So imagine you're against current implementations electronic voting-- not a very farfetched proposition, especially around here in the Slashdot crowd. Imagine also that you live in a small town, where it's pretty easy to get your name officially on the ballot. Then, imagine you don't advertise, so nobody knows you're running, nobody sees your signs while they're making their decisions.
Here's the fun thing about secret ballots: You can't verify that our friend the candidate _isn't lying_. Want to try to put a dent in Diebold's credibility? Wander into town to vote, and vote for someone else. Then claim you -- of course! -- voted for yourself. When the votes are tallied and the 36 votes split for two candidates with no votes for you, the third party, pitch a fit. Even Podunk, Arkansas will find national coverage when you can "prove" the voting machines are fixed.
Except we don't have proof.
Now, I'm not saying the machines _aren't_ fixed-- but, honestly, who rigs the mayoral election for Podunk, Arkansas?
Revenue from CDs is bigger than revenue from online downloads by a 6:1 margin. Revenue, not profit.
Now, note that downloads have very little overhead, distribution costs, or production costs, where you gotta press CDs and ship 'em. So for every dollar of revenue you get from a download, more of it is profit than if that dollar came from CD sales.
It seems to me the question he OUGHT to be asking is: "How do I make it so I can sell the same dollar value of downloads tomorrow, which are a much higher profit margin, as I sell CDs today?" not "How do I make sure I keep selling more CDs than downloads?"
Asking the right question here makes your stockholders very happy, as they're fond of profit.
And the answer is: "Throw out DRM and sell 'em with online liner notes and such, so basically they're just like a CD."
No longer is Scrabble about vocabulary - simply memorising swathes of daft vowel/consonant combinations seems to work.
I dunno. You feel free to play all those garbage two-letter words. I'll play from a real vocabulary, and we'll see who wins. I'm betting the guy with the 835 point game that started this whole thing didn't once play the word 'ao'.
It is about more than vocabulary-- being able to look at the board and know what's left in the bag and what might be on your opponent's rack so you can block plays he might have is an important factor at that level. But memorizing a slew of garbage two letter words isn't all that useful.
Indeed, I think that's the biggest problem: requiring constant motion, particularly when the game would not.
Imagine, instead, an omnidirectional treadmill. (Okay, I don't know how to do it, either, and honestly, version 1.0 doesn't really need it...) Insert user into J. Random First Person Shooter with a VR-style headset.
Need to get across the airfield? Start running. Need to jump onto that barrel? Jump; the sensor in the treadmill will notice.
Need a rest? Duck into that building for a minute and hope they don't find you.
Now you've got a setup that'll get people exercise that doesn't intrude on the experience-- indeed, it enhances it. I am, however, having a hard time imagining hard-core gamers guzzling Gatorade and Clif Bars instead of Dew and Doritos, though...
A lab prototype like this can help them with something important: Given multi-core processors look to be the way future computers will be built, how do you feed them data? The current paradigm won't scale past 4 cores on a single chip's worth of FSB, and there are folks who don't think that even 4's going to be a useful increase over 2.
Even if Intel never sells a chip bigger than 16 or 32 ways, an 80 core lab mule will teach them many things about how to get information to a processor and keep those caches full of appropriate data.
iTunes would just carry Stargate and stop making us wait 2 weeks, I'd cancel my cable. Even at a $1.99 an episode, I would probably save money over what I pay Comcast today.
I did exactly that-- to get Sci-Fi channel through Adelphia I had to get Digital Cable, and that cost $72/mo after all the cheeseball fees.
Now I pay Apple $2/episode, for better resolution than my Tivo records, with no commercials. (The two weeks doesn't bother me-- I'm usually two or three weeks behind, anyhow, when I get around to watching what the Tivo watched for me...) I come out way ahead on this deal.
After looking at some of the results from the Firefox sources, I see that "bugs" include unreferenced variables and dead code that never gets executed.
Checking for things like this is useful, though: If you've got code in software that doesn't get executed, or a variable that never gets used, you've almost certainly got something in there you didn't intend. Since bugs are when programs don't behave the way they're intended to, code that isn't quite what you expected is a good place to look...
Why do we talk about moving these five pretty huge and fundamental things into Linux, instead of using OpenSolaris and moving the things Linux has into it?
Now we won't be able to tell the classic "Blonde holding the page up to her monitor and pressing the 'PrintScreen' key" joke anymore...
When I was a technician at a retail computer store, I got a call that was quite similar to this.
It seems that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing: this guy had actually gone and read the manual that came with his new whizzy 15" non-interlaced monitor.
