Which gives a 60% improvement? As I said it's a slightly more efficient gas-electric hybrid design. The efficiency comes from the lack of a drivetrain. That may give on the order of 5 - 15% improvement in efficiency but not 60%. This is an obvious natural progression of gas-electric hybrid technology if it can be made economical and safe.
Why is this anything more than just a slightly more efficient way of doing a hybrid gas-electric system by putting the engine in the wheel. It's a good idea, but I can't say I hadn't thought of it too. If it's technically sound it's a natural progression.
Why should it be legal for stores lie when we ask "What does this cost?"
And for the record there seems to be some confusion as to what "What does this cost?" means. It means "How much money am I going to pay to get it?" Not "How much money do you want to tell me it costs to get it?" If I call a phone company ans ask "How much it will cost to get a phone line per month" and the monthly bill comes to twice that, they lied. It's not that they didn't know, they lied. Plain and simple. They know about the fees, they know about the taxes. Just because they don't keep the money, doesn't mean it's not part of the cost.
"How much does this cost?" is a very simple question. The billing computers never get it wrong. Companies shouldn't be able to lie and tell you it costs less just because they want to.
I agree. We are all getting used to the "Cost" of an item being less when we ask a sales person then when we ask a cash register. The sales tax started this. To me, it's fine if you are going to add tax but you sould be required to include the tax in any listed price. It's time for a federal law mandating that. Otherwise you never really know how much things are going to cost.
And all non-optional fees that are directly related to the purchase of an item should be required to be included in the price. You can't say the mouse pad costs $0.10 and charge $2.00 handling for each one.
I just bought a snow blower from Home Depot the other day. I got up to the register and they rung it up for $15 more than I was quoted for it. I asked and they said it was a non-optional assembly fee. I don't understand how a non-optional fee can be separated from the price.
My wife is a Kindergarten teacher. Her school district tries to provide computers for the classroom but they just don't have the resources to do it right.
I bought and setup a computer lab for her kindergarten classroom. It has 4 workstations, a server, monitors, keyboards, mice, speakers and headphones, all bought brand new and designed to work the way she needed them to. The computers are used as a center in her classroom (like puzzles, library, listening center etc..) It is only open during the times when center's are open and they are only allowed to use certain software.
I strongly believe that there is a lot of good that computers can do in the classroom if they are used correctly. The key to having them work well is figuring out where they can help in curriculum and choosing the hardware and software to best make that work. I think the biggest mistake schools often make is overlooking software needs. They buy the hardware, set it up and wonder why the only thing people ever teach is PowerPoint. A lot of schools don't realize that a computer with Microsoft Office isn't really and educational tool. The school software market is a dry place mostly populated with software targeting administrative tasks and assessment tools. The kids software market is mostly driven by home users because schools don't spend money there. Kids software often requires the CD to be physically present in a machine in order for the software to run which is completely inappropriate for a school environment. This is a good example of an industries greed costing it huge money. If schools start organizing and pooling money together they could make it worth the software maker's while to build the software to be classroom friendly.
Different children learn in different ways. One thing you will find in children is that some kids (ADD and ADHD kids in particular) will have a much more rewarding learning experience in a place where they get to use a computer. Computer's can be a calming influence for ADHD kids since the quick response to input allows them to stay focused on something longer. They tend to crave computer time, which gives the teacher a bargaining chip for a student that they not have one for otherwise. This can lead to better behavior in the rest of classroom activities and a more positive overall learning experience for that child and for the rest of the class.
I think people who advocate removing computers from the classroom are suggesting the wrong solution to the right problem. Computers can play a beneficial role in the classroom if they are used right. The right solution is to make there are clear educational goals in setting up the computers and that the computers are properly designed and configured to fulfill those goals. One of the thing I would suggest is that states should form a group in charge of designing architectures for schools including software setups for each grade level and helping the school districts implement these setups. Designs should be based as much as possible with no proprietary hardware involved and only buying proprietary software when necessary. Also, since new computers have gotten so cheap to buy and so easy to maintain often times it is cheaper to just replace the old computers than to maintain them. Anything below a Pentium II should probably be chucked.
The details of my setup:
The whole classroom setup was put together for about $2500 including the server and software. The workstations are 4 Dell 2350's I bought for about $330 a piece around a year ago. The server is a PowerEdge 400SC I picked up just a few months ago when they got cheap. I bought 4 17" monitors which for this situation was optimal since any bigger would take up too much space in the classroom. The mice are all optical so they don't get dirty and frustrate the kids. The computers all have speakers with volume control knobs and headphone jacks so it's easy to control the volume of the headphones. Each one has headphones plugged into it with a big hook
I was working from home in a condo for a while. That was hard and I always wanted to go out after work. Now I own a house in the country and I love it! I enjoy solitude and am married so my situation may be different than yours but I really enjoy having piece and quiet and yet room to go do things and walk and get out and accomplish things.
When you don't get out much, mowing the lawn is very refreshing.
Owning a house is usually cheaper than renting both an appartment and office space expecially when you factor in the tax implications and equity building. Plus, it gives you something to do in your off hours. Being a programmer, I especially like to work on things in the house. It is tangable work which is a welcome change to something as abstract as programming.
