If we abolished the electoral college, then we'd not have to watch this sort of spectacle again, because the margins of victory would vastly increase. Rather than looking through 6,000,000 votes in search of 500 one way or the other.... But then... who knows?
According to Gnumeric, Gore won the country by 285,279 votes (.28%), where as he lost florida by 537 votes (.0092%) (those really are percentages, not decimals with percentage signs).
I think that, especially after this election, people really will care much more about their votes, ESPECIALLY if we red ourselves of a small bit of our 17th century roots.
It's one thing to fudge things 500 votes one way or the other... and say that 3000 votes could have made or broke the election, but on the much larger scale, what we've been watching in flordia is basically meaningless for democracy, in the true sense of the word.
In massachusetts we have a voting booth with little levers and stuff. It's extremely clear what switch does what. And there's no need for recounts, since there's none of this "hanging chad" and stuff like that.
What about the 19000 double punched palm beach ballots? There were 24,000 other rejected ballots in the northern part of the state, from what i understand, as well... And let's not forget how pissed off those 3000 african americans will be at gore, since they accidentally voted for Buchanan rather than Gore. Even Buchanan concedes that.
No, you'd have each person having an equal say... Right now, where according to your theory, our votes are weighted by what the population density is. The higher the density the less each vote counts, basically. It's not like a candidate could go from LA to Houston to Miami to Altanta to DC to Boston to New York to Chicago and wrap the election like that, unless maybe they got 100% of the votes in each of those cities and the rest of the coutry forgot to turn out.
Every other vote in this country is based on popular vote - senators, congressmen, governors, mayors, etc... And didn't we just sit back in glee when Milosivech (i know, i can't spell his name) lost the popular vote, called himself the victor and then watch on tv as the entire country revolted against him.
Maybe we don't need to abolish the electoral college completely, but what we need to do is separate the votes from the states. Have the candidates fight out over each and every vote... Like, right now, bush'd get 13 of florida's votes and gore'd get 12 and this'd been over weeks ago. Because i hardly see how "every vote counts" under a system where the loser wins... No one recounted Massachusetts looking for extra gore or bush or nader votes because 66% of the state went for gore, making the other 34% basically throwaway votes.
BSD's been around far longer than Linux. And it's a lot more "standardized" than linux, thanks to the fact that there' aren't so many distributions, just a few different flavors, that to anyone that knows them are quite different internally and are developed with different goals in mind from one another...
Past that, the BSD license (i know, this is getting old around here) is a much freer license than the GPL... It doesn't take away your freedom to do with it as you chose, nor does it do that to anyone else. It also doesn't order you to do anything you might not want to do.
BSD's not going anywhere. While Linux continually chases Microsoft, the BSD's will continue to be the rock solid foundations. There aren't any public companies selling BSD, there aren't any shareholders to listen to, there's no CFO's discussing market share with the CEO and how to grow the market. It's just a bunch of people that have decided that they like this system better than the alternatives, and if you do too, cool, otherwise that's fine too.
Speaking at least for me... I could care less that i have the linux source code and all of these development tools installed on my system. I started using linux because it was the most well supported Unix like operating system for x86 PC's, as well as the cheapest. In the end, I'd have preferred OpenBSD, but Oracle won't run there, and that was one of my critereon when purchasing my new system.
But I have no desire to compile all of my command line tools. Wow... I could eke out a little extra performance from grep and ls? I've an Athlon 700, so even if the software is horribly unoptimized, the machine more than makes up the differnce.
Quake benchmarks are useless except for video cards.
And how is encoding video to mpeg 4 less usefull than photoshop filters and povray renders? Those three are all the exact same operations, basically. If anything, mpeg encoding puts more strain on the memory system than a photoshop filter would, simply because you're dealing with 4 to 8 gigs of data running through the CPU rather than a 30 megabyte file.
Running real world programs like FlasK seems like a reasonable test. A highly CPU intensive application that any user could run if they wanted to. Not nearlly as "elitist" SPEC's series of benchmarks, which cost a fortune just to be able to have access to the software they used.
In the mean time, I think it's good that he's rerunning his tests as he gets new data. That's one of the things that's great about the web, nothing is static, and news can react as quickly as events change, instead of magazines which have press deadlines so they have to publish whatever they can by a certain date, only to print a tiny correction a few months later. Tom's being upfront about what's going on, and keeping all of us much more informed than we would have otherwise been...