The manual mentioned something about a "scan rate". Now, he didn't know what that was, but he knew what scanners did, so he was trying to determine if he needed another piece of software to use the scanner built into the monitor...
If a sailor averages $100k in upkeep a year, then sailor costs per year were $10 billion per 50 years. It costs $4 billion to build a boat, so figure it was $14 billion over fifty years.
This boat only costs $8 billion over fifty years.
Seems to me that the answer isn't "figure out how to do damage control with 40% of a regular crew complement." Seems to me the answer is "You were gonna send three of these things to blow up the bad guy good; send five instead, it's still cheaper."
-JDF
Re:skype? What the hell is a skype?
on
Ekiga 2.0 Released
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Even ignoring the fallacy in the "they're doing it, why don't we do it?" argument, there's a big difference here.
Skype comes from a business. They've got money to throw at Madison Avenue, and the advertisements will make sure we all know exactly what they do.
Where, exactly, is Ekiga's advertising money going to be coming from?
-F
Ekiga? What the hell is an Ekiga?
on
Ekiga 2.0 Released
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I might have been able to guess what GnomeMeeting did. I would have guessed that it was perhaps a collaborative whiteboard tool, perhaps with a dose of voice-chat built in. I'd bet it worked in Gnome.
I would have no bloody clue what an Ekiga is if the article hadn't mentioned it was the successor to GnomeMeeting. I'm sure it means something really appropriate in Sanskrit or something. How very clever.
And so, another project winds up with a useless name and they get to wonder why nobody uses their product, because folks see "Ekiga" and have no idea that it does exactly what they need, where GnomeMeeting might've hinted that at least.
Probably not, but I think it's kinda silly. If you're on a machine where you're worried about spawning off one more process, I feel sorry for you.:)
Remember, there's More Than One Way To Do It. That's kinda the beauty of Unix. I do like that 'for i in *.jpg' takes a lot fewer keystrokes, mind, but just because it uses fewer keystrokes and doesn't exec ls doesn't make it the Only Right Way.
Indeed, for some things, it may not be the Right Way at all. Ferinstance:
for i in `ls fullsize` do convert -scale 800x800 fullsize/$i $i convert -scale 150x150 fullsize/$i thumbnails/$i done
It's cheaper to exec ls here than it is to crunch $i each time to strip 'fullsize/' off the front. If you really wanted to streamline it (and if you're that worried about it, why the heck are you writing a shell script?) you could throw $PWD at a temporary variable, cd into fullsize, run your converts, but why bother with the extra typing or lines of code when this runs correctly, makes sense, and is only exec'ing the ls once?
But really what it boils down to, to me, is if exec'ing ls once instead of using the shell builtin * is causing problems on your system, you've got bigger problems than your shellscript-fu.
Back on topic, I like my Casio Pathfinder that not only knows what time it is, it also knows what the barometric pressure is, my current altitiude, and facing. It's also got a thermometer built in, but I have to take it off for ten minutes for that to tell me the temperature of anything other than my wrist...
You will ALWAYS lose exactly the percentage the casino decides you will lose.
The sick thing is, that's how they sell it. The house has a.8% edge at this game, a 1.2% edge at that game.
Most people at casinoes aren't playing games they can play long-haul, though. They show up to a casino with $200 and play blackjack at the $10 tables. They've no concept of "variance".
So for the people who are playing "smart", the casino takes their percent. For the people who aren't, they take everything the person was willing to show up with, because they weren't smart enough to realize that the expected swings over time in a $10 blackjack game are MUCH higher than $200.
From this, I can prove linear motion is impossible!
We have dx which, obviously, is tied directly to distance, and dt that's tied to time.
Well, if I have, ferinstance, an equation that describes signal power with respect to distance from a transmitter, then I'd have, say, dp/dx, right?
But if I just wanted distance, I'd have dx/dx, and that obviously doesn't make any sense!
So, by these guys' logic, not only is time travel impossible-- ALL travel is impossible!
I hope you're reading this from home and not from the office. I've just proven you're gonna be stuck there for a while. Serves you right for wasting company time browsing Slashdot!
I know that for years you've stated that you didn't like meta-discussions, that you didn't like slashdot to talk about slashdot.
I dunno, I think the solution for this one is pretty simple. I agree that as a general rule, the casual slashdot reader doesn't give a hoot in hell about how the gears turn behind the scenes, and as such, perhaps slashdot's not the best place to talk about slashdot. It isn't particularly a professional look.
However, I got this bar on the left side of my window. It says "Apache, Apple, AskSlashdot"...
Why not generate a meta-slashdot just like we've got a YRO and a Games? Then you can get the talk about slashdot off of slashdot, but have it still available for those who do care about how the thing runs?