Also, too many people feel that they are "working" when they are phisically at work. Simply being someplace doesn't mean you are working but many people find that without that distinction, they are rarely ever actually working and that can be troubling. If you're goal is to get things done, the added simplicity of not leaving the house can really improve your productivity. Plus, it makes a lot of thigs simpler since you don't have to maintain a work environment in two places.
If you feel disconnected from politics, maybe it's because you chose to be.
The problem isn't that people don't have the power anymore, it's that they don't use it. People don't pay attention to politics because they don't have to. In general, they just let it do it's thing and assumption is that the system pretty much takes care of itself. So far, that assumption is working, although with some issues.
Old people vote because they care and they understand that things can be a lot worse than they are. They generally take more time than the young in thinking about the issues and put more effort into finding and supporting good candidates.
Think about politics, read about politics, talk about politics and you will see. There are lots of people out there that understand the issues . It's stupid people voting because they think they have to that's the problem. One of the great misfortunes of today is that people think they should vote whether they understand the issues and the candidates or not. You shouldn't vote just because you can, you should only vote if you have a good reason to support one person over the others.
People in charge of elections have a hard job too. This proposed system is just barely possible with today's technology and as far as I know they don't even have a working prototype, just a proposed design. Any electronic voting system should have a few years of people trying to hack and break it before it is trusted to elect people.
I bet if there were prototypes available 2 years ago there would be some places using it already. The push has been very strong in some places to get good e-voting systems in place.
If there are only lousy e-voting machines on the market, the best choice is either a lousy e-voting machine or no e-voting machine.
That article had lots of detail about the mechanics of the printing system but very little description of overall architecture.
The gist is that the voter's choices are printed out in a visually readable form on two surfaces laminated together. The printing is done in such a way that one half can't be read without the other and one of the two sides has to be left at the polling place.
I didn't understand the part about being able to scan the one you take with you to verify it was valid and later verify that it had been counted. What exactly are you taking away? Is it equivalent to a signature/digest for the vote, or does an encrypted for of the actual vote, or simply a form of the vote that is only readable by machines? How do you know the system recorded the same vote it displayed to you?
The only paper in this system is taken with the voter so what gets stored electronically in the voting system? Is it the same data as what the voter took with them? Is it Encrypted? Signed? Both? How can you make it so people can see that their vote has been entered without letting anyone ever find out what that vote was?
Why can't we just print out a ballot with an MD5 hash of the choices in a tear-off section at the bottom. Have a machine read the ballot we printed out and display the MD5 to us. We check the MD5 against what the part we tore off to know that the vote was generated and scanned properly. We can then take the MD5 with us and can check for that MD5 in the results when they are tallied. Add a secret key into the mix before the MD5 and you can't figure out what was voted for from the MD5 you take away.
What is the difference between a simple MD5 based system and this one?
Good point, but instead of doing away with the verification system altogether, why don't we just add a "fake vote" capability to the system. You can enter a fake vote into the system and it will be recorded in all the databases just like a regular vote only it won't be counted. To all verification systems the vote seems legitimate and it could be pulled up using a web interface. It's more work than just not being able to take something away but it protects from the scenario you brought up as well as many others. There could be an automatic random fake vote entered for every real vote. That way you couldn't even use any data about whether a fake vote was entered to check if a vote was fake. To make that work, you would need to only be able to take one printout out with you. That way there would be no way to tell if the printout was real or fake.
There are hazards to having a verifiable voting system but I think the benefits in terms of a strong sense that your vote is being counted and a feeling that the system can't be corrupted are important to a fair voting process too.
The issue of ballot stuffing is an important one. I think this is probably the most common form of election fraud in the US (based solely on an educated guess.) Fighting this is hard since there needs to be a disconnect between who is voting and what they are voting for which makes a system that is naturally vulnerable to stuffing. Fighting stuffing is different from fighting tampering and should be treated as a separate issue. Solutions for this are things like cameras that watch people entering a voting place and count the number of unique people coming in. You need to strike a precarious balance between ensuring the voter is who they say they are and ensuring the voter anonymous voting capability. One way would be to take pictures of every voter and store the number of voters who checked in (and had their picture taken) and make sure there aren't more votes entered than the number of people checked in. This helps defeat bulk ballot stuffing, and multiple voting since you could compare all the pictures of people to each other and see if people are voting more than once. Stuffing on a huge scale would be extremely difficult.
Of course the flip side of this is: if our congressmen can sell votes why can't we! (grin)
I propose that a record should be kept in a database of every single vote that is cast. This record should have a unique identifier that is assigned when the vote is cast that can be used to access the record of the vote if and when that becomes appropriate. As we have today, the voting machine should not know who is in front of it and should have no way to determine who voted for what. What it should do is offer to print out a "vote recipt" for everyone who requests one. These vote recipts could be used by the voters themselves to access the total collected results of the voting to make sure that the vote they cast, was actually counted in the total.
Furthermore, each voting system should have a secret key. On the recipt there should be a hash (ala MD5) of the information and the secret key. A recipt with this hash would be *proof* that a vote was cast, on which machine it was cast, and what you voted for. This
way there would be no way for someone to come in later and change votes in the database without that change being evident. Voters could punch in their recipt code into a web interface and have the system automatically check that their vote was cast and counted correctly.
