This might be rather long, but let me know what you think. This all came from a report I did years ago in college, so don't quote me on the figures please. Its all from memory.
Way back when, an area would select a person to represent them in our country's government. Back then, they HAD to come up with a predetermined set of beliefs because they would leave the area and represent them in the government with very little contact with their home territory. Each of these people would represent ~50,000 people. It is a very simple system, but our country is not simple anymore and it has to change.
Why do we have to pick a person based on what THEY believe? Does anyone actually ever find a candidate that fits them perfectly? I sure havn't. I am for abortion and against gun control. Where does that leave me? We shouldn't have to pick the lesser of the two evils.
Why can't the person we send to congress vote the way WE want him to, not they way THEY want to vote. Why do we even have to send him to congress anyway? Does anyone feel that their salaries are warranted? How would you like to be able to vote yourself a raise? Does anyone still use ANYTHING made that long ago? Since when can 1 person represent 500,000 people or more?
Here's my suggestion: Our technology today allows many of us to work from home. Why can't they? There is no longer a need to be in DC anymore. Security issues aside, voting can easilly be done electronically. This would allow more time spent in the district addressing local issues.
Representatives should do what the name suggests: Represent us. Regardless of their personal feelings on a subject, they vote based on how the majority of voters in the area want them to vote on the current issue. They get 1 vote just like any other person. The people vote on issues through the internet or by phone. It would simply be like reading the paper in the morning. Pull up the page, login, and vote. The Rep will then take the results and put the vote in for that district.
The salary for this person would be the average salary for the district and a set amount of money would be given for staff and supplies.
Increase the amount of representatives every few years to allow for no more than 30,000 people per district.
Why would this be better? I'll tell you:)
**Come home good son - Moving the Rep back home rather than DC is obvious. Being in the district will allow for the Rep to talk to the people. Communication is good. **Representing us - if the Rep votes on how WE want them to and not based on an election of THEIR beliefs, SO MANY CONGRESSIONAL PROBLEMS DISAPPEAR. First, results on issues would better represent (there's that word again) the people. This would totally eliminate the party system. How can an entire country be represented by two parties? They could vote totally against your district's beliefs on a lesser issue because everyone elected them for their beliefs on a larger issue. Not to mention all the pressure they get from other reps, lobbiests, big business, etc. This would eliminate all of this. The only way to get to your Rep is through you! How would you like some of those $$$ donations that our elected officials get? Well you just might. If the power company cuts its rates in half, you might vote in their favor next time. **Electronic Voting - Again security aside (Just use linux!). Just about everyone has access to some sort of technology that can be used to vote on issues. The internet, phones, ATMs, etc. With districts only 30k people in size, a trip to the Rep's office would take only a few minutes. It is not that far fetched. **Who wants to work for $18k/yr - By eliminating that huge salary and corporate donations, you might just get people in the jobs who actually want to help. With the reduced workload of constant arguing in congress, travelling back and forth, and wishywashy lunch meetings, there would be no reason why they couldnt hold another full time job. All they need to do is collect voting results and record their districts vote. For some of the poorer areas, the people may join together to vote on issues that help their community, not the Rep's pocketbook.
I could go on forever. This system was developed for a much smaller country and was not set to handle what we now deal with. Partisan voting is ruining our country. People are going in to politics for the power and money, not for the people. It's just going to get out of hand. I know that this doesn't solve every problem but its a start. I know that SOMETIMES the rep might have to vote on something that has to do with national security or something that is time sensitive.
Until something like this gets implemented in my area, I'm not voting. I won't vote for someone else's beliefs, but I would vote for everyone else's.
One other notable here. Verisign is going to have a lot of problems with their root rollover in a bunch of different browsers. Come Jan 1st, many browsers certs are going to expire. Thawte had this problem a couple fo years ago, but wasn't that big of a deal. But Verisign is looking at a large percentage of browsers that have to get "fixed" by installing a new cert. Thawte will not have this problem and they were hyping this BIGTIME on their site for the last month or so and it has mysteriously disappeared. Watch those prices...I got lucky and renewed as of the 15th.