-----
Back to the matter at hand, am I the only one surprised by this whole thing? I don't believe I've ever clicked on a submitter's link, I had no idea these guys were driving up pagerank or whatever else...
Eh - I'm patient. I have 10 months to wait and see.
I've got even longer; I don't expect to be able to justify the cost of this monster 'til it drops down into a range slightly closer to what I paid for my current standalone unit, especially since my lifetime subscription on the standalone unit's not transferrable. (It's not that I don't yet have an HD monitor yet-- the big reason I don't is because I've been waiting for affordable HD Tivo.:) )
One of the things I love about my current Tivo is Tivo-to-go. I wonder if this new monster will support that?
I'm guessing he's thinking about the Cyrix clone, which was bad enough for both of 'em combined and then some; as bad as that Cyrix often was-- which may or may not have even been the Cyrix part; one so rarely saw a decent quality motherboard with the Cyrix processor on it that who _knows_ what the processor itself was doing-- it wouldn't surprise me if he's painted all the clones with the same brush. Some really low-end manufacturers were using NEC v20s back in the XT days, but at least those were also available in some better hardware and you could tell it wasn't the processor's fault. The NEC chips still got something of a bad rap for it, though.
The AMD part was, however, bug-for-bug compatible with the i386. We used 'em in Netware shops, Lantastic shops, Netware Lite, I ran Linux on one... Only thing that wouldn't run reliably on it was Windows 3.1, and heck, it didn't run right on the Intel part, either.
I did have one other problem with the 386DX/40, and that was when VESA Local Bus came around: VESA Local Bus ran at processor/FSB speed, which for 386en was the same thing. If you bought a cheapass VESA Local Bus video card, it didn't want to run at 40MHz. But you had to go _very_ cheapass for that to be a problem; even low-end cards from reputable manufacturers like Diamond or Genoa ran just fine on a 40MHz VLB.
Slashdot Mirror
...who was imagining someone looking at the ground and squinting wondering how GPS was gonna help that guy locate his contact...
So imagine you're against current implementations electronic voting-- not a very farfetched proposition, especially around here in the Slashdot crowd. Imagine also that you live in a small town, where it's pretty easy to get your name officially on the ballot. Then, imagine you don't advertise, so nobody knows you're running, nobody sees your signs while they're making their decisions.
Here's the fun thing about secret ballots: You can't verify that our friend the candidate _isn't lying_. Want to try to put a dent in Diebold's credibility? Wander into town to vote, and vote for someone else. Then claim you -- of course! -- voted for yourself. When the votes are tallied and the 36 votes split for two candidates with no votes for you, the third party, pitch a fit. Even Podunk, Arkansas will find national coverage when you can "prove" the voting machines are fixed.
Except we don't have proof.
Now, I'm not saying the machines _aren't_ fixed-- but, honestly, who rigs the mayoral election for Podunk, Arkansas?
-F
Revenue from CDs is bigger than revenue from online downloads by a 6:1 margin. Revenue, not profit.
Now, note that downloads have very little overhead, distribution costs, or production costs, where you gotta press CDs and ship 'em. So for every dollar of revenue you get from a download, more of it is profit than if that dollar came from CD sales.
It seems to me the question he OUGHT to be asking is: "How do I make it so I can sell the same dollar value of downloads tomorrow, which are a much higher profit margin, as I sell CDs today?" not "How do I make sure I keep selling more CDs than downloads?"
Asking the right question here makes your stockholders very happy, as they're fond of profit.
And the answer is: "Throw out DRM and sell 'em with online liner notes and such, so basically they're just like a CD."
-F
No longer is Scrabble about vocabulary - simply memorising swathes of daft vowel/consonant combinations seems to work.
I dunno. You feel free to play all those garbage two-letter words. I'll play from a real vocabulary, and we'll see who wins. I'm betting the guy with the 835 point game that started this whole thing didn't once play the word 'ao'.
It is about more than vocabulary-- being able to look at the board and know what's left in the bag and what might be on your opponent's rack so you can block plays he might have is an important factor at that level. But memorizing a slew of garbage two letter words isn't all that useful.
-F
add up to 13 -- whether you write it in the US or the European form.
But I was sure the commutative property of addition didn't work in Europe!
Indeed, I think that's the biggest problem: requiring constant motion, particularly when the game would not.
Imagine, instead, an omnidirectional treadmill. (Okay, I don't know how to do it, either, and honestly, version 1.0 doesn't really need it...) Insert user into J. Random First Person Shooter with a VR-style headset.
Need to get across the airfield? Start running. Need to jump onto that barrel? Jump; the sensor in the treadmill will notice.
