Good point. What comes to mind right now is that the oscillation in pressure causes flexing in of the arterial tissue. Without that flexing, perhaps the vessel walls would stiffen, which could be a problem.
Also, blood-pressure cuffs that doctors use are dependent on a pulse. Without a pulse, how would a doctor tell if you're hypertensive?:)
Did you know that many clocks depend on your outlet current being exactly 60 (or 50) Hz? In the US, I believe federal regulations dictate that over some specified period of time, your wall outlet has to count to the right total number of oscillations. When load is high, causing the generators to spin slowly, the cycle count can get off by minutes, and the electric company has to make up for in off-peak periods by running the generators faster.
In biological systems, we often see unusual dependencies. I think I read somewhere that certain birds can't swallow without gravity. And why not? It's there! Make use of it! That's the way evolution works. Nothing is more redundant than it needs to be (well, we can talk about transposons later). In humans, bone density is dependent on load, which is why our bones atrophe in weightlessness.
So, given that we HAVE a pulse, I would be surprised if some part of your body didn't take advantage of it.
All this article is saying is that IT people often don't consider the feelings of others, and that in order to be less annoying, they have to consider the other person to be a person who deserves to be listened to and be respected.
Gosh, can we get any more basic than that?
I mean, I get annoying some times, but when I am, I usually realize I've done it and try to note it and learn not to do it again. This isn't rocket science. Even many young children seem to be able to pay attention to the feelings of others and consider the consequences of their actions before they do or say something.
The caveat here is that I didn't learn these basic social skills until I was in my 20's.:) But I look back on my self when I was younger and wonder how I could have been so bone-headed. Part of my problem was that my parents didn't have much social sense. Another part was that I didn't have other people patient enough to sit me down and explain certain things to me. But I think the biggest part of my problem was that I just wasn't ready to understand these things. I was pretty stupid. I had to learn to actually PAY ATTENTION and CARE.
So, those are the key ideas here:
1) PAY ATTENTION to the feelings of others and how you affect them. 2) CARE about the feelings of others and how you affect them.
If I understand things correctly, something like ELF itself isn't copyrightable. Under present patent law that allows software patents it is patentable, but you can't copyright an idea. However, if there were a reference implementation of ELF, then THAT would be copyrightable.
If you watch too much SciFi, you might get brainwashed into thinking that aliens might possibly look like humans.
But the truth is, only the evolutionary history of earth could have produced humans. Slight changes at various points in our history could have radically altered what came to be the dominant life form and if that form was even all that bright.
Some stuff I was watching on the Science channel recently explained that it was an ice age that created selective pressure in favor of hominids who were smarter, because our ancestors had to adapt to a changing environment faster than evolution could adapt. Only the hominids who could IQ their way around the problems (ie. invent clothing) were able to survive.
Now, when it comes to aliens who evolved in an environment that is completely different from ours and with little or no possibility of us having common ancestors, you really can't expect much similarity.
Now, we do live in the same universe with the same physical laws, which means they probably use some of the same chemistry. For instance carbon seems to be a much better basis for building life forms than the alternatives. Also, liquid water is a much better environment than the alternatives.
We have to ask, for instance, if life can evolve in radically different temperature ranges. Can life evolve in liquid methane? How about molten iron? We do see some rather interesting "extremopholes" here on earth, but I suspect it's easier to adapt to an extreme environment than to evolve there in the first place. (That is, there may be life still on Mars from when it had liquid water, but it's a completely inhospitable environment for abiogenesis.)
We assume that their math will be similar. I mean, if their technology is advanced enough that they could do, say, quantum computation, and they have electrons whose spin they can manipulate, well, presumably, they would have a concept that allowed them to distinguish between one electron, and then two electrons, and then three electrons. That is to say, electrons are discrete quanta, so if you're going to deal with them, you have to be able to count them. So we can assume that an alien culture will have that. But can we really assume that? What about a world 100% covered in water where live evolved in such a way that there aren't separate organisms, but really every living thing is just a part of the same continuous organism, where everything is connected in some way. If you evolved to live in a world where you perceive everything as continous and you therefore have no concept of discrete objects, then can you count? (I agree that there are some lousy assumptions here, but go with me here.)