"I want to know the age, sex, and zip code of every person who visited my site so that I can prepare a brochure for advertisers."
You have to remember that a lot of these web sites out there need to track their users surfing habits. It's called Demographics and Marketing. Without knowing who your users are, you can't specialize the content for them. I agree that there are a lot of bad cookie implementations out there, but the need still exitsts.
It's not like tracking customers was new with the internet. Radio Shack directly asks you for your information at the checkout counter. They may sell/use this information to help them serve you at a later date. When I bought my house, it was quite weird when all these mortgage loan companies started sending me loan applications. How did THEY get that information. It happens all around us daily, and the internet is no different.
When I started my online shop, I thought my target age group was 15-25, but have since found out that it is closer to the parents of the 15-25yr olds. In my case, the information was given to us by the customer and not through cookies, but any company out there will get all the information it can in any way it can. It only helps them.
If people are really scared about cookies then simply turn them off and use sites that dont require cookies. Its not that hard. There is a lot more information about you being transferred from company to company in the Real World (tm) that you should be more concerned about.
Novell is not losing or in trouble. The only problem novell has had in the last few years was no one wanted to upgrade to netware 4 because 3.12 was SOOO stable. The benefits of NDS have been realized and Netware 5 with Zen is just incredible and my customers are excited.
I personally think that novell is widening it's horizons since they realize that not every network is a totally MS network. Cheers to Novell. One of the last few companies that have a foothold in a MS world.
Notes is perfect for that. I could have all that up and running in less than 10 minutes. Notes comes with existing templates for address books, discussion groups, etc.
A rookie can pick up programming new apps is about a month. I wrote an entire ecommerce system in my first 6 months and it has been running for 2 years now.
If the view/form/document ident is unique, you can leave off the ?BlahBlah too. It also comes with a full url mapping system.
It may not be the best at anything, but it is 1 product that does almost everything. No need to tie together apps...start doing that and you start acting like MS.
You do have it wrong. There is a reason for those long URLs. Even so, it is not that different from any web based DB application. Notes is different. I am surprised at how many people knock it w/o truely understanding it. I took the time to learn it and am very glad I did. If it is a virus, then for once I am glad I'm sick.
> Um, this was about Linux. How did you happen to read it? I mean, heck, you even read and replied to comments on it.
I was reading it for the 911 part of the story. To clarify my statement: I stop reading anything about linux that contais "linux is the best thing to ever exist and MS just blows period."
In my company, we use Lotus Notes R5 for everything except accounting. The server is coming for linux (you can get the beta now), already runs a some other *nix and works great at DB to Web conversion. Calandaring and Scheduling is build right in as well as many custom DB templates for document management and other things. And above all that, you get email, nntp, ldap, etc... If you know how to create a spreadsheet, you can program notes. Simple @functions do most of the programming issues. Lotus Script allows some lower level access to the systems, but is rarely needed. Java and Javascript as well as server side applets are fully supported and integrated in to the dev IDE. The DB is only a flat file, but it can access just about any ODBC DB out there. Even though I run my server on NT (dont know linux yet), I havn't had a crash yet (2 years). The client is a different story, but you only need that for development. As for accounting? We use peachtree. I'm the tech guy so I don't get much involved with that.
I never used the USPS for anything other than bills and such. The ease of email has allowed me to send little notes to people that I would never have used the USPS for. I have not sent any less mail through the USPS than normall although I sent about 20 emails a day.
If there is one company that is losing out on my email, its the phone company, not the USPS.
USPS will always be around...I have yet to be invited to a wedding through email.
I agree... as soon as someone says anything about linux not winning all the time, you are digitally thrashed. Its made me stop reading anything about linux (yes you are chasing people away), and visiting less often. I think its time the moderators start -1 a little more often./. is starting to get a bad rep.
But...when users stop choosing distros because the suits have infiltrated, the "new" distros will become more and more popular. It will only be a matter of time before they try to capitalize on the popularity too.
Its only a matter of time before linux too is absorbed (atleast any of the distros that are worth anything) in to the corporate market place.
