". I was having a hard time believing that this was the same guy who walked out to thunderous applause at LinuxWorld...
- Richie
I have no sympathy for a superfluous branch of the government that fights its own natural demise. More power to the FedExes and UPSes of the world.
- Richie
Today's big new is that Judge Jackson issued his ruling, agreeing with the DoJ on practically every point.
Remember, the case is DoJ vs. MSFT, with federal judge Thomas P. Jackson as the final arbiter. Well, at least Jackson was the final arbiter -- now, it's up to the Court of Appeals or Supreme Court (depending on whether the DoJ requests a "fast track" appeal and whether Jackson agrees to it).
- Richie
Because I didn't have my Palm Pilot yet...
- Richie
Sure, it's easy for Penthouse to claim the moral high ground when they're being ripped off. But if adult content providers are so concerned about minors having access to inappropriate material, how could Playboy bring a case to the Supreme Court (and win!), bemoaning the fact that their "freedom of expression" is violated by forcing cable providers to scramble adult channels?
I realize that Playboy and Penthouse are 2 distinct and rivaling entities, but the Supreme Court ruling applies to the entire adult entertainment industry. And the fact is that that entire industry doesn't give a damn about kids.
- Richie
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONT
I'm on the team that manages the AP's news site (wire.ap.org). The truth is, you can't go directly to the URL that was posted here. The Wire is designed such that you need to enter a member's co-branded site, but as a non-profit orginization, we don't promote ourselves. Sorry!
(I don't make the rules; I just carry them out technically. The opinions here are mine alone and not my employers'.)
- Richie
http://www.gnucash.org/pub/gnucash
As a side note, I'd like to point out that this release is really big news because the GnuCash team finally realized that deploying on 3 GUI widget platforms simultaneously (Motif, GTK, and Qt) was sapping at their development time and just leading to breakage. The previous post-xacc releases were a huge pain to build, which lead to the emergence of other Quicken substitutes like Gnofin.
From my initial test run, it looks like GnuCash has a new customer. Congratulations!
- Richie
"The Secret of NIMH" was Don Bluth's work, not Disney's. It remains perhaps his most best work, with the possible exception of "An American Tail". The rest of the lot ("Penguin and the Pebble", "All Dogs Go to Heaven", etc.) aren't even up to the level of Disney's direct-to-TV/video productions, both animation-wise and story-wise.
- Richie
It can't. Remember that Linux user don't have a ridiculously convoluted mechanism for determining default apps for file types (suffixes/mime types) yet. RealPlayer can't take over MP3s according to the "system" because there's no such thing as an associated system file type. Perhaps your GNOME or KDE settings can be changed, but that's on a user-by-user basis. And you can always change them back.
- Richie
Lips fill screen, and utter cryptic phrase:
"Rosewood..."
- Richie
The only page that a distinct browser (say, the CNet browser, for example) would be able to "dictate" would be the default home page. This is the only reason that Netscape was able to use NetCenter as its chief money-maker during the last few months of its life as an independent company.
Curiously enough, this first page pole-position doesn't seem to apply to TV, as no one would imply that channel 2 has an advantage from being the first channel that a viewer will see when he plugs in his set. As Net newbies become more experienced, the default home page advantage will erode further.
Then again, I'll let you try to explain that to my father-in-law who feels most comfortable when he can start at AT&T Worldnet's default home page, "just like the software set it up to be"....
- Richie
By my reckoning, all that AOL lacks is:
Let's say that Steve Case comes to you with a sweet buyout offer. Do you sell, or gracefully decline? And if Corel does become part of the AOL Empire, would you stay on?
- Richie