Need a rest? Duck into that building for a minute and hope they don't find you.
Now you've got a setup that'll get people exercise that doesn't intrude on the experience-- indeed, it enhances it. I am, however, having a hard time imagining hard-core gamers guzzling Gatorade and Clif Bars instead of Dew and Doritos, though...
-F
A lab prototype like this can help them with something important: Given multi-core processors look to be the way future computers will be built, how do you feed them data? The current paradigm won't scale past 4 cores on a single chip's worth of FSB, and there are folks who don't think that even 4's going to be a useful increase over 2.
Even if Intel never sells a chip bigger than 16 or 32 ways, an 80 core lab mule will teach them many things about how to get information to a processor and keep those caches full of appropriate data.
-F
iTunes would just carry Stargate and stop making us wait 2 weeks, I'd cancel my cable. Even at a $1.99 an episode, I would probably save money over what I pay Comcast today.
I did exactly that-- to get Sci-Fi channel through Adelphia I had to get Digital Cable, and that cost $72/mo after all the cheeseball fees.
Now I pay Apple $2/episode, for better resolution than my Tivo records, with no commercials. (The two weeks doesn't bother me-- I'm usually two or three weeks behind, anyhow, when I get around to watching what the Tivo watched for me...) I come out way ahead on this deal.
After looking at some of the results from the Firefox sources, I see that "bugs" include unreferenced variables and dead code that never gets executed.
Checking for things like this is useful, though: If you've got code in software that doesn't get executed, or a variable that never gets used, you've almost certainly got something in there you didn't intend. Since bugs are when programs don't behave the way they're intended to, code that isn't quite what you expected is a good place to look...
-F
Which makes me wonder:
What's Linux got that OpenSolaris doesn't?
Why do we talk about moving these five pretty huge and fundamental things into Linux, instead of using OpenSolaris and moving the things Linux has into it?
-F
Now we won't be able to tell the classic "Blonde holding the page up to her monitor and pressing the 'PrintScreen' key" joke anymore...
When I was a technician at a retail computer store, I got a call that was quite similar to this.
It seems that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing: this guy had actually gone and read the manual that came with his new whizzy 15" non-interlaced monitor.
The manual mentioned something about a "scan rate". Now, he didn't know what that was, but he knew what scanners did, so he was trying to determine if he needed another piece of software to use the scanner built into the monitor...
-F
You've got it backward: The guy who comes flying up behind you doing 90mph is a maniac.
You're the asshole.
-F
Poit! Narf! What're we gonna do tonight, Brin?
-F
If a sailor averages $100k in upkeep a year, then sailor costs per year were $10 billion per 50 years. It costs $4 billion to build a boat, so figure it was $14 billion over fifty years.
This boat only costs $8 billion over fifty years.
Seems to me that the answer isn't "figure out how to do damage control with 40% of a regular crew complement." Seems to me the answer is "You were gonna send three of these things to blow up the bad guy good; send five instead, it's still cheaper."
-JDF
Even ignoring the fallacy in the "they're doing it, why don't we do it?" argument, there's a big difference here.
Skype comes from a business. They've got money to throw at Madison Avenue, and the advertisements will make sure we all know exactly what they do.
Where, exactly, is Ekiga's advertising money going to be coming from?
-F
I might have been able to guess what GnomeMeeting did. I would have guessed that it was perhaps a collaborative whiteboard tool, perhaps with a dose of voice-chat built in. I'd bet it worked in Gnome.
I would have no bloody clue what an Ekiga is if the article hadn't mentioned it was the successor to GnomeMeeting. I'm sure it means something really appropriate in Sanskrit or something. How very clever.
And so, another project winds up with a useless name and they get to wonder why nobody uses their product, because folks see "Ekiga" and have no idea that it does exactly what they need, where GnomeMeeting might've hinted that at least.
-F
Am I the only person who laughed out loud?
:)
Probably not, but I think it's kinda silly. If you're on a machine where you're worried about spawning off one more process, I feel sorry for you.
Remember, there's More Than One Way To Do It. That's kinda the beauty of Unix. I do like that 'for i in *.jpg' takes a lot fewer keystrokes, mind, but just because it uses fewer keystrokes and doesn't exec ls doesn't make it the Only Right Way.
Indeed, for some things, it may not be the Right Way at all. Ferinstance:
for i in `ls fullsize`
do
convert -scale 800x800 fullsize/$i $i
convert -scale 150x150 fullsize/$i thumbnails/$i
done
It's cheaper to exec ls here than it is to crunch $i each time to strip 'fullsize/' off the front. If you really wanted to streamline it (and if you're that worried about it, why the heck are you writing a shell script?) you could throw $PWD at a temporary variable, cd into fullsize, run your converts, but why bother with the extra typing or lines of code when this runs correctly, makes sense, and is only exec'ing the ls once?