Look, the x86 architecture is not going anywhere. Nor will it ever. Intel knows that, which is why it's not even bothering to attempt to extend it again with 64 bit extensions. AMD knows this too, which is why they ARE trying to add 64 bit exensions to it. Transmeta even knows this, since their first processor would be useless without x86 compatibility. They're all right. The world demands backwards compatibility. If you have a problem with that, don't buy x86. But don't yell at Intel for supplying what most people want and what they make the most of...
Re:GM food is not a good idea yet
on
Golden Rice
·
· Score: 1
Companies today like Pioneer have entire fields devoted to this same practice of aggressively cross-breeding various staples in efforts to yield more disease-resistant, larger, tastier foods. Why, oh why, do people not get just as worked up over aggressive cross-breeding as they do over laboratory-based genetic engineering? Is it our obsession with the whole natural = right, artificial = wrong? If so, just keep reminding yourself that glasses are extremely unnatural, whereas the Bubonic Plague is 100% pure Mother Earth
The prospect of disease resistant foods gets rather scary if you think about it... What if someone produced a breed of rice that was immune to every disease we put before it and whose seed was cheaper than any other? Farmers across the world would pull up their crops and plant this new rice. Now, what would happen if finally a disease did break through it's barrier? Because, you know it will happen, just as in computer security, uptime estimates, or any other more slashdotty term, no one can ever state any sort of 100% guarentee about anything. It might be 100% disease proof up til now, but later on a disease might mutate to the point where it can decimate crops of rice. And that's what could stand to happen... Some virus could come along and kill off all the worlds rice crops. Or not even the worlds, but a specific region of the worlds.
It's not FUD from luddites, et al, that's causing any holdup. It's pure concern from across the spectrum of people who think and care about it.
NSI's decision not to register domain names that they deem as being vulgar is just like MAPS and ORBS' decisions to not deliver email to persons who's ISPs have signed up with them whom they deem as being spammers.
A web bug has nothing to do with cookies... It's basically an image request set to 1 by 1 pixels. The server on the other end will 404 it, but that doesn't matter at all. Since each email has a unique "bug", it's trivial to track that emails path across IP addresses... They can tell who the sucker was that forwarded it in the first place and pound them with more and more emails.
So, html savy email programs would have to disallow retrieving images on the web, in order to deter web bugs.
Since it was widely speculated and pretty much known that the P4 would accomplish less per clock than the P3, Intel should have simply milked the P3 for a couple more months until they could ramp up production of 2 or 2.1 GHz P4's which would hopefully outperform P3's at all tasks...
Why would anyone want to spend the fortune to upgrade their system to a P4 when they could save a bundle and get equivalent performance from one of Intel's own P3's, and that's forgetting all about AMD for the moment...
Intel had best be extremely aggressive about upping the clocks on it's chips... I read (I think on the Register, I'm not possitive) that AMD's roadmaps don't forecast the Athlon going much past 1.5 or 1.7 GHz this year. So, if Intel can go strong with the P4 and AMD does perhaps stumble under the weight of their recent successes, they might be able to be king of the hill once again...
Just not right now.
Just as a correction: THose boxes were from Gil Amelio's description of Rhapsody. They still apply to OS X, though...
Blue box is now Classic application which runs OS 9 and the apps with in it.
Yellow box is now Cocoa, Apple's "preffered" tool for developers to use to build OS X apps.
Those two choices weren't enough to make developers happy, so Apple provided a 3rd choice: Carbon, so that developers with apps already built wouldn't have to rewrite their work from scratch in order to get it to run on OS X.
Never in Apple's plans have they announced anything about running Wintel binaries. One rumors site said they heard from a source that Apple was working on the "Red box" which would provide windows compatibility... But that was just a rumor site, which made that claim a year or two ago and never said a word of it afterwards.
Linux will be around. So will gnome and kde. Redhat, VA Linux, et al may not be. They seem to make very little difference in the grand schemem of things. But still, it makes little sense to compare the features of Microsofts product to those of linux's currently shipping equivalents, namely because Whistler is so far away from release that any feature or weakness can easily be changed in time for release...
Past that... I for one am happy that the stock market has become a sane environment once again. There were too many ideas that were getting too many millions in financing thanks to aspirations to be the next amazon, yahoo, or ebay. Maybe now people will start concentrating on those little things like "profit", "revenue" and "margins". But that's a conversation for another day.
