Instead of trying to come up with a way to decide who gets extra votes, why not just go with transferable votes, where you can either vote on issues or tranfer your vote to another person (reversible of course).
because a lot of people are lazy and/or greedy and would simply sell all thier votes to the highest bidder
It deals with the problems of underrepresentation (right now if 51% of people voted for one person, and the other 49% voted for another, the 49 group is completely unrepresented
Not really, if you consider a president normally has little power, most power is held in houses where everything is voted on, so the 49% get their representation, unfortunately people at some point decided strong governance is worth more than representation of individuals so most countries have retarded voting systems that take away quite a bit of this representation. currently most countries have fairly stable political climates, so strong governments (and as a result strong parties) aren't really required, so most of countries would be better served by some form of proportional representation and as a result a divided government that would compromise (on the few issues they disagree on). in the uk, the lib dems would hold some actual power (they get a substantial vote, but its spread evenly so they get fewer seats), in the us the libertarians would at least get the 1% that vote for them (if not more as people would actually vote for them)
I'm not a fan of videogame/software piracy because there are good legitimate alternatives (and no MAFIAA), however my brother and his friends justify it because ds/wii games are not full games ( there are some and to be far to him he has a fair few of them). While he doesn't mind paying £30-£40 for a full xbox360 game, he finds paying £30 for a collection of minigames is too much. pc game piracy is pretty easy too but i believe that the pricing on a ds games is what makes many turn to the dark side.
I disagree with him as imo, if you don't want to pay £30 for a collection of minigames, you should just go on flash websites and not splash out on a DS in the first place.
thats interesting but not really piracy, as you have previously stated you have pretty weird views on what piracy is, to the rest of us its simple: are you playing wii games, that you did not purchase legitimatly?
patent (if they're even valid) and trademark (if your not passing it of as the original who cares) abuse don't count as piracy, they count as *shock* patent/trademark abuse.
then they will take countermeasures, if they don't interactive performance on their oversold "up to speed X" network will become terrible.
they could just get us to play nice and use QOS so we can mark out torrent traffic/large downloads as bulk and our browsing as browsing, I suppose that is traffic shaping, but atm virgin broadband work something like this if they catch bittorrent packets or you have encrypted upload's > ~30Kib/s, then they smash users pings up to ~4s obviously a lot of pirates are unethical douchebags and will just mark all their packets voip, but providing a way for the rest of us to download nicely (pun intended), will: *allow them to keep overselling ridiculously *keep most of people happy *reduce the amount of data they are traffic analysing (they can just scan for people abusing their QOS and do thorough inspection on them)
It's obvious why this is moded troll, however i believe you have a point. Personally I'm a bit of a gnu zealot and that is why I'm holding on to firefox over chrome/opera, but i do find it interesting that a lot of people claim "open source software is more secure because you can view the source", then go on to run a closed app in one of the most vulnerable position on a system.
I think you really need a history class, I'm no expert but basically: Hitler had not promised to ban all other political parties (nor where his anti-semitic views on prominent display in nazi propaganda). Hitler tricked and schemed other politicians into giving him more power, in exchange for getting rid of the threat of communism (much like McCarthy), however once he had the power there was not much that could be done, without the ability to unify the 56% of the country that had voted for the other parties where powerless to do anything about it. Hitler was popular there is no denying that but 1) He never got the majority vote 2) He never promised to seize power and crush other democratic parties, merely to crush communism (which is what many democratic leaders where doing at the time)
With the App store, 2 billion in sales is a lot of money for Apple. Why would they worry about such things unless there's a PR backlash?
Because if it makes the review system useless and as a result people buy less apps! This requires it to be a serious widespread problem though, which AFAIK it is not.
Let's say you want to astroturf Amazon a hundred times... so you buy your book a hundred times. That costs what... $1000-$2000? That's dirt cheap advertising.
1) you have set a limit there, now you can only astrotruft 100 times, much better than the inf times you could before 2) $1000-$2000 is a much more significant cost than $0 3) it's dirty cheap but its,fairly crappy advertising, you only sell to people already looking at the book's page
Meanwhile, a bunch of people who have bought your book, and would like to write about how much it stinks, can't. Because they bought it at a normal book store.