The central votes database would need to record:
What voting machine cast the vote
The unique ID of the vote
What was voted for
Things not recorded in the central votes database:
What time the vote was cast (this would be too easy to tie to who came in and voted when)
Weather the recipt was printed (If that was in the DB someone could go in and only change votes where there was no proof of what the original vote was for)
The voting machines secret key (this should be a well guarded secret.)
The recipt should have:
The id of the voting machine used
The unique ID of the vote
The MD5 of what was voted for, the uniqe ID, and the secret key
(Voter Optional) A printout of what the votes were cast
The voting machines would need to disable themselves if for some reason it's printer didn't work. The key to not being able to tamper with the votes is that verification must be possible. Without that, votes could be altered with impunity.
Someone, please! Every single football game runs at least 30 minues over. What braindead moron decided they should schedule 30 minutes less than the game takes and screw up every single show that comes after. Schedule it for 30 minutes more and make some filler you can show if it runs short.
I agree! I watched almost every Farscape and in the end, I have to say, it sucked at the end. The writing just went to hell and after they got rid of the plant chick it wasn't much worth watching. Firefly had good writing good music and was fun to watch. I loved the part where the captain was telling the assassins what to tell their boss and the guy wouldn't cooperate so he just kicked him into the intake of the engine grabbed the next guy, and started saying the same thing to him. Damn funny moment.
I also liked the part in the pilot where the reavers are coming and the alliance marshal is holding the doctor's sister hostage and the captain just walks in, shoots him, and tosses him out the back. I like it when people take a typical TV show setup that we are used to seing turn into a long drawn out dramatc moment and just ending it cleverly. Like the bridge scene in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. It was just nice, they moved past all the stupid artificial melodrama that is in most movies and into the real melodrama that inevitably comes after.
I see the Linux desktop market occupying the $150-$300 disposable desktop range. Apples with OSX are incapable of competing in that price range. And don't let that $799 price tag fool you. There are a lot of expenses associated with operating in the Apple world that have nothing to do with the purchase price of the machine.
The Apple way of doing things has more overhead than the PC way of doing things, it always has and always will. That's not to say it's inferior! The Ferrari way of doing things will always be more expensive than the Ford way of doing things but you don't see Ferrari owners longing for a Ford or Ford owners kicking themselves for not buying a Ferrari. There is a place for both business strategies. But just like Ferrari's will never be mainstream cars, Apples will never be mainstream business machines. It's just not what they do.
P.S.
I hate the idea of monitors built in to the computers. Montiors last 3-4 times as long as computers do in my household. You waste a bunch of money by bundling the two together, especially when it's a LCD monitor that get's bundled (shudder.)
Interstate commerce is not taxable by the states. The states keep trying to decide that it is and trying to dream up ways to do it. It's against the rules. It should be against the rules. Go find money elsewhere!
I get the feeling that this is the end of a process, probably started a long time ago deep inside Microsoft in the attempt to label the GPL as an IP Virus. The spin at the time coming from MS was that the GPL either was or should be illegal. This may just be the tail end of a project that was given a little money to try and bring that about. Someone was probably clever enough to see the SCO thing starting to happen and, tap into it and inject a little money and influence to twist it into something that would get us here. Weather or not that this ends in Mircosofts favor, at least they tried and at the end they will know where they stand.
This is a good thing for the GPL since it will probably finally get it's day in court with someone arguing that you can't do what the GPL does. Lots of smart people have looked at the GPL and decided it will hold up and is pretty iron clad but it would still be nice to get that as a ruling from a judge.
Personally, I think all of software licenses are on shaky ground since it's really an unsigned contract and seemingly not enforceable. I think there should be such a thing as a software licence and an end user licence agreement but the EULA's should limitations clearly spelled out somewhere.
It's time for a "Software Owner's Bill of Rights" where we have our rights to use, backup, and transfer software between computers explicitly stated and a system of fines for any company that sells software that violates these rights. Other things that should be explicitly granted as "Fair Use" for any purchased copy of software is patching, reverse engineering, and we could even add things like an option:
1. You can install on 4 computers simultaneously but then the software can't be transferred to any others.
2. You can only install on one machine at a time but you can move it any number of times.
And which option is chosen could be up to the company selling the software but one of those two must be chosen. Any technical measures installed in the software to remove fair use rights could be delcared illegal as part of the Software Owner's Bill of Rights. Wouldn't that be cool! We have the concept of Fair Use for copyrighted works we purchase but the software world has tried to remove anything like fair use from their products using End User License Agreements. It's time to extend the laws and get Fair Use rights back for good.
Mono makes it easy to give access to all kinds of.net libraries from inside Parrot (the new high power VM for Perl and probably Python and Ruby.) And it makes it easy for Parrot to add the ability to turn perl code into.net code (I think. does anyone know how much mono code is being used in parrot?).
Parrot is not at all what Microsoft wanted when they pushed for Mono, but it will be great platform for developers. Parrot will embrace and extend all the.net languages, java, perl, python, etc and allow them to cooperate and function together. Thank you Microsoft for making perl slightly better. Take your lousy languages and restrictive platforms and shove them, however.
If you really want to switch to a portable, high power platform, go to Perl or Python. Forget the.net languages. They will die long before these will. Although, who knows, maybe someone will build parrot compilers for those languages too. It's apparently very easy to add a language to Parrot.