Much too much of our world seems fundamental to us because this is the environment we evolved in. For instance, predators had an effect on our evolution. Naturally, the aliens would have different evolutionary pressures... throughout all of the billions and billions of years in their evolution, completely different from ours. So, consider a world, for example, where metalic iron is sticking out of the ground all over the place. Think about how inhabitants would evolve to make use of this ubiquitous natural resource the way humans evolved to make use of wood and animal bones. (Or more fundamentally, how our cells evolved to make use of carbon compounds as building blocks.)
Alien life could be so different that we might not even recognize it as life. No matter what you conjecture about what alien life might be like, if/when we ever do discover it, it'll be nothing like what you expect.
One of the things that bipedalism gave us was the ability to carry a larger brain. Rather than having to hold the head up, we just sortof balance it on the top of the spine.
Try crawling around for a while on all fours. Besides getting sore knees, you'll also get a sore neck from holding your head up. (Although the fact that our spine connects to the skull in a different place from that of quadrupeds may exacerbate the problem.)
But don't let this confuse you. Having a larger brain did not cause us to go bipedal just so we could hold our heads up. Evolution doesn't work that way (with quadrupeds, brains larger than what gives an immediate advantage are selected against). Instead, our ancestors developed bipedalism because it was a hunting advantage... you can see farther and not occupy your hands with the act of moving (as someone else in this forum already mentioned). But then that allowed us to develop larger brains (and thicker skulls *g*) which kinda got us cornered this way (that is, our larger brains are now a selection criterion against NOT being bipedal).
(BTW, the thicker skulls thing is serious, though, when you consider Neandertals.)
So, to answer your question, bipedalism is not a learned thing in modern humans. We evolved to be this way, we don't function well if we don't walk upright, and children pretty much figure it out on their own (although watching others may help a little).
Also, besides bipedalism, another way to be able to develop a larger brain is to be aquatic. (Floating is good.) Thus, we have dolphins.
Perhaps I don't get it, but if each molecule can hold up to 8 electrons, and you can somehow determine how many it's holding (but they're interchangable, like storing them unordered in a bucket), then you can only use that to store 9 different values (zero through 8), which is about 3 bits worth of information.
If they're not interchangable, then you have 8 bits, which is... well, 8 bits.
But the fact is, I doubt they can count the electrons, let alone make a measurement without disturbing the molecule, so I would expect those 8 electrons to be a necessary level of redundancy (like how more than one iron oxide crystal is used to store a bit on a hard disk platter) in order to get any reasonable amount of redundancy.
I can't wait for all the Christians to start wailing about 666 and the antichrist and stuff.
What they don't know is that the number was originally 616 and that these numbers were the result of a popular mental exercise of the ancient world where you would add up the numerical values of the letters of some famous person's name and then have others try to guess what name corresponds to the sum. I think 666 corresponded to Calligula, and 616 was some other Caesar.
This makes me wonder if the PHP programs have to be manually compiled, if they can be compiled JIT, or if a compiled version can be cached and only recompiled if the original PHP source changes....
I don't have a lot of time, but I do have MySQL/PHP skills, and I might be able to help with some bug fixes, etc. I suppose I should join before I bother to write this, but oh well. What I want is an email address for someone so I can tell them what I am willing to do (shit work).
BTW, I usually hate shit work, but I'm willing to spend some time lending a hand with WikiPedia. I spend all day thinking hard (chip design), and so for this, simply because I have the skill set, I'm willing to do some things thta don't require as much thought.
I've been thinking about something similar to this for a while. At work, it would be kinda nice to have some network storage that is more reliable than it is fast. It would be there for files that we use but which we don't use frequently enough to warrant expensive disks.
One idea I had was to scarf up a bunch of cheap 9-gig SCSI drives from one of the local computer fairs and RAID them together. But I'm not sure if that's a good idea.
You misunderstand what I'm trying to say. I'm not letting people off the hook for making mistakes or saying that it's okay for Diebold to act unethically. Not at all. I'm just saying that the solution will take a long time.