But really what it boils down to, to me, is if exec'ing ls once instead of using the shell builtin * is causing problems on your system, you've got bigger problems than your shellscript-fu.
-F
No self-respecting geek would wear that hat.
It uses deprecated html.
-----
Back on topic, I like my Casio Pathfinder that not only knows what time it is, it also knows what the barometric pressure is, my current altitiude, and facing. It's also got a thermometer built in, but I have to take it off for ten minutes for that to tell me the temperature of anything other than my wrist...
-F
You will ALWAYS lose exactly the percentage the casino decides you will lose.
.8% edge at this game, a 1.2% edge at that game.
The sick thing is, that's how they sell it. The house has a
Most people at casinoes aren't playing games they can play long-haul, though. They show up to a casino with $200 and play blackjack at the $10 tables. They've no concept of "variance".
So for the people who are playing "smart", the casino takes their percent. For the people who aren't, they take everything the person was willing to show up with, because they weren't smart enough to realize that the expected swings over time in a $10 blackjack game are MUCH higher than $200.
Neat trick, ain't it?
-F
From this, I can prove linear motion is impossible!
We have dx which, obviously, is tied directly to distance, and dt that's tied to time.
Well, if I have, ferinstance, an equation that describes signal power with respect to distance from a transmitter, then I'd have, say, dp/dx, right?
But if I just wanted distance, I'd have dx/dx, and that obviously doesn't make any sense!
So, by these guys' logic, not only is time travel impossible-- ALL travel is impossible!
I hope you're reading this from home and not from the office. I've just proven you're gonna be stuck there for a while. Serves you right for wasting company time browsing Slashdot!
-F
...was took a script kiddie, and then replaced the kiddie part with more script.
I know that for years you've stated that you didn't like meta-discussions, that you didn't like slashdot to talk about slashdot.
I dunno, I think the solution for this one is pretty simple. I agree that as a general rule, the casual slashdot reader doesn't give a hoot in hell about how the gears turn behind the scenes, and as such, perhaps slashdot's not the best place to talk about slashdot. It isn't particularly a professional look.
However, I got this bar on the left side of my window. It says "Apache, Apple, AskSlashdot"...
Why not generate a meta-slashdot just like we've got a YRO and a Games? Then you can get the talk about slashdot off of slashdot, but have it still available for those who do care about how the thing runs?
-----
Back to the matter at hand, am I the only one surprised by this whole thing? I don't believe I've ever clicked on a submitter's link, I had no idea these guys were driving up pagerank or whatever else...
-JDF
Gerecke recommends magnetic tapes to store pictures, videos and songs.
Because, as anyone who's ever dealt with a cassette tape or a floppy disk knows, magnetic media never goes bad...
-JDF
Eh - I'm patient. I have 10 months to wait and see.
:) )
I've got even longer; I don't expect to be able to justify the cost of this monster 'til it drops down into a range slightly closer to what I paid for my current standalone unit, especially since my lifetime subscription on the standalone unit's not transferrable. (It's not that I don't yet have an HD monitor yet-- the big reason I don't is because I've been waiting for affordable HD Tivo.
One of the things I love about my current Tivo is Tivo-to-go. I wonder if this new monster will support that?
-JDF
I'm guessing he's thinking about the Cyrix clone, which was bad enough for both of 'em combined and then some; as bad as that Cyrix often was-- which may or may not have even been the Cyrix part; one so rarely saw a decent quality motherboard with the Cyrix processor on it that who _knows_ what the processor itself was doing-- it wouldn't surprise me if he's painted all the clones with the same brush. Some really low-end manufacturers were using NEC v20s back in the XT days, but at least those were also available in some better hardware and you could tell it wasn't the processor's fault. The NEC chips still got something of a bad rap for it, though.
The AMD part was, however, bug-for-bug compatible with the i386. We used 'em in Netware shops, Lantastic shops, Netware Lite, I ran Linux on one... Only thing that wouldn't run reliably on it was Windows 3.1, and heck, it didn't run right on the Intel part, either.
I did have one other problem with the 386DX/40, and that was when VESA Local Bus came around: VESA Local Bus ran at processor/FSB speed, which for 386en was the same thing. If you bought a cheapass VESA Local Bus video card, it didn't want to run at 40MHz. But you had to go _very_ cheapass for that to be a problem; even low-end cards from reputable manufacturers like Diamond or Genoa ran just fine on a 40MHz VLB.
-JDF