I like the idea of linux, not the biggest fan of it currently, but something good seldom goes unpurchased.
Will definatly be interesting in the next few years though.
Well, from reading the post further down, I realized that the application to write would be a distributed shell. One which basically contains the communication functions. Each distributed project would contain a config file for the data type and computation information the shell would need to do its work.
This way, to participate in a project would only require you to select from a menu of projects in the client...client d/ls the config file and starts working.
A lot more can be done. With permission, the server could change the project to meet the processing needs of a client (yes this could easilly be used to make $$$, and pay out to the end nodes).
I run a K6-2 350 (OC372) at home and a k6-2 400 at work and I get 28 hrs and 32hrs respectivly. The 350 beats the 400 because i blank my screen instead of using their graphical screen saver. Havn't done that yet.
I will be interested in seeing what block rate the Athlon will turn out.
>...many of the posts indicated substantial experience with Notes...
I think a couple of my posts have run together and after a record setting 15 (now 17) I may not have been to clear on the subject.
The question about experience with notes comes from a few responses that said they used it for 3 weeks or a couple of months. This is by no means enough time to learn the ins and outs of notes administration especially on a large scale. 3 months is definatly not enough time to conquer the programming aspect.
Notes is different, and it is not easy to understand some of the features in the product because there has never been a product like it before. Educating our customers has been the hardest part. All the documentation and explanations cause their eyes to glaze over. They actually need to see the product in use to understand it.
*My* experience in implementing notes has been nothing but positive. I have not run across 1 unhappy notes installation that my company has set up. The few we ran across that were unhappy we plain and simply set up incorrectly, or they were just using it for email (bloated). When you can walk in, start the web service and create a discussion area on the web in less than 5 minutes, eyes open widely.
The spreading of misinformation was because this was old news and people were spouting out at notes *because* they are jumping on the bandwagon...thats it.
>One problem is, though, that Lotus positions its >product as being "zero-effort, go home at 6pm, >turnkey, all problems solved if only you sign the >purchase order"; reality is much different as you >yourself attest, isn't it.
I think that is a little exagerrated, but that is correct. If you have an experienced admin and programmers, then it is not true. It took me 1 hour to set up R5 and convert my apps from 4.6. It has been running since with no problems.
>Yes, yes, yes. You CLP. We hacker. You important. We stupid.
I am not a CLP, just an enthusiast much like yourself. But one thing I have noticed (not you) is that there is a lot of bias in favor of linux and oss.
Slashdot Mirror
This might be rather long, but let me know what you think. This all came from a report I did years ago in college, so don't quote me on the figures please. Its all from memory.
:)
Way back when, an area would select a person to represent them in our country's government. Back then, they HAD to come up with a predetermined set of beliefs because they would leave the area and represent them in the government with very little contact with their home territory. Each of these people would represent ~50,000 people. It is a very simple system, but our country is not simple anymore and it has to change.
Why do we have to pick a person based on what THEY believe? Does anyone actually ever find a candidate that fits them perfectly? I sure havn't. I am for abortion and against gun control. Where does that leave me? We shouldn't have to pick the lesser of the two evils.
Why can't the person we send to congress vote the way WE want him to, not they way THEY want to vote.
Why do we even have to send him to congress anyway?
Does anyone feel that their salaries are warranted?
How would you like to be able to vote yourself a raise?
Does anyone still use ANYTHING made that long ago?
Since when can 1 person represent 500,000 people or more?
Here's my suggestion: Our technology today allows many of us to work from home. Why can't they? There is no longer a need to be in DC anymore. Security issues aside, voting can easilly be done electronically. This would allow more time spent in the district addressing local issues.
Representatives should do what the name suggests: Represent us. Regardless of their personal feelings on a subject, they vote based on how the majority of voters in the area want them to vote on the current issue. They get 1 vote just like any other person. The people vote on issues through the internet or by phone. It would simply be like reading the paper in the morning. Pull up the page, login, and vote. The Rep will then take the results and put the vote in for that district.
The salary for this person would be the average salary for the district and a set amount of money would be given for staff and supplies.