Most people and companies aren't concerned with the slot or socket that's in their systems. They buy a box, which happens to have components inside of them... The components may be retired in 6 months, but they'll still be usable for quite some time after that.
And people will keep buying P4's from Intel, simply because Intel is the standard. Intel has capacity. And Intel's chips are standard inside of most business PC's... Athlons generally only ship in hobbyist, game, and soho machines.
Until AMD can crank up their capacity even more and sign on gateway, IBM, and compaq to ship their chips in their mainstream business machines, Intel is sitting pretty.
You would have been getting warning messages for 90 days in advance, so if you'd overlooked that, you'd only have yourself to blame on that one. It's not like you have to remember the date that you installed it or else it would just mysteriously stop working one day.
Germany would probably incinerate the machine. Or put in in a trash compactor. They're really touchy (maybe the word is ashamed) about the war, and go to great lengths to destroy anything that has anything to do with it.
Germany's definetly not the place for anything worth keeping from WW2
A new motherboard and case shouldnt' be looked at as being this huge expense. After all, you had to buy a new mobo when you upgraded from Pentium or Celeron to an Athlon system... And the heat sink may be intimidating, but it won't be the sole factor that a potential buyer changes their mind...
But as for the price of the actual CPU's... Intel needs to get off their high horse and realize that they need to win back their market share, even if it means not living on 40%-60% margins on their high end chips...
Probably because there's 10 times more Wintel based machines for them to pick from than *nix boxes... I doubt the corps that have Onyx's and E10000s in the back room will let process tree's software anywhere near their machines.
When the high end is unusable, the next step is to use the commodity platform, which would be Wintel. Yes, linux and *bsd may be a bit more stable, but to use those would mean to limit themselves to a small subsection of the PC market... Plus, i believe they're only distributing closed source binaries, which further impeeds them from the diehard GNU market.
We're not talking mission critical here... Any machine can crash out for a few hours here and there, because there are so many other machines ready to take it's place should that happen... Kind of like a RAID 5 composed of computers...
Slashdot Mirror
If we abolished the electoral college, then we'd not have to watch this sort of spectacle again, because the margins of victory would vastly increase. Rather than looking through 6,000,000 votes in search of 500 one way or the other.... But then... who knows?
According to Gnumeric, Gore won the country by 285,279 votes (.28%), where as he lost florida by 537 votes (.0092%) (those really are percentages, not decimals with percentage signs).
I think that, especially after this election, people really will care much more about their votes, ESPECIALLY if we red ourselves of a small bit of our 17th century roots.
It's one thing to fudge things 500 votes one way or the other... and say that 3000 votes could have made or broke the election, but on the much larger scale, what we've been watching in flordia is basically meaningless for democracy, in the true sense of the word.
Oh, you won't need to worry about any microsoft breakups once bush's in office, or haven't you heard how opposed he is about the whole thing?
In massachusetts we have a voting booth with little levers and stuff. It's extremely clear what switch does what. And there's no need for recounts, since there's none of this "hanging chad" and stuff like that.
Piss off all the residents of florida?
What about the 19000 double punched palm beach ballots? There were 24,000 other rejected ballots in the northern part of the state, from what i understand, as well... And let's not forget how pissed off those 3000 african americans will be at gore, since they accidentally voted for Buchanan rather than Gore. Even Buchanan concedes that.
No, you'd have each person having an equal say... Right now, where according to your theory, our votes are weighted by what the population density is. The higher the density the less each vote counts, basically. It's not like a candidate could go from LA to Houston to Miami to Altanta to DC to Boston to New York to Chicago and wrap the election like that, unless maybe they got 100% of the votes in each of those cities and the rest of the coutry forgot to turn out.
Every other vote in this country is based on popular vote - senators, congressmen, governors, mayors, etc... And didn't we just sit back in glee when Milosivech (i know, i can't spell his name) lost the popular vote, called himself the victor and then watch on tv as the entire country revolted against him.
Maybe we don't need to abolish the electoral college completely, but what we need to do is separate the votes from the states. Have the candidates fight out over each and every vote... Like, right now, bush'd get 13 of florida's votes and gore'd get 12 and this'd been over weeks ago. Because i hardly see how "every vote counts" under a system where the loser wins... No one recounted Massachusetts looking for extra gore or bush or nader votes because 66% of the state went for gore, making the other 34% basically throwaway votes.