But it'll take even longer if people of conscience don't act. It will ONLY get there through the actions of people who care about getting it done right and making it work.
Like any new technology, evoting will open up a new arena for criminal activity, both on the part of those who make evoting machines, and others who would try to exploit the technology for evil. This WILL happen, and those who want to do the right thing will have to be ever vigilant.
And, BTW, those who commit crimes SHOULD go to jail. I'm not saying "it'll take a long time" to make an excuse for people to do wrong things.
Oh, and as an obligatory slashdot comment, I really do believe that open source is the only way to go here, because it's the only way to get enough HONEST eyes looking at the code and making sure it's secure. Letting any company keep proprietary anything THAT CRITICAL is almost guaranteed to result in something criminal, because companies WILL fudge things to make deadlines, and what they fudge is usually security before anything else.
Can evoting take less than 50 years to get right? Theoretically, yes. Given human history, it's unlikely. Most probably, it will evolve slowly over time like every other technology. But it's possible for a few geniuses or a lot of geniuses to have some strokes of genius and design a system that is both feature-complete and secure.
But for comparison, let's contrast with Linux. I think Linus is a bona fide genius. Linux started in 1991. It got to be reasonable pretty fast, but only now is it becoming truly "enterprise quality" (ie. feature-complete). So with even the greatest minds behind something, things still take time to evolve.
Is there something we can do to speed things up? Certainly. Become a pair of the ever necessary "critical eyes" which will be needed to examine evoting software and point out its flaws.
The US independence on July 4, 1776. That was 228 years ago. Plus, at that time, there were simply fewer people. While I don't know what difficulties the US might have had with vote counting back then, the fact is that we've had over 200 years to get the paper-and-pencil method right.
Why? Humans are slow, and they don't think ahead. It takes a long time for people to figure out what's wrong with their methods, and they're slow to adopt changes to correct their problems.
Taking this into consideration, why should we be surprised that electronic voting doesn't work yet? OF COURSE they're going to screw it up! Even Diebold and their unethical behavior is par for the course.
You know how a lot of different kinds of software don't become "feature complete" until they've been around for about 10 years? I once read that in an article linked by slashdot (so it must be true *g*). Voting software isn't going to be any exception.
But feature completeness is only one part of the problem, especially when you have a system that (nearly) EVERYONE wants to hack. Computer security has been a problem for a very long time, and it doesn't look like it's going to get solved any time soon. We probably need another 50 years before things get figured out. Buffer overflows are only the focus of THIS decade -- once that's dealt with, who knows what's next.
So don't sweat it. The simple fact is that we'll be lucky if our grand children (if we're in our 20's) see reasonably good electronic voting machines. That's just the result of the way technology moves when humans are involved.
It looks like what happened here is that Stallman went to India, had a talk with their President, talked to him about open source being a good idea, and the President bought it.
This doesn't necessarily say that the Indian President is a brilliant leader; one possibility is that he was swayed by someone's argument, the same way that many other leaders are swayed by Microsoft's argument.
I'm not saying that I'm disappointed, but it's one thing to have a leader be swayed by someone that gave him a convinving argument, and it's entirely another to have that leader come to the conclusion on his own.
Now, the thing is the Indian President is clearly a really smart guy, and he's an accomplished scientist, etc. I don't mean to imply that he ACTUALLY just bought Stallman's line without thinking about it. What I mean to say is that there are plenty of people who would point at the Stallman visit and try to use that to suggest that the Indian President only made his recommendation because he's parroting someone else's words. This is a means for them to dismiss his recommendation.
It's much more satisfying when someone figures out that Free Software is a good idea without activism being involved, so no one can imply that he didn't understand what he was saying.
Argh. I'm having a really hard time expressing what I mean. Oh well.
The two magazines I actually read on a more than casual basis are:
- Scientific American - Discover
I used to get Popular Science, but it's really not as interesting to me as the above two. Also, I don't have subscriptions to them, because I don't have time to read them (I have to read other things, like Slashdot), but those are what I always pick up in the airport when flying, or sometimes I'm attracted by a cool cover when I'm in a book store randomly.