Increase the amount of representatives every few years to allow for no more than 30,000 people per district.
Why would this be better? I'll tell you
**Come home good son - Moving the Rep back home rather than DC is obvious. Being in the district will allow for the Rep to talk to the people. Communication is good.
**Representing us - if the Rep votes on how WE want them to and not based on an election of THEIR beliefs, SO MANY CONGRESSIONAL PROBLEMS DISAPPEAR. First, results on issues would better represent (there's that word again) the people. This would totally eliminate the party system. How can an entire country be represented by two parties? They could vote totally against your district's beliefs on a lesser issue because everyone elected them for their beliefs on a larger issue. Not to mention all the pressure they get from other reps, lobbiests, big business, etc. This would eliminate all of this. The only way to get to your Rep is through you! How would you like some of those $$$ donations that our elected officials get? Well you just might. If the power company cuts its rates in half, you might vote in their favor next time.
**Electronic Voting - Again security aside (Just use linux!). Just about everyone has access to some sort of technology that can be used to vote on issues. The internet, phones, ATMs, etc. With districts only 30k people in size, a trip to the Rep's office would take only a few minutes. It is not that far fetched.
**Who wants to work for $18k/yr - By eliminating that huge salary and corporate donations, you might just get people in the jobs who actually want to help. With the reduced workload of constant arguing in congress, travelling back and forth, and wishywashy lunch meetings, there would be no reason why they couldnt hold another full time job. All they need to do is collect voting results and record their districts vote. For some of the poorer areas, the people may join together to vote on issues that help their community, not the Rep's pocketbook.
I could go on forever. This system was developed for a much smaller country and was not set to handle what we now deal with. Partisan voting is ruining our country. People are going in to politics for the power and money, not for the people. It's just going to get out of hand. I know that this doesn't solve every problem but its a start. I know that SOMETIMES the rep might have to vote on something that has to do with national security or something that is time sensitive.
Until something like this gets implemented in my area, I'm not voting. I won't vote for someone else's beliefs, but I would vote for everyone else's.
One other notable here. Verisign is going to have a lot of problems with their root rollover in a bunch of different browsers. Come Jan 1st, many browsers certs are going to expire. Thawte had this problem a couple fo years ago, but wasn't that big of a deal. But Verisign is looking at a large percentage of browsers that have to get "fixed" by installing a new cert. Thawte will not have this problem and they were hyping this BIGTIME on their site for the last month or so and it has mysteriously disappeared. Watch those prices...I got lucky and renewed as of the 15th.
hehe, I just renewed my cert as of the 15th.
"I want to know the age, sex, and zip code of every person who visited my site so that I can prepare a brochure for advertisers."
You have to remember that a lot of these web sites out there need to track their users surfing habits. It's called Demographics and Marketing. Without knowing who your users are, you can't specialize the content for them. I agree that there are a lot of bad cookie implementations out there, but the need still exitsts.
It's not like tracking customers was new with the internet. Radio Shack directly asks you for your information at the checkout counter. They may sell/use this information to help them serve you at a later date. When I bought my house, it was quite weird when all these mortgage loan companies started sending me loan applications. How did THEY get that information. It happens all around us daily, and the internet is no different.
When I started my online shop, I thought my target age group was 15-25, but have since found out that it is closer to the parents of the 15-25yr olds. In my case, the information was given to us by the customer and not through cookies, but any company out there will get all the information it can in any way it can. It only helps them.
If people are really scared about cookies then simply turn them off and use sites that dont require cookies. Its not that hard. There is a lot more information about you being transferred from company to company in the Real World (tm) that you should be more concerned about.
Novell is not losing or in trouble. The only problem novell has had in the last few years was no one wanted to upgrade to netware 4 because 3.12 was SOOO stable. The benefits of NDS have been realized and Netware 5 with Zen is just incredible and my customers are excited.
I personally think that novell is widening it's horizons since they realize that not every network is a totally MS network. Cheers to Novell. One of the last few companies that have a foothold in a MS world.
Fight Club 2, The SQL ok...that was bad
>Try to fit Windoze on this hardware