And for any fellow Perl developers out there, be exited for the new Perl 6 syntax changes. I wasn't but I started doing some reading and they are doing it right! The changes make a lot of sense and will make a bunch of things that were painful in perl 5, easy and straightforward. And there will be utilities to convert from old syntax to new.
Why would you go with mod_mono as opposed to mod_perl? I'm not trying to be snyde, I'm a perl developer who has done lots of things in mod_perl and have been totally happy with it. I am, however, always on the lookout for the advantages of other languages. Would mod_mono simply be so you could use.net languages in Apache or is there some technical advantage to using.net?
For programmers who want portability, switching to Parrot rather than mono seems to be a much better bet in the long term.
For those who haven't heard of Parrot, it's Perl 6 (and probably Python and Ruby's) new backend virtual machine. It will embrace and extend.NET and Java in a way that promises to be very powerful for developers. It will give programmers access to.net libraries, java libraries, and let you use them all from the safety of your favorite fully open and portable language like Python, Perl or Ruby. It should also allow for compilation from any of these languages into java or.net bytecode. I plan to program in a language that will let me skip this whole mess.
I've had one of these for a few months now. It's my backup drive. I run a cron job that backs up all critical files of my primary disks to this beast. I'ts perfect for that. It's big and slow and cheap. Since I also keep previous versions of changed files as long as I have room to do it, this beast really makes a difference.
I agree that you shouldn't have giant disks without backups. This guy can back up 2 or 3 giant disks. It's also great for things like a ReplayTV or Tivo but I have to save up a little longer before I can get another one for that.
This is what I make sure all the Windows computers I send out have:
Windows 2000 or XP (Anything older is more trouble than it's worth.)
Open Office
Mozilla and plugins:
Quick Time
Real Player
Flash player
Java JRE
Acrobat Reader
WinZip
Winamp
RealVNC (If they will ever need help)
Tweak UI
Norton Antivirus (or one of the free ones if it's not worth the money)
I put these on every Windows machine, no matter what it will be doing. After that, you need to look at what it will be used for to determine what software should be on there.
You can let your kids watch a nasty movie, play a nasty video game, and listen to nasty music. It can be a healthy outlet. Just make sure to put it in context. Ban something every once in a while. Dissaprove of things that should be disapproved of, and comment on why things that are bad, are bad. Context is everything. It's one thing to whitness horrible things and be discusted. It's a completely different thing to whitness a horrible thing and think it's cool. And you don't need to instil a sense of discust in them. Simply by expressing your opinion they will notice how it differs with thiers. It may take a while to sink in, but that's how most kids learn best.
(At least I think that should work. I have no parenting experience.)
Writing the Plan of Action to insist that they automatically prefer OSS over Proprietary software is as silly as writing it to automatically prefer proprietary over OSS.
This is not true. From the customer's standpoint maintainability of closed source software is necessarily worse than that of open source software because only the company that owns the source is allowed to modify it. Also the software owners aren't required to make modifications you want if they don't want to. For example, if my organization wanted to modify the Windows authentication system I was using to be Kerberos compatible to integrate with a new system and were willing to pay for the development time, I couldn't do it, no matter what my budget.
It shouldn't matter whether the building was built by volunteers or by a private construction firm, all that matters is which building is better.
OSS is not about volunteers (many OSS developers are salaried employees.) What makes something OSS is that the source is available and that the customer can make and use changes to it. I equate close source software to a plumbing system that does not allow you to make any modifications to it. It would be against the building code to install such a system. It's not inappropriate to require a minimum set of requirements on your infrastructure one of which might be the ability to modify it to accommodate situations outside of it's original design. It's like requiring buildings to be able to survive an earthquake, it's not free and I'm sure many companies would rather not do it but it's not unprecedented and not even a bad idea. It wouldn't even be unprecedented for a state or federal government to say that it was illegal to setup new systems using software that didn't meet the current "IT code" which could include requirements that the source be available for necessary modifications just like we require that plumbing drains that are installed are modifiable and expandable.
all that matters is which building is better
That doesn't mean it's not appropriate to issue minimum standards. Tents were efficient and useful to earlier civilizations but over time we learned that long-term there were better options and most places building codes don't allow you to use tents as residences anymore. Defining minimum standards to insure an infrastructure that is stable, maintainable, and scalable is part of what governments do. Continuing the building analogy: If a contractor offers to put up a tent in their plan to build a building, it will be rejected as unqualified no matter if it is the cheapest and prettiest solution to the problem. Similarly, they could deem closed source software unqualified because of it's fundamental issues. (I'm not saying they should, just that if it were the right thing to do it would be appropriate for government bodies to do it.)
Closed source software has fundamental issues, especially in infrastructure software. The problem is that in infrastructure software like operating systems, the closer the product is to 100% market share, the more expensive it gets (monopoly pricing) while in open source software, the closer it gets to 100% market share, the less expensive it gets (work is spread over more people.) Closed source is more economical efficient for small scale "niche" software and for medium scale "specialty" software but when it reaches the level of large scale "infrastructure" software, the closed source model becomes economically inefficient.
Proprietary software development employs people, which leads to people being fed... There's no moral deficit in that.
Open Source software employs people also. Granted there are fewer marketing, legal, middle management and sales people employed but that helps economic efficiency and is generally good for the economy. Since governments are in the business of providing infrastructure when it is economically efficient to do so and they are in the business of defining minim
Slashdot Mirror
it says there is no drivetrain.