In college, I was a member (one of those cheap college memberships or something) of AAAS (American Association of for the Advancement of Science) which provides also a free subscription to Science managine which is more like a journal than a magazine. Often some really neat articles in all sorts of different fields (chemistry, physics, geology, biology, genetics, etc.). But it's extremely technical in those fields, so I find it difficult to understand some of the content. It's like reading the proof for Fermat's last theorem when I have trouble understanding the GLOSSARY.
I'm a member of SID (Society for Information Display), because you have to be to go to the trade shows. I go to the show because I do graphics stuff (chip design, X11 drivers, LCD panel controller boards). A magazine comes with that membership. Although the magazine looks like it has some really cool technical articles on display technology, I've never had time to read it.
When I was in college, I was a member of ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), and thus got a free subscription to Communications of the ACM.
I'm really not trying to flame or anything, but it always seems to me that while open source geeks have great technical skill, they completely lack any sense of art.
This window system is cool. It's cool in the same way that Aero Glass will be cool and how the Java3D desktop is cool. But what really turns me off about those screen shots is that horrible window manager. It's like whoever designed it has absolutely no sense of aesthetics.
Here's the thing... if you want a minimalist system, then fvwm2 is great. It's not a really attractive look, but it's small and fast. But if you're going to require a lot of horsepower so that you can rotate windows in 3-space and all the other cool stuff, then it's not asking much to want a window manager with some textures and lighting and curves and some other stuff that looks halfway attractive.
Wow. It seems like XML is like the Holy Grail or something. I'm guessing from the headline that XML was the primary enabler for this power-saving thing, and were it not for XML, the power-saving would not have been possible!
Wow! XML is like that miracle stuff you can buy on TV which will clean the worst stains off your pots and pans, makes the best sandwitch spread you've ever eaten, and also makes a great substitute for gasoline.
Dude, now that I have XML, I have no excuse not to do my laundry, exercise, or clean the house, because with XML, I can do ANYTHING, and I can do it so much easier too.
The thing is, unlike those other people, I'm not really smart enough to figure out how to use XML to save money on my power bill.
See, it makes sense to be able to take your cell phone number with you, because people actually use that number. But with internet addresses, it's usually by DNS entry, and your IP address can even be completely dynamic. Therefore, there's no reason to take your IP address with you, especially since it'll screw up internet routing.
Dual-link DVI: One channel, one pixel clock, but 6 differential pairs (rather than the normal three). Usually with dual-link, your GPU's video controller spits out two adjacent pixels each pix clock.
Dual-channel DVI: Two independent single-link DVI channels (like two of what you normally get). In this case, your display is divided in half; the left half comes out of one channel, and the right half comes out of the other channel.
The first one is a DVI standard which simple doubles the DVI maximum dot rate from 165 megapixels/sec to 330. Some nVidia cards can do this, and it works great.
However, it sounds like the apple thing is doing dual-channel. I've also experienced nVidia dual-channel, and it has a problem. The problem is that it's using two independently programmed video controllers, and I've seen them get out of sync. The result is a tear-line down the middle of the screen when there's motion going on that crosses that line. It's really irritating.
I realize this should just be a software problem, because the two video controllers can be programmed at the same time and started at the same time, and they SHOULD stay in sync, but I've seen them get out of sync. Where I experienced this was with the Windows drivers. If you reboot into the dual-channel mode, it works fine, but if you change the resolution to one that uses only one channel, and then you change back, the two video controllers always end up out of sync.
Anyone buying this panel from apple should check this and complain. This is a software-fixable problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Good point. What comes to mind right now is that the oscillation in pressure causes flexing in of the arterial tissue. Without that flexing, perhaps the vessel walls would stiffen, which could be a problem.
:)
Also, blood-pressure cuffs that doctors use are dependent on a pulse. Without a pulse, how would a doctor tell if you're hypertensive?