That's not amazons problem, when it comes to reviews quantity doesn't matter, its quality and while it would reduce the number of reviews, it would increase the quality by hurting astroturfers much more than it hurts legitimate amazon customers.
I never got why amazon didn't limit reviews to people who had bought the book, (while it doesn't stop this it makes it a more costly business, I find it particularly surprising that a company with as much control over their system as apple don't limit reviews to app purchasers.
cue/. republicans, bitching about how nothing good will come of this, and whenever the government try anything they just fuck it up and or it should just be left to the market!
I wasn't talking about daemons they are AFAIK, pretty well tuned (under any os), I'm talking about starting up my little GUI programs, e.g RSS feed scroller, my weather feed scroller, KTorrent, Kopete,Kontact,Amarok,etc these programs (especially the smaller widgets) are generally not written with battery life in mind (don't even think of using itunes as an example of a well designed gui program that regularly runs in the background). I suppose you could patch small widget programs to care about battery life or design a much more complex applet system, but it was hardly a priority when fancy GUI applet systems where designed, the applications (Kde suite in this case) have no such excuse, but then again i have no proof they drain bat, i just knew i didn't use them so there was no need to run them.
Another thing you mentioned that really shouldn't be necessary is disabling devices. Yes, it can help, but it shouldn't help much for idle devices unless something is very wrong.
This is true, unfortunately a lot of the Linux drivers suck when it comes to power management (in their defence they really get the kind of collaboration apple get from apple when asking for device specs). In particular i know the firmware on the webcam probably suck because the drivers have been developed from scratch with no specs and have enough problems that prevent the battery use being important. Now I can either kick up a fuse and demand perfect drivers or i can accept the reality that its being worked on but its hard and physically disable the devices when they are not in use.
The wireless stack should only scan when an application polls it and asks for an updated list of access points, which should only happen when the user clicks on an Airport menu extra or whatever the Linux equivalent is.
It is a lot easier to concentrate on powermanagment when there is one device (that you have the spec for), for which there is one driver, communicating with one kernel, communicating with one wireless stack. Linux doesn't have this luxury, however slowly the various components are improving (well those that i've noticed are).
So yes, you can nickel and dime your way into a tiny bit of extra battery life by following those steps, but if they make a big difference, it means that there's something massively wrong with the OS itself.
the problem comes down to your definition of OS, The kernel needs work (but tbh first it needs some spec,so if your $brand_name laptop has crappy battery life under Linux they probably haven't released much of the spec for their components), but many of the major improvements are in the framework already (tickeless kernel, new wifistack, gscpa improvements, etc). The low level userspace (daemons,etc) are pretty much fine (possibly except pulseaudio, but that is apparent;y saving power in otherways) The DE may need work (kde3s kicker did, kde4 doesn't seam too bad, fluxbox was almost perfect) The GUI apps do need work, but thats not really a "linux" problem and there are tools out there that are fine already (powertop is very useful for identifying those that aren't)
Windows has better ACPI stuff because most of the drivers are 3rd party, so while its not scanning the card sleeps, eventually NM+well supported cards will catch up, e.g ath5k now handles me turning the card on/off, this is a big improvement from custom rmmod scripts (if you want it sooner, go do it)
it has tons of background stuff active
The background stuff isn't "linux's" fault, its down to whatever distro/setup you have, e.g if doubt slackware/arch users bitch about battery life. For example, i run crap loads of background stuff that requires a net connection, it can't magically know that I've decided to watch a film on batteries without a net connection.
you have a colorful UI with FX
I think a lean KDE3 install might compete with XP, running fluxbox wasn't because the DE is particular efficient (which it is), it's because it didn't suit my setup. Perhaps KDE4 might compete with Vista, but i don't know i ran vista once and it ate my batteries.
and full brightness,
Again changing brightness affects both OSes equally or do you think linux has some allergy to light?
you use the mouse
While the linux touchpad drivers probably aren't as good as the windows driver, my advice stands for windows too, using keyboard/button inputs uses much less cpu than a touchpad.