Which gives a 60% improvement? As I said it's a slightly more efficient gas-electric hybrid design. The efficiency comes from the lack of a drivetrain. That may give on the order of 5 - 15% improvement in efficiency but not 60%. This is an obvious natural progression of gas-electric hybrid technology if it can be made economical and safe.
Why is this anything more than just a slightly more efficient way of doing a hybrid gas-electric system by putting the engine in the wheel. It's a good idea, but I can't say I hadn't thought of it too. If it's technically sound it's a natural progression.
..any lock can be picked with a big enough hammer.
Also, as Jobs said, with digital media you only need to pick the lock once and all the doors are open.
What do you mean?
Why should it be legal for stores lie when we ask "What does this cost?"
And for the record there seems to be some confusion as to what "What does this cost?" means. It means "How much money am I going to pay to get it?" Not "How much money do you want to tell me it costs to get it?" If I call a phone company ans ask "How much it will cost to get a phone line per month" and the monthly bill comes to twice that, they lied. It's not that they didn't know, they lied. Plain and simple. They know about the fees, they know about the taxes. Just because they don't keep the money, doesn't mean it's not part of the cost.
"How much does this cost?" is a very simple question. The billing computers never get it wrong. Companies shouldn't be able to lie and tell you it costs less just because they want to.
I agree. We are all getting used to the "Cost" of an item being less when we ask a sales person then when we ask a cash register. The sales tax started this. To me, it's fine if you are going to add tax but you sould be required to include the tax in any listed price. It's time for a federal law mandating that. Otherwise you never really know how much things are going to cost.
And all non-optional fees that are directly related to the purchase of an item should be required to be included in the price. You can't say the mouse pad costs $0.10 and charge $2.00 handling for each one.
I just bought a snow blower from Home Depot the other day. I got up to the register and they rung it up for $15 more than I was quoted for it. I asked and they said it was a non-optional assembly fee. I don't understand how a non-optional fee can be separated from the price.
My wife is a Kindergarten teacher. Her school district tries to provide computers for the classroom but they just don't have the resources to do it right.
I bought and setup a computer lab for her kindergarten classroom. It has 4 workstations, a server, monitors, keyboards, mice, speakers and headphones, all bought brand new and designed to work the way she needed them to. The computers are used as a center in her classroom (like puzzles, library, listening center etc..) It is only open during the times when center's are open and they are only allowed to use certain software.
I strongly believe that there is a lot of good that computers can do in the classroom if they are used correctly. The key to having them work well is figuring out where they can help in curriculum and choosing the hardware and software to best make that work. I think the biggest mistake schools often make is overlooking software needs. They buy the hardware, set it up and wonder why the only thing people ever teach is PowerPoint. A lot of schools don't realize that a computer with Microsoft Office isn't really and educational tool. The school software market is a dry place mostly populated with software targeting administrative tasks and assessment tools. The kids software market is mostly driven by home users because schools don't spend money there. Kids software often requires the CD to be physically present in a machine in order for the software to run which is completely inappropriate for a school environment. This is a good example of an industries greed costing it huge money. If schools start organizing and pooling money together they could make it worth the software maker's while to build the software to be classroom friendly.
Different children learn in different ways. One thing you will find in children is that some kids (ADD and ADHD kids in particular) will have a much more rewarding learning experience in a place where they get to use a computer. Computer's can be a calming influence for ADHD kids since the quick response to input allows them to stay focused on something longer. They tend to crave computer time, which gives the teacher a bargaining chip for a student that they not have one for otherwise. This can lead to better behavior in the rest of classroom activities and a more positive overall learning experience for that child and for the rest of the class.
I think people who advocate removing computers from the classroom are suggesting the wrong solution to the right problem. Computers can play a beneficial role in the classroom if they are used right. The right solution is to make there are clear educational goals in setting up the computers and that the computers are properly designed and configured to fulfill those goals. One of the thing I would suggest is that states should form a group in charge of designing architectures for schools including software setups for each grade level and helping the school districts implement these setups. Designs should be based as much as possible with no proprietary hardware involved and only buying proprietary software when necessary. Also, since new computers have gotten so cheap to buy and so easy to maintain often times it is cheaper to just replace the old computers than to maintain them. Anything below a Pentium II should probably be chucked.
The details of my setup:
The whole classroom setup was put together for about $2500 including the server and software. The workstations are 4 Dell 2350's I bought for about $330 a piece around a year ago. The server is a PowerEdge 400SC I picked up just a few months ago when they got cheap. I bought 4 17" monitors which for this situation was optimal since any bigger would take up too much space in the classroom. The mice are all optical so they don't get dirty and frustrate the kids. The computers all have speakers with volume control knobs and headphone jacks so it's easy to control the volume of the headphones. Each one has headphones plugged into it with a big hook
I was working from home in a condo for a while. That was hard and I always wanted to go out after work. Now I own a house in the country and I love it! I enjoy solitude and am married so my situation may be different than yours but I really enjoy having piece and quiet and yet room to go do things and walk and get out and accomplish things.
When you don't get out much, mowing the lawn is very refreshing.