Did you know that many clocks depend on your outlet current being exactly 60 (or 50) Hz? In the US, I believe federal regulations dictate that over some specified period of time, your wall outlet has to count to the right total number of oscillations. When load is high, causing the generators to spin slowly, the cycle count can get off by minutes, and the electric company has to make up for in off-peak periods by running the generators faster.
In biological systems, we often see unusual dependencies. I think I read somewhere that certain birds can't swallow without gravity. And why not? It's there! Make use of it! That's the way evolution works. Nothing is more redundant than it needs to be (well, we can talk about transposons later). In humans, bone density is dependent on load, which is why our bones atrophe in weightlessness.
So, given that we HAVE a pulse, I would be surprised if some part of your body didn't take advantage of it.
All this article is saying is that IT people often don't consider the feelings of others, and that in order to be less annoying, they have to consider the other person to be a person who deserves to be listened to and be respected.
:) But I look back on my self when I was younger and wonder how I could have been so bone-headed. Part of my problem was that my parents didn't have much social sense. Another part was that I didn't have other people patient enough to sit me down and explain certain things to me. But I think the biggest part of my problem was that I just wasn't ready to understand these things. I was pretty stupid. I had to learn to actually PAY ATTENTION and CARE.
Gosh, can we get any more basic than that?
I mean, I get annoying some times, but when I am, I usually realize I've done it and try to note it and learn not to do it again. This isn't rocket science. Even many young children seem to be able to pay attention to the feelings of others and consider the consequences of their actions before they do or say something.
The caveat here is that I didn't learn these basic social skills until I was in my 20's.
So, those are the key ideas here:
1) PAY ATTENTION to the feelings of others and how you affect them.
2) CARE about the feelings of others and how you affect them.
If I understand things correctly, something like ELF itself isn't copyrightable. Under present patent law that allows software patents it is patentable, but you can't copyright an idea. However, if there were a reference implementation of ELF, then THAT would be copyrightable.
If you watch too much SciFi, you might get brainwashed into thinking that aliens might possibly look like humans.
But the truth is, only the evolutionary history of earth could have produced humans. Slight changes at various points in our history could have radically altered what came to be the dominant life form and if that form was even all that bright.
Some stuff I was watching on the Science channel recently explained that it was an ice age that created selective pressure in favor of hominids who were smarter, because our ancestors had to adapt to a changing environment faster than evolution could adapt. Only the hominids who could IQ their way around the problems (ie. invent clothing) were able to survive.
Now, when it comes to aliens who evolved in an environment that is completely different from ours and with little or no possibility of us having common ancestors, you really can't expect much similarity.
Now, we do live in the same universe with the same physical laws, which means they probably use some of the same chemistry. For instance carbon seems to be a much better basis for building life forms than the alternatives. Also, liquid water is a much better environment than the alternatives.
We have to ask, for instance, if life can evolve in radically different temperature ranges. Can life evolve in liquid methane? How about molten iron? We do see some rather interesting "extremopholes" here on earth, but I suspect it's easier to adapt to an extreme environment than to evolve there in the first place. (That is, there may be life still on Mars from when it had liquid water, but it's a completely inhospitable environment for abiogenesis.)
We assume that their math will be similar. I mean, if their technology is advanced enough that they could do, say, quantum computation, and they have electrons whose spin they can manipulate, well, presumably, they would have a concept that allowed them to distinguish between one electron, and then two electrons, and then three electrons. That is to say, electrons are discrete quanta, so if you're going to deal with them, you have to be able to count them. So we can assume that an alien culture will have that. But can we really assume that? What about a world 100% covered in water where live evolved in such a way that there aren't separate organisms, but really every living thing is just a part of the same continuous organism, where everything is connected in some way. If you evolved to live in a world where you perceive everything as continous and you therefore have no concept of discrete objects, then can you count? (I agree that there are some lousy assumptions here, but go with me here.)
Much too much of our world seems fundamental to us because this is the environment we evolved in. For instance, predators had an effect on our evolution. Naturally, the aliens would have different evolutionary pressures... throughout all of the billions and billions of years in their evolution, completely different from ours. So, consider a world, for example, where metalic iron is sticking out of the ground all over the place. Think about how inhabitants would evolve to make use of this ubiquitous natural resource the way humans evolved to make use of wood and animal bones. (Or more fundamentally, how our cells evolved to make use of carbon compounds as building blocks.)