So what was the point of your post? To bitch about how the background processes and drivers in linux arn't as efficient as those in windows? How about you go fireup powertop and file some bug reports. If you'd understood the point of my post (which ill go out on a limb and say you had no fucking clue), it was that the problem doesn't lie in the kernel (although for the wlan scanning it may), but rather in the background processes (looks at pulseadudio, though it saves audio card power im sure it wastes more in CPU wakeups) and Desktop environment, which over time do actually improve (firefox is still a bad offender but its gone from ~100 wakeups/s to ~40 in 3.5), however if you want to see battery life improve quicker then do something (just filing bugreports helps [1] bitching about it on slashdot does not!)
+1 powertop will also give suggestions, you can permanently configure sutff.
on my Acer i also managed to get more battery life than windows by: switching my DE to fluxbox not running anything in the background (except kpowersave) turning off unused peripherals (wireless chips eat power with their scans, webcams hold charge in their CCD, etc) using buttons/keys over mouse where possible (I think most of the touchpad drivers run in software, thus prevents the CPU reaching lower sleep levels)
Short of a hardware based tracker, all the software methods seam to give up any hope of securing a system. *To get a picture on a webcam you need to let the thief login, *To connect to an encrypted AP you need to let the thief login, *To get the gadget turned on for sustained amounts of time you need to let the thief login...
There are some potential exceptions, *you could have bios periodically turn on, boot to a custom kernel,scan for APs and report its position (could use something like wesside-ng to report its location even if only WEP APs are available), *you could have fake passwords (idiot words?) log you into a fake login/partition, but 1) this raises huge security issues 2) AFAIK this has not been implemented by any OS yet.
I hope I can still view unapproved version. It would be great if this keeps the deletionist happy enough that we can start adding stuff again, because nobody has to look after the pages, maybe they can even give anon users the ability to create pages again.
The android ain't going to be the cashcow where people will pay stupid amounts for any old app, those people already have iphones (and i doubt that any startups have actually that made much after apple-tax)
What are the catalyst people doing? no release for 2.6.29 or 2.6.30, at this rate its just a matter of time till the radeon driver will be equal to the flgrx, maybe that is what ATI have been planning all along. Hopefully when that point is reached somebody at ATI will say: "yeah we could, stop supporting linux altogether or we could *Quake voice*Dominate* the linux market by putting that limited man power (i suspect the flgrx drivers are just "ported" windows drivers done in limited time by the windows driver developers) towards the radeon drivers", it's seams doubtful because it would require a management type to see things other than the bottomline (i.e we could sack a developer)
The binary blobs do not come installed, and never will be, that would be a GPL violation! I for one do not use ubuntu (got nothing against it, just don't use it atm), and currently frglx (or flgrx whatever you call ATI closed drivers) do not exist for my kernel, however radeon (open ATI driver) is coming along nicely with the ATI provided spec. For radeon, the optimisation is happening (we can almost run compiz, we can run kde4 compositing) but its tricky stuff, I've read (and its a reasonable explanation) that the closed drivers cheat and use a lot of their windows code in their Linux drivers and so are already heavily optimised.
Funny i saw a Carmac talking about it, and was under the impression that it was being designed with all the platforms in mind, the PS3 will have better graphics (than the 360) because the larger discs allow it, the PC will allow users to choose all the settings so they can vary it by hardware. Even if release dates are staggered, because the id Tech engines are "done right", i doubt any of the versions can be regarded as a port. A port is: bob: We really need to get into the ps3 market jon: OK well, we'll just move over our $existing_game, and fix any bugs as we go This is more like: bob: remember jon the key markets are ps3 and xbox360 jon: OK we will spend more time making sure $new_game, works well on them.
I may be reading into it too much, but it may be: previously it went game->DRI/X-server->prop drivers and oss drivers as they got the performance to play games now he may be saying game->DRI/X-server+Direct calls to binary blobs->prop cards drivers
That is the only reason that I'm on radeon drivers, because flgrx+(ironically) flash did not play nice, since the switch i can't do much 3d stuff, but i never have to worry about my system going down due to driver issues.