Owning a house is usually cheaper than renting both an appartment and office space expecially when you factor in the tax implications and equity building. Plus, it gives you something to do in your off hours. Being a programmer, I especially like to work on things in the house. It is tangable work which is a welcome change to something as abstract as programming.
Also, too many people feel that they are "working" when they are phisically at work. Simply being someplace doesn't mean you are working but many people find that without that distinction, they are rarely ever actually working and that can be troubling. If you're goal is to get things done, the added simplicity of not leaving the house can really improve your productivity. Plus, it makes a lot of thigs simpler since you don't have to maintain a work environment in two places.
You misunderstand. I'm not talking about internet voting, just electronic voting machines at polling places.
Also, People in China already vote for US president. It's called absentee voting.
If you feel disconnected from politics, maybe it's because you chose to be.
The problem isn't that people don't have the power anymore, it's that they don't use it. People don't pay attention to politics because they don't have to. In general, they just let it do it's thing and assumption is that the system pretty much takes care of itself. So far, that assumption is working, although with some issues.
Old people vote because they care and they understand that things can be a lot worse than they are. They generally take more time than the young in thinking about the issues and put more effort into finding and supporting good candidates.
Think about politics, read about politics, talk about politics and you will see. There are lots of people out there that understand the issues . It's stupid people voting because they think they have to that's the problem. One of the great misfortunes of today is that people think they should vote whether they understand the issues and the candidates or not. You shouldn't vote just because you can, you should only vote if you have a good reason to support one person over the others.
That was a little heavy on the sarcasm.
People in charge of elections have a hard job too. This proposed system is just barely possible with today's technology and as far as I know they don't even have a working prototype, just a proposed design. Any electronic voting system should have a few years of people trying to hack and break it before it is trusted to elect people.
I bet if there were prototypes available 2 years ago there would be some places using it already. The push has been very strong in some places to get good e-voting systems in place.
If there are only lousy e-voting machines on the market, the best choice is either a lousy e-voting machine or no e-voting machine.
Someone please mod this down as overrated!!!
You can build secure systems on top of insecure components. See any encrypted internet protocol for an example.
That article had lots of detail about the mechanics of the printing system but very little description of overall architecture.
The gist is that the voter's choices are printed out in a visually readable form on two surfaces laminated together. The printing is done in such a way that one half can't be read without the other and one of the two sides has to be left at the polling place.
I didn't understand the part about being able to scan the one you take with you to verify it was valid and later verify that it had been counted. What exactly are you taking away? Is it equivalent to a signature/digest for the vote, or does an encrypted for of the actual vote, or simply a form of the vote that is only readable by machines? How do you know the system recorded the same vote it displayed to you?
The only paper in this system is taken with the voter so what gets stored electronically in the voting system? Is it the same data as what the voter took with them? Is it Encrypted? Signed? Both? How can you make it so people can see that their vote has been entered without letting anyone ever find out what that vote was?
Why can't we just print out a ballot with an MD5 hash of the choices in a tear-off section at the bottom. Have a machine read the ballot we printed out and display the MD5 to us. We check the MD5 against what the part we tore off to know that the vote was generated and scanned properly. We can then take the MD5 with us and can check for that MD5 in the results when they are tallied. Add a secret key into the mix before the MD5 and you can't figure out what was voted for from the MD5 you take away.
What is the difference between a simple MD5 based system and this one?
Good point, but instead of doing away with the verification system altogether, why don't we just add a "fake vote" capability to the system. You can enter a fake vote into the system and it will be recorded in all the databases just like a regular vote only it won't be counted. To all verification systems the vote seems legitimate and it could be pulled up using a web interface. It's more work than just not being able to take something away but it protects from the scenario you brought up as well as many others. There could be an automatic random fake vote entered for every real vote. That way you couldn't even use any data about whether a fake vote was entered to check if a vote was fake. To make that work, you would need to only be able to take one printout out with you. That way there would be no way to tell if the printout was real or fake.
There are hazards to having a verifiable voting system but I think the benefits in terms of a strong sense that your vote is being counted and a feeling that the system can't be corrupted are important to a fair voting process too.
The issue of ballot stuffing is an important one. I think this is probably the most common form of election fraud in the US (based solely on an educated guess.) Fighting this is hard since there needs to be a disconnect between who is voting and what they are voting for which makes a system that is naturally vulnerable to stuffing. Fighting stuffing is different from fighting tampering and should be treated as a separate issue. Solutions for this are things like cameras that watch people entering a voting place and count the number of unique people coming in. You need to strike a precarious balance between ensuring the voter is who they say they are and ensuring the voter anonymous voting capability. One way would be to take pictures of every voter and store the number of voters who checked in (and had their picture taken) and make sure there aren't more votes entered than the number of people checked in. This helps defeat bulk ballot stuffing, and multiple voting since you could compare all the pictures of people to each other and see if people are voting more than once. Stuffing on a huge scale would be extremely difficult.
Of course the flip side of this is: if our congressmen can sell votes why can't we! (grin)
Furthermore, each voting system should have a secret key. On the recipt there should be a hash (ala MD5) of the information and the secret key. A recipt with this hash would be *proof* that a vote was cast, on which machine it was cast, and what you voted for. This way there would be no way for someone to come in later and change votes in the database without that change being evident. Voters could punch in their recipt code into a web interface and have the system automatically check that their vote was cast and counted correctly.