BSD's been around far longer than Linux. And it's a lot more "standardized" than linux, thanks to the fact that there' aren't so many distributions, just a few different flavors, that to anyone that knows them are quite different internally and are developed with different goals in mind from one another...
Past that, the BSD license (i know, this is getting old around here) is a much freer license than the GPL... It doesn't take away your freedom to do with it as you chose, nor does it do that to anyone else. It also doesn't order you to do anything you might not want to do.
BSD's not going anywhere. While Linux continually chases Microsoft, the BSD's will continue to be the rock solid foundations. There aren't any public companies selling BSD, there aren't any shareholders to listen to, there's no CFO's discussing market share with the CEO and how to grow the market. It's just a bunch of people that have decided that they like this system better than the alternatives, and if you do too, cool, otherwise that's fine too.
Speaking at least for me... I could care less that i have the linux source code and all of these development tools installed on my system. I started using linux because it was the most well supported Unix like operating system for x86 PC's, as well as the cheapest. In the end, I'd have preferred OpenBSD, but Oracle won't run there, and that was one of my critereon when purchasing my new system.
But I have no desire to compile all of my command line tools. Wow... I could eke out a little extra performance from grep and ls? I've an Athlon 700, so even if the software is horribly unoptimized, the machine more than makes up the differnce.
Quake benchmarks are useless except for video cards.
And how is encoding video to mpeg 4 less usefull than photoshop filters and povray renders? Those three are all the exact same operations, basically. If anything, mpeg encoding puts more strain on the memory system than a photoshop filter would, simply because you're dealing with 4 to 8 gigs of data running through the CPU rather than a 30 megabyte file.
Running real world programs like FlasK seems like a reasonable test. A highly CPU intensive application that any user could run if they wanted to. Not nearlly as "elitist" SPEC's series of benchmarks, which cost a fortune just to be able to have access to the software they used.
In the mean time, I think it's good that he's rerunning his tests as he gets new data. That's one of the things that's great about the web, nothing is static, and news can react as quickly as events change, instead of magazines which have press deadlines so they have to publish whatever they can by a certain date, only to print a tiny correction a few months later. Tom's being upfront about what's going on, and keeping all of us much more informed than we would have otherwise been...
Look, the x86 architecture is not going anywhere. Nor will it ever. Intel knows that, which is why it's not even bothering to attempt to extend it again with 64 bit extensions. AMD knows this too, which is why they ARE trying to add 64 bit exensions to it. Transmeta even knows this, since their first processor would be useless without x86 compatibility. They're all right. The world demands backwards compatibility. If you have a problem with that, don't buy x86. But don't yell at Intel for supplying what most people want and what they make the most of...
Companies today like Pioneer have entire fields devoted to this same practice of aggressively cross-breeding various staples in efforts to yield more disease-resistant, larger, tastier foods. Why, oh why, do people not get just as worked up over aggressive cross-breeding as they do over laboratory-based genetic engineering? Is it our obsession with the whole natural = right, artificial = wrong? If so, just keep reminding yourself that glasses are extremely unnatural, whereas the Bubonic Plague is 100% pure Mother Earth
The prospect of disease resistant foods gets rather scary if you think about it... What if someone produced a breed of rice that was immune to every disease we put before it and whose seed was cheaper than any other? Farmers across the world would pull up their crops and plant this new rice. Now, what would happen if finally a disease did break through it's barrier? Because, you know it will happen, just as in computer security, uptime estimates, or any other more slashdotty term, no one can ever state any sort of 100% guarentee about anything. It might be 100% disease proof up til now, but later on a disease might mutate to the point where it can decimate crops of rice. And that's what could stand to happen... Some virus could come along and kill off all the worlds rice crops. Or not even the worlds, but a specific region of the worlds.
It's not FUD from luddites, et al, that's causing any holdup. It's pure concern from across the spectrum of people who think and care about it.
Dump the x86 while youre at it, and you've got yourself a G4/450 MP :)
How do you figure that $11USD is cheaper than $10.00, pray tell?
I might have a cheap bridge to sell to you if you come up with a compelling enough explanation...
NSI's decision not to register domain names that they deem as being vulgar is just like MAPS and ORBS' decisions to not deliver email to persons who's ISPs have signed up with them whom they deem as being spammers.
A web bug has nothing to do with cookies... It's basically an image request set to 1 by 1 pixels. The server on the other end will 404 it, but that doesn't matter at all. Since each email has a unique "bug", it's trivial to track that emails path across IP addresses... They can tell who the sucker was that forwarded it in the first place and pound them with more and more emails.