Slashdot Mirror
Instead of trying to come up with a way to decide who gets extra votes, why not just go with transferable votes, where you can either vote on issues or tranfer your vote to another person (reversible of course).
because a lot of people are lazy and/or greedy and would simply sell all thier votes to the highest bidder
It deals with the problems of underrepresentation (right now if 51% of people voted for one person, and the other 49% voted for another, the 49 group is completely unrepresented
Not really, if you consider a president normally has little power, most power is held in houses where everything is voted on, so the 49% get their representation, unfortunately people at some point decided strong governance is worth more than representation of individuals so most countries have retarded voting systems that take away quite a bit of this representation. currently most countries have fairly stable political climates, so strong governments (and as a result strong parties) aren't really required, so most of countries would be better served by some form of proportional representation and as a result a divided government that would compromise (on the few issues they disagree on). in the uk, the lib dems would hold some actual power (they get a substantial vote, but its spread evenly so they get fewer seats), in the us the libertarians would at least get the 1% that vote for them (if not more as people would actually vote for them)
GMail is still consistently more reliable than our exchange server. And not by a little.
That's your problem there sir.
I'm not a fan of videogame/software piracy because there are good legitimate alternatives (and no MAFIAA), however my brother and his friends justify it because ds/wii games are not full games ( there are some and to be far to him he has a fair few of them). While he doesn't mind paying £30-£40 for a full xbox360 game, he finds paying £30 for a collection of minigames is too much. pc game piracy is pretty easy too but i believe that the pricing on a ds games is what makes many turn to the dark side.
I disagree with him as imo, if you don't want to pay £30 for a collection of minigames, you should just go on flash websites and not splash out on a DS in the first place.
thats interesting but not really piracy, as you have previously stated you have pretty weird views on what piracy is, to the rest of us its simple:
are you playing wii games, that you did not purchase legitimatly?
patent (if they're even valid) and trademark (if your not passing it of as the original who cares) abuse don't count as piracy, they count as *shock* patent/trademark abuse.
then they will take countermeasures, if they don't interactive performance on their oversold "up to speed X" network will become terrible.
they could just get us to play nice and use QOS so we can mark out torrent traffic/large downloads as bulk and our browsing as browsing, I suppose that is traffic shaping, but atm virgin broadband work something like this
if they catch bittorrent packets or you have encrypted upload's > ~30Kib/s, then they smash users pings up to ~4s
obviously a lot of pirates are unethical douchebags and will just mark all their packets voip, but providing a way for the rest of us to download nicely (pun intended), will:
*allow them to keep overselling ridiculously
*keep most of people happy
*reduce the amount of data they are traffic analysing (they can just scan for people abusing their QOS and do thorough inspection on them)
It's obvious why this is moded troll, however i believe you have a point.
Personally I'm a bit of a gnu zealot and that is why I'm holding on to firefox over chrome/opera, but i do find it interesting that a lot of people claim "open source software is more secure because you can view the source", then go on to run a closed app in one of the most vulnerable position on a system.
I think you really need a history class, I'm no expert but basically: Hitler had not promised to ban all other political parties (nor where his anti-semitic views on prominent display in nazi propaganda). Hitler tricked and schemed other politicians into giving him more power, in exchange for getting rid of the threat of communism (much like McCarthy), however once he had the power there was not much that could be done, without the ability to unify the 56% of the country that had voted for the other parties where powerless to do anything about it. Hitler was popular there is no denying that but
1) He never got the majority vote
2) He never promised to seize power and crush other democratic parties, merely to crush communism (which is what many democratic leaders where doing at the time)
mac supports PAE in 32bit versions so the 3.4gb limit is a windows only limitation!
With the App store, 2 billion in sales is a lot of money for Apple. Why would they worry about such things unless there's a PR backlash?
Because if it makes the review system useless and as a result people buy less apps! This requires it to be a serious widespread problem though, which AFAIK it is not.
Let's say you want to astroturf Amazon a hundred times... so you buy your book a hundred times. That costs what... $1000-$2000? That's dirt cheap advertising.
1) you have set a limit there, now you can only astrotruft 100 times, much better than the inf times you could before
2) $1000-$2000 is a much more significant cost than $0
3) it's dirty cheap but its,fairly crappy advertising, you only sell to people already looking at the book's page
Meanwhile, a bunch of people who have bought your book, and would like to write about how much it stinks, can't. Because they bought it at a normal book store.