The central votes database would need to record:
- What voting machine cast the vote
- The unique ID of the vote
- What was voted for
Things not recorded in the central votes database:- What time the vote was cast (this would be too easy to tie to who came in and voted when)
- Weather the recipt was printed (If that was in the DB someone could go in and only change votes where there was no proof of what the original vote was for)
- The voting machines secret key (this should be a well guarded secret.)
The recipt should have:- The id of the voting machine used
- The unique ID of the vote
- The MD5 of what was voted for, the uniqe ID, and the secret key
- (Voter Optional) A printout of what the votes were cast
The voting machines would need to disable themselves if for some reason it's printer didn't work. The key to not being able to tamper with the votes is that verification must be possible. Without that, votes could be altered with impunity.Someone, please! Every single football game runs at least 30 minues over. What braindead moron decided they should schedule 30 minutes less than the game takes and screw up every single show that comes after. Schedule it for 30 minutes more and make some filler you can show if it runs short.
I agree! I watched almost every Farscape and in the end, I have to say, it sucked at the end. The writing just went to hell and after they got rid of the plant chick it wasn't much worth watching. Firefly had good writing good music and was fun to watch. I loved the part where the captain was telling the assassins what to tell their boss and the guy wouldn't cooperate so he just kicked him into the intake of the engine grabbed the next guy, and started saying the same thing to him. Damn funny moment.
I also liked the part in the pilot where the reavers are coming and the alliance marshal is holding the doctor's sister hostage and the captain just walks in, shoots him, and tosses him out the back. I like it when people take a typical TV show setup that we are used to seing turn into a long drawn out dramatc moment and just ending it cleverly. Like the bridge scene in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. It was just nice, they moved past all the stupid artificial melodrama that is in most movies and into the real melodrama that inevitably comes after.
I see the Linux desktop market occupying the $150-$300 disposable desktop range. Apples with OSX are incapable of competing in that price range. And don't let that $799 price tag fool you. There are a lot of expenses associated with operating in the Apple world that have nothing to do with the purchase price of the machine.
The Apple way of doing things has more overhead than the PC way of doing things, it always has and always will. That's not to say it's inferior! The Ferrari way of doing things will always be more expensive than the Ford way of doing things but you don't see Ferrari owners longing for a Ford or Ford owners kicking themselves for not buying a Ferrari. There is a place for both business strategies. But just like Ferrari's will never be mainstream cars, Apples will never be mainstream business machines. It's just not what they do.
P.S.
I hate the idea of monitors built in to the computers. Montiors last 3-4 times as long as computers do in my household. You waste a bunch of money by bundling the two together, especially when it's a LCD monitor that get's bundled (shudder.)
Interstate commerce is not taxable by the states. The states keep trying to decide that it is and trying to dream up ways to do it. It's against the rules. It should be against the rules. Go find money elsewhere!
I get the feeling that this is the end of a process, probably started a long time ago deep inside Microsoft in the attempt to label the GPL as an IP Virus. The spin at the time coming from MS was that the GPL either was or should be illegal. This may just be the tail end of a project that was given a little money to try and bring that about. Someone was probably clever enough to see the SCO thing starting to happen and, tap into it and inject a little money and influence to twist it into something that would get us here. Weather or not that this ends in Mircosofts favor, at least they tried and at the end they will know where they stand.
This is a good thing for the GPL since it will probably finally get it's day in court with someone arguing that you can't do what the GPL does. Lots of smart people have looked at the GPL and decided it will hold up and is pretty iron clad but it would still be nice to get that as a ruling from a judge.
Personally, I think all of software licenses are on shaky ground since it's really an unsigned contract and seemingly not enforceable. I think there should be such a thing as a software licence and an end user licence agreement but the EULA's should limitations clearly spelled out somewhere.
It's time for a "Software Owner's Bill of Rights" where we have our rights to use, backup, and transfer software between computers explicitly stated and a system of fines for any company that sells software that violates these rights. Other things that should be explicitly granted as "Fair Use" for any purchased copy of software is patching, reverse engineering, and we could even add things like an option:
1. You can install on 4 computers simultaneously but then the software can't be transferred to any others.
2. You can only install on one machine at a time but you can move it any number of times.
And which option is chosen could be up to the company selling the software but one of those two must be chosen. Any technical measures installed in the software to remove fair use rights could be delcared illegal as part of the Software Owner's Bill of Rights. Wouldn't that be cool! We have the concept of Fair Use for copyrighted works we purchase but the software world has tried to remove anything like fair use from their products using End User License Agreements. It's time to extend the laws and get Fair Use rights back for good.
Mono makes it easy to give access to all kinds of .net libraries from inside Parrot (the new high power VM for Perl and probably Python and Ruby.) And it makes it easy for Parrot to add the ability to turn perl code into .net code (I think. does anyone know how much mono code is being used in parrot?).
.net languages, java, perl, python, etc and allow them to cooperate and function together. Thank you Microsoft for making perl slightly better. Take your lousy languages and restrictive platforms and shove them, however.
.net languages. They will die long before these will. Although, who knows, maybe someone will build parrot compilers for those languages too. It's apparently very easy to add a language to Parrot.