So, html savy email programs would have to disallow retrieving images on the web, in order to deter web bugs.
Since it was widely speculated and pretty much known that the P4 would accomplish less per clock than the P3, Intel should have simply milked the P3 for a couple more months until they could ramp up production of 2 or 2.1 GHz P4's which would hopefully outperform P3's at all tasks...
Why would anyone want to spend the fortune to upgrade their system to a P4 when they could save a bundle and get equivalent performance from one of Intel's own P3's, and that's forgetting all about AMD for the moment...
Intel had best be extremely aggressive about upping the clocks on it's chips... I read (I think on the Register, I'm not possitive) that AMD's roadmaps don't forecast the Athlon going much past 1.5 or 1.7 GHz this year. So, if Intel can go strong with the P4 and AMD does perhaps stumble under the weight of their recent successes, they might be able to be king of the hill once again...
Just not right now.
Just as a correction: THose boxes were from Gil Amelio's description of Rhapsody. They still apply to OS X, though...
Blue box is now Classic application which runs OS 9 and the apps with in it.
Yellow box is now Cocoa, Apple's "preffered" tool for developers to use to build OS X apps.
Those two choices weren't enough to make developers happy, so Apple provided a 3rd choice: Carbon, so that developers with apps already built wouldn't have to rewrite their work from scratch in order to get it to run on OS X.
Never in Apple's plans have they announced anything about running Wintel binaries. One rumors site said they heard from a source that Apple was working on the "Red box" which would provide windows compatibility... But that was just a rumor site, which made that claim a year or two ago and never said a word of it afterwards.
That's almost half of what the P4's heat sink weighs, isn't it???
:)
Linux will be around. So will gnome and kde. Redhat, VA Linux, et al may not be. They seem to make very little difference in the grand schemem of things. But still, it makes little sense to compare the features of Microsofts product to those of linux's currently shipping equivalents, namely because Whistler is so far away from release that any feature or weakness can easily be changed in time for release...
Past that... I for one am happy that the stock market has become a sane environment once again. There were too many ideas that were getting too many millions in financing thanks to aspirations to be the next amazon, yahoo, or ebay. Maybe now people will start concentrating on those little things like "profit", "revenue" and "margins". But that's a conversation for another day.
Most people and companies aren't concerned with the slot or socket that's in their systems. They buy a box, which happens to have components inside of them... The components may be retired in 6 months, but they'll still be usable for quite some time after that.
And people will keep buying P4's from Intel, simply because Intel is the standard. Intel has capacity. And Intel's chips are standard inside of most business PC's... Athlons generally only ship in hobbyist, game, and soho machines.
Until AMD can crank up their capacity even more and sign on gateway, IBM, and compaq to ship their chips in their mainstream business machines, Intel is sitting pretty.
You would have been getting warning messages for 90 days in advance, so if you'd overlooked that, you'd only have yourself to blame on that one. It's not like you have to remember the date that you installed it or else it would just mysteriously stop working one day.
Germany would probably incinerate the machine. Or put in in a trash compactor. They're really touchy (maybe the word is ashamed) about the war, and go to great lengths to destroy anything that has anything to do with it.
Germany's definetly not the place for anything worth keeping from WW2
But intel is much more successful at convincing software developers to adopt their new technologies than AMD's been, so far.
A new motherboard and case shouldnt' be looked at as being this huge expense. After all, you had to buy a new mobo when you upgraded from Pentium or Celeron to an Athlon system... And the heat sink may be intimidating, but it won't be the sole factor that a potential buyer changes their mind...
But as for the price of the actual CPU's... Intel needs to get off their high horse and realize that they need to win back their market share, even if it means not living on 40%-60% margins on their high end chips...
Probably because there's 10 times more Wintel based machines for them to pick from than *nix boxes... I doubt the corps that have Onyx's and E10000s in the back room will let process tree's software anywhere near their machines.
When the high end is unusable, the next step is to use the commodity platform, which would be Wintel. Yes, linux and *bsd may be a bit more stable, but to use those would mean to limit themselves to a small subsection of the PC market... Plus, i believe they're only distributing closed source binaries, which further impeeds them from the diehard GNU market.
We're not talking mission critical here... Any machine can crash out for a few hours here and there, because there are so many other machines ready to take it's place should that happen... Kind of like a RAID 5 composed of computers...