That's not amazons problem, when it comes to reviews quantity doesn't matter, its quality and while it would reduce the number of reviews, it would increase the quality by hurting astroturfers much more than it hurts legitimate amazon customers.
you can do that with either centralised or distributed systems, i fail to see your point.
I never got why amazon didn't limit reviews to people who had bought the book, (while it doesn't stop this it makes it a more costly business, I find it particularly surprising that a company with as much control over their system as apple don't limit reviews to app purchasers.
cue /. republicans, bitching about how nothing good will come of this, and whenever the government try anything they just fuck it up and or it should just be left to the market!
I wasn't talking about daemons they are AFAIK, pretty well tuned (under any os), I'm talking about starting up my little GUI programs, e.g RSS feed scroller, my weather feed scroller, KTorrent, Kopete ,Kontact ,Amarok ,etc these programs (especially the smaller widgets) are generally not written with battery life in mind (don't even think of using itunes as an example of a well designed gui program that regularly runs in the background). I suppose you could patch small widget programs to care about battery life or design a much more complex applet system, but it was hardly a priority when fancy GUI applet systems where designed, the applications (Kde suite in this case) have no such excuse, but then again i have no proof they drain bat, i just knew i didn't use them so there was no need to run them.
Another thing you mentioned that really shouldn't be necessary is disabling devices. Yes, it can help, but it shouldn't help much for idle devices unless something is very wrong.
This is true, unfortunately a lot of the Linux drivers suck when it comes to power management (in their defence they really get the kind of collaboration apple get from apple when asking for device specs). In particular i know the firmware on the webcam probably suck because the drivers have been developed from scratch with no specs and have enough problems that prevent the battery use being important. Now I can either kick up a fuse and demand perfect drivers or i can accept the reality that its being worked on but its hard and physically disable the devices when they are not in use.
The wireless stack should only scan when an application polls it and asks for an updated list of access points, which should only happen when the user clicks on an Airport menu extra or whatever the Linux equivalent is.
It is a lot easier to concentrate on powermanagment when there is one device (that you have the spec for), for which there is one driver, communicating with one kernel, communicating with one wireless stack. Linux doesn't have this luxury, however slowly the various components are improving (well those that i've noticed are).
So yes, you can nickel and dime your way into a tiny bit of extra battery life by following those steps, but if they make a big difference, it means that there's something massively wrong with the OS itself.
the problem comes down to your definition of OS,
The kernel needs work (but tbh first it needs some spec,so if your $brand_name laptop has crappy battery life under Linux they probably haven't released much of the spec for their components), but many of the major improvements are in the framework already (tickeless kernel, new wifistack, gscpa improvements, etc).
The low level userspace (daemons,etc) are pretty much fine (possibly except pulseaudio, but that is apparent;y saving power in otherways)
The DE may need work (kde3s kicker did, kde4 doesn't seam too bad, fluxbox was almost perfect)
The GUI apps do need work, but thats not really a "linux" problem and there are tools out there that are fine already (powertop is very useful for identifying those that aren't)
your wlan scans the surroundings
Windows has better ACPI stuff because most of the drivers are 3rd party, so while its not scanning the card sleeps, eventually NM+well supported cards will catch up, e.g ath5k now handles me turning the card on/off, this is a big improvement from custom rmmod scripts (if you want it sooner, go do it)
it has tons of background stuff active
The background stuff isn't "linux's" fault, its down to whatever distro/setup you have, e.g if doubt slackware/arch users bitch about battery life. For example, i run crap loads of background stuff that requires a net connection, it can't magically know that I've decided to watch a film on batteries without a net connection.
you have a colorful UI with FX
I think a lean KDE3 install might compete with XP, running fluxbox wasn't because the DE is particular efficient (which it is), it's because it didn't suit my setup.
Perhaps KDE4 might compete with Vista, but i don't know i ran vista once and it ate my batteries.
and full brightness,
Again changing brightness affects both OSes equally or do you think linux has some allergy to light?
you use the mouse
While the linux touchpad drivers probably aren't as good as the windows driver, my advice stands for windows too, using keyboard/button inputs uses much less cpu than a touchpad.