Parrot is not at all what Microsoft wanted when they pushed for Mono, but it will be great platform for developers. Parrot will embrace and extend all the
If you really want to switch to a portable, high power platform, go to Perl or Python. Forget the
And for any fellow Perl developers out there, be exited for the new Perl 6 syntax changes. I wasn't but I started doing some reading and they are doing it right! The changes make a lot of sense and will make a bunch of things that were painful in perl 5, easy and straightforward. And there will be utilities to convert from old syntax to new.
Why would you go with mod_mono as opposed to mod_perl? I'm not trying to be snyde, I'm a perl developer who has done lots of things in mod_perl and have been totally happy with it. I am, however, always on the lookout for the advantages of other languages. Would mod_mono simply be so you could use .net languages in Apache or is there some technical advantage to using .net?
.NET and Java in a way that promises to be very powerful for developers. It will give programmers access to .net libraries, java libraries, and let you use them all from the safety of your favorite fully open and portable language like Python, Perl or Ruby. It should also allow for compilation from any of these languages into java or .net bytecode. I plan to program in a language that will let me skip this whole mess.
For programmers who want portability, switching to Parrot rather than mono seems to be a much better bet in the long term.
For those who haven't heard of Parrot, it's Perl 6 (and probably Python and Ruby's) new backend virtual machine. It will embrace and extend
I've had one of these for a few months now. It's my backup drive.
I run a cron job that backs up all critical files of my primary disks to this beast. I'ts perfect for that. It's big and slow and cheap. Since I also keep previous versions of changed files as long as I have room to do it, this beast really makes a difference.
I agree that you shouldn't have giant disks without backups. This guy can back up 2 or 3 giant disks. It's also great for things like a ReplayTV or Tivo but I have to save up a little longer before I can get another one for that.
- Windows 2000 or XP (Anything older is more trouble than it's worth.)
- Open Office
- Mozilla and plugins:
- Quick Time
- Real Player
- Flash player
- Java JRE
- Acrobat Reader
- WinZip
- Winamp
- RealVNC (If they will ever need help)
- Tweak UI
- Norton Antivirus (or one of the free ones if it's not worth the money)
I put these on every Windows machine, no matter what it will be doing. After that, you need to look at what it will be used for to determine what software should be on there.You can let your kids watch a nasty movie, play a nasty video game, and listen to nasty music. It can be a healthy outlet. Just make sure to put it in context. Ban something every once in a while. Dissaprove of things that should be disapproved of, and comment on why things that are bad, are bad. Context is everything. It's one thing to whitness horrible things and be discusted. It's a completely different thing to whitness a horrible thing and think it's cool. And you don't need to instil a sense of discust in them. Simply by expressing your opinion they will notice how it differs with thiers. It may take a while to sink in, but that's how most kids learn best.
(At least I think that should work. I have no parenting experience.)
This is not true. From the customer's standpoint maintainability of closed source software is necessarily worse than that of open source software because only the company that owns the source is allowed to modify it. Also the software owners aren't required to make modifications you want if they don't want to. For example, if my organization wanted to modify the Windows authentication system I was using to be Kerberos compatible to integrate with a new system and were willing to pay for the development time, I couldn't do it, no matter what my budget.
It shouldn't matter whether the building was built by volunteers or by a private construction firm, all that matters is which building is better.
OSS is not about volunteers (many OSS developers are salaried employees.) What makes something OSS is that the source is available and that the customer can make and use changes to it. I equate close source software to a plumbing system that does not allow you to make any modifications to it. It would be against the building code to install such a system. It's not inappropriate to require a minimum set of requirements on your infrastructure one of which might be the ability to modify it to accommodate situations outside of it's original design. It's like requiring buildings to be able to survive an earthquake, it's not free and I'm sure many companies would rather not do it but it's not unprecedented and not even a bad idea. It wouldn't even be unprecedented for a state or federal government to say that it was illegal to setup new systems using software that didn't meet the current "IT code" which could include requirements that the source be available for necessary modifications just like we require that plumbing drains that are installed are modifiable and expandable.
all that matters is which building is better
That doesn't mean it's not appropriate to issue minimum standards. Tents were efficient and useful to earlier civilizations but over time we learned that long-term there were better options and most places building codes don't allow you to use tents as residences anymore. Defining minimum standards to insure an infrastructure that is stable, maintainable, and scalable is part of what governments do. Continuing the building analogy: If a contractor offers to put up a tent in their plan to build a building, it will be rejected as unqualified no matter if it is the cheapest and prettiest solution to the problem. Similarly, they could deem closed source software unqualified because of it's fundamental issues. (I'm not saying they should, just that if it were the right thing to do it would be appropriate for government bodies to do it.)
Closed source software has fundamental issues, especially in infrastructure software. The problem is that in infrastructure software like operating systems, the closer the product is to 100% market share, the more expensive it gets (monopoly pricing) while in open source software, the closer it gets to 100% market share, the less expensive it gets (work is spread over more people.) Closed source is more economical efficient for small scale "niche" software and for medium scale "specialty" software but when it reaches the level of large scale "infrastructure" software, the closed source model becomes economically inefficient.
Proprietary software development employs people, which leads to people being fed... There's no moral deficit in that.
Open Source software employs people also. Granted there are fewer marketing, legal, middle management and sales people employed but that helps economic efficiency and is generally good for the economy. Since governments are in the business of providing infrastructure when it is economically efficient to do so and they are in the business of defining minim