Alien life could be so different that we might not even recognize it as life. No matter what you conjecture about what alien life might be like, if/when we ever do discover it, it'll be nothing like what you expect.
One of the things that bipedalism gave us was the ability to carry a larger brain. Rather than having to hold the head up, we just sortof balance it on the top of the spine.
Try crawling around for a while on all fours. Besides getting sore knees, you'll also get a sore neck from holding your head up. (Although the fact that our spine connects to the skull in a different place from that of quadrupeds may exacerbate the problem.)
But don't let this confuse you. Having a larger brain did not cause us to go bipedal just so we could hold our heads up. Evolution doesn't work that way (with quadrupeds, brains larger than what gives an immediate advantage are selected against). Instead, our ancestors developed bipedalism because it was a hunting advantage... you can see farther and not occupy your hands with the act of moving (as someone else in this forum already mentioned). But then that allowed us to develop larger brains (and thicker skulls *g*) which kinda got us cornered this way (that is, our larger brains are now a selection criterion against NOT being bipedal).
(BTW, the thicker skulls thing is serious, though, when you consider Neandertals.)
So, to answer your question, bipedalism is not a learned thing in modern humans. We evolved to be this way, we don't function well if we don't walk upright, and children pretty much figure it out on their own (although watching others may help a little).
Also, besides bipedalism, another way to be able to develop a larger brain is to be aquatic. (Floating is good.) Thus, we have dolphins.
Perhaps I don't get it, but if each molecule can hold up to 8 electrons, and you can somehow determine how many it's holding (but they're interchangable, like storing them unordered in a bucket), then you can only use that to store 9 different values (zero through 8), which is about 3 bits worth of information.
If they're not interchangable, then you have 8 bits, which is... well, 8 bits.
But the fact is, I doubt they can count the electrons, let alone make a measurement without disturbing the molecule, so I would expect those 8 electrons to be a necessary level of redundancy (like how more than one iron oxide crystal is used to store a bit on a hard disk platter) in order to get any reasonable amount of redundancy.
My wife uses her iPod almost exclusively to listen to audiobooks while she exercises.
:)
Music? That's what you listen to when you're in the car.
I can't wait for all the Christians to start wailing about 666 and the antichrist and stuff.
What they don't know is that the number was originally 616 and that these numbers were the result of a popular mental exercise of the ancient world where you would add up the numerical values of the letters of some famous person's name and then have others try to guess what name corresponds to the sum. I think 666 corresponded to Calligula, and 616 was some other Caesar.
This makes me wonder if the PHP programs have to be manually compiled, if they can be compiled JIT, or if a compiled version can be cached and only recompiled if the original PHP source changes....
It just so happens that this one company's back-stabbing greed might just result in improved privacy.
Ironic, isn't it.
1) A major reason to not support the higher speed is that chip production yields are increased.
2) Why not speed-grade the parts and sell two models? Not cost effective at this time.
3) Futhermore to release one model how and then another model later maintains a more even revenue stream than two models now and then none later.
4) Most likely, spreading it out also increases total revenue due to the people who buy one and then upgrade to the next.
I don't have a lot of time, but I do have MySQL/PHP skills, and I might be able to help with some bug fixes, etc. I suppose I should join before I bother to write this, but oh well. What I want is an email address for someone so I can tell them what I am willing to do (shit work).
BTW, I usually hate shit work, but I'm willing to spend some time lending a hand with WikiPedia. I spend all day thinking hard (chip design), and so for this, simply because I have the skill set, I'm willing to do some things thta don't require as much thought.
I've been thinking about something similar to this for a while. At work, it would be kinda nice to have some network storage that is more reliable than it is fast. It would be there for files that we use but which we don't use frequently enough to warrant expensive disks.
One idea I had was to scarf up a bunch of cheap 9-gig SCSI drives from one of the local computer fairs and RAID them together. But I'm not sure if that's a good idea.