So what was the point of your post? To bitch about how the background processes and drivers in linux arn't as efficient as those in windows? How about you go fireup powertop and file some bug reports. If you'd understood the point of my post (which ill go out on a limb and say you had no fucking clue), it was that the problem doesn't lie in the kernel (although for the wlan scanning it may), but rather in the background processes (looks at pulseadudio, though it saves audio card power im sure it wastes more in CPU wakeups) and Desktop environment, which over time do actually improve (firefox is still a bad offender but its gone from ~100 wakeups/s to ~40 in 3.5), however if you want to see battery life improve quicker then do something (just filing bugreports helps [1] bitching about it on slashdot does not!)
+1 powertop will also give suggestions, you can permanently configure sutff.
on my Acer i also managed to get more battery life than windows by:
switching my DE to fluxbox
not running anything in the background (except kpowersave)
turning off unused peripherals (wireless chips eat power with their scans, webcams hold charge in their CCD, etc)
using buttons/keys over mouse where possible (I think most of the touchpad drivers run in software, thus prevents the CPU reaching lower sleep levels)
Short of a hardware based tracker, all the software methods seam to give up any hope of securing a system.
*To get a picture on a webcam you need to let the thief login,
*To connect to an encrypted AP you need to let the thief login,
*To get the gadget turned on for sustained amounts of time you need to let the thief login...
There are some potential exceptions,
*you could have bios periodically turn on, boot to a custom kernel,scan for APs and report its position (could use something like wesside-ng to report its location even if only WEP APs are available),
*you could have fake passwords (idiot words?) log you into a fake login/partition, but 1) this raises huge security issues 2) AFAIK this has not been implemented by any OS yet.
I hope I can still view unapproved version. It would be great if this keeps the deletionist happy enough that we can start adding stuff again, because nobody has to look after the pages, maybe they can even give anon users the ability to create pages again.
The android ain't going to be the cashcow where people will pay stupid amounts for any old app, those people already have iphones (and i doubt that any startups have actually that made much after apple-tax)
What are the catalyst people doing? no release for 2.6.29 or 2.6.30, at this rate its just a matter of time till the radeon driver will be equal to the flgrx, maybe that is what ATI have been planning all along. Hopefully when that point is reached somebody at ATI will say: "yeah we could, stop supporting linux altogether or we could *Quake voice*Dominate* the linux market by putting that limited man power (i suspect the flgrx drivers are just "ported" windows drivers done in limited time by the windows driver developers) towards the radeon drivers", it's seams doubtful because it would require a management type to see things other than the bottomline (i.e we could sack a developer)
The binary blobs do not come installed, and never will be, that would be a GPL violation!
I for one do not use ubuntu (got nothing against it, just don't use it atm), and currently frglx (or flgrx whatever you call ATI closed drivers) do not exist for my kernel, however radeon (open ATI driver) is coming along nicely with the ATI provided spec. For radeon, the optimisation is happening (we can almost run compiz, we can run kde4 compositing) but its tricky stuff, I've read (and its a reasonable explanation) that the closed drivers cheat and use a lot of their windows code in their Linux drivers and so are already heavily optimised.
Funny i saw a Carmac talking about it, and was under the impression that it was being designed with all the platforms in mind, the PS3 will have better graphics (than the 360) because the larger discs allow it, the PC will allow users to choose all the settings so they can vary it by hardware. Even if release dates are staggered, because the id Tech engines are "done right", i doubt any of the versions can be regarded as a port. A port is:
bob: We really need to get into the ps3 market
jon: OK well, we'll just move over our $existing_game, and fix any bugs as we go
This is more like:
bob: remember jon the key markets are ps3 and xbox360
jon: OK we will spend more time making sure $new_game, works well on them.
I may be reading into it too much, but it may be:
previously it went game->DRI/X-server->prop drivers and oss drivers as they got the performance to play games
now he may be saying game->DRI/X-server+Direct calls to binary blobs->prop cards drivers
That is the only reason that I'm on radeon drivers, because flgrx+(ironically) flash did not play nice, since the switch i can't do much 3d stuff, but i never have to worry about my system going down due to driver issues.
indeed, I suspect the overlap between the 5% without flash and IE users is minimal.