You misunderstand what I'm trying to say. I'm not letting people off the hook for making mistakes or saying that it's okay for Diebold to act unethically. Not at all. I'm just saying that the solution will take a long time.
But it'll take even longer if people of conscience don't act. It will ONLY get there through the actions of people who care about getting it done right and making it work.
Like any new technology, evoting will open up a new arena for criminal activity, both on the part of those who make evoting machines, and others who would try to exploit the technology for evil. This WILL happen, and those who want to do the right thing will have to be ever vigilant.
And, BTW, those who commit crimes SHOULD go to jail. I'm not saying "it'll take a long time" to make an excuse for people to do wrong things.
Oh, and as an obligatory slashdot comment, I really do believe that open source is the only way to go here, because it's the only way to get enough HONEST eyes looking at the code and making sure it's secure. Letting any company keep proprietary anything THAT CRITICAL is almost guaranteed to result in something criminal, because companies WILL fudge things to make deadlines, and what they fudge is usually security before anything else.
Can evoting take less than 50 years to get right? Theoretically, yes. Given human history, it's unlikely. Most probably, it will evolve slowly over time like every other technology. But it's possible for a few geniuses or a lot of geniuses to have some strokes of genius and design a system that is both feature-complete and secure.
But for comparison, let's contrast with Linux. I think Linus is a bona fide genius. Linux started in 1991. It got to be reasonable pretty fast, but only now is it becoming truly "enterprise quality" (ie. feature-complete). So with even the greatest minds behind something, things still take time to evolve.
Is there something we can do to speed things up? Certainly. Become a pair of the ever necessary "critical eyes" which will be needed to examine evoting software and point out its flaws.
The US independence on July 4, 1776. That was 228 years ago. Plus, at that time, there were simply fewer people. While I don't know what difficulties the US might have had with vote counting back then, the fact is that we've had over 200 years to get the paper-and-pencil method right.
Why? Humans are slow, and they don't think ahead. It takes a long time for people to figure out what's wrong with their methods, and they're slow to adopt changes to correct their problems.
Taking this into consideration, why should we be surprised that electronic voting doesn't work yet? OF COURSE they're going to screw it up! Even Diebold and their unethical behavior is par for the course.
You know how a lot of different kinds of software don't become "feature complete" until they've been around for about 10 years? I once read that in an article linked by slashdot (so it must be true *g*). Voting software isn't going to be any exception.
But feature completeness is only one part of the problem, especially when you have a system that (nearly) EVERYONE wants to hack. Computer security has been a problem for a very long time, and it doesn't look like it's going to get solved any time soon. We probably need another 50 years before things get figured out. Buffer overflows are only the focus of THIS decade -- once that's dealt with, who knows what's next.
So don't sweat it. The simple fact is that we'll be lucky if our grand children (if we're in our 20's) see reasonably good electronic voting machines. That's just the result of the way technology moves when humans are involved.
It looks like what happened here is that Stallman went to India, had a talk with their President, talked to him about open source being a good idea, and the President bought it.
This doesn't necessarily say that the Indian President is a brilliant leader; one possibility is that he was swayed by someone's argument, the same way that many other leaders are swayed by Microsoft's argument.
I'm not saying that I'm disappointed, but it's one thing to have a leader be swayed by someone that gave him a convinving argument, and it's entirely another to have that leader come to the conclusion on his own.
Now, the thing is the Indian President is clearly a really smart guy, and he's an accomplished scientist, etc. I don't mean to imply that he ACTUALLY just bought Stallman's line without thinking about it. What I mean to say is that there are plenty of people who would point at the Stallman visit and try to use that to suggest that the Indian President only made his recommendation because he's parroting someone else's words. This is a means for them to dismiss his recommendation.
It's much more satisfying when someone figures out that Free Software is a good idea without activism being involved, so no one can imply that he didn't understand what he was saying.
Argh. I'm having a really hard time expressing what I mean. Oh well.
The two magazines I actually read on a more than casual basis are:
- Scientific American
- Discover
I used to get Popular Science, but it's really not as interesting to me as the above two. Also, I don't have subscriptions to them, because I don't have time to read them (I have to read other things, like Slashdot), but those are what I always pick up in the airport when flying, or sometimes I'm attracted by a cool cover when I'm in a book store randomly.
In college, I was a member (one of those cheap college memberships or something) of AAAS (American Association of for the Advancement of Science) which provides also a free subscription to Science managine which is more like a journal than a magazine. Often some really neat articles in all sorts of different fields (chemistry, physics, geology, biology, genetics, etc.). But it's extremely technical in those fields, so I find it difficult to understand some of the content. It's like reading the proof for Fermat's last theorem when I have trouble understanding the GLOSSARY.
I'm a member of SID (Society for Information Display), because you have to be to go to the trade shows. I go to the show because I do graphics stuff (chip design, X11 drivers, LCD panel controller boards). A magazine comes with that membership. Although the magazine looks like it has some really cool technical articles on display technology, I've never had time to read it.
When I was in college, I was a member of ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), and thus got a free subscription to Communications of the ACM.
Listen, you didn't get the joke.
1) emerge glabels ...
2)
3) Wooo! Cool!
I'm really not trying to flame or anything, but it always seems to me that while open source geeks have great technical skill, they completely lack any sense of art.
This window system is cool. It's cool in the same way that Aero Glass will be cool and how the Java3D desktop is cool. But what really turns me off about those screen shots is that horrible window manager. It's like whoever designed it has absolutely no sense of aesthetics.
Here's the thing... if you want a minimalist system, then fvwm2 is great. It's not a really attractive look, but it's small and fast. But if you're going to require a lot of horsepower so that you can rotate windows in 3-space and all the other cool stuff, then it's not asking much to want a window manager with some textures and lighting and curves and some other stuff that looks halfway attractive.
</rant>
Wow. It seems like XML is like the Holy Grail or something. I'm guessing from the headline that XML was the primary enabler for this power-saving thing, and were it not for XML, the power-saving would not have been possible!
Wow! XML is like that miracle stuff you can buy on TV which will clean the worst stains off your pots and pans, makes the best sandwitch spread you've ever eaten, and also makes a great substitute for gasoline.
Dude, now that I have XML, I have no excuse not to do my laundry, exercise, or clean the house, because with XML, I can do ANYTHING, and I can do it so much easier too.
The thing is, unlike those other people, I'm not really smart enough to figure out how to use XML to save money on my power bill.
See, it makes sense to be able to take your cell phone number with you, because people actually use that number. But with internet addresses, it's usually by DNS entry, and your IP address can even be completely dynamic. Therefore, there's no reason to take your IP address with you, especially since it'll screw up internet routing.
Dual-link DVI: One channel, one pixel clock, but 6 differential pairs (rather than the normal three). Usually with dual-link, your GPU's video controller spits out two adjacent pixels each pix clock.
Dual-channel DVI: Two independent single-link DVI channels (like two of what you normally get). In this case, your display is divided in half; the left half comes out of one channel, and the right half comes out of the other channel.
The first one is a DVI standard which simple doubles the DVI maximum dot rate from 165 megapixels/sec to 330. Some nVidia cards can do this, and it works great.
However, it sounds like the apple thing is doing dual-channel. I've also experienced nVidia dual-channel, and it has a problem. The problem is that it's using two independently programmed video controllers, and I've seen them get out of sync. The result is a tear-line down the middle of the screen when there's motion going on that crosses that line. It's really irritating.
I realize this should just be a software problem, because the two video controllers can be programmed at the same time and started at the same time, and they SHOULD stay in sync, but I've seen them get out of sync. Where I experienced this was with the Windows drivers. If you reboot into the dual-channel mode, it works fine, but if you change the resolution to one that uses only one channel, and then you change back, the two video controllers always end up out of sync.
Anyone buying this panel from apple should check this and complain. This is a software-fixable problem.
Languages that don't have variable length strings make me choke.
(When I say variable length, I mean some way to to have a value whose length is less than the allocated size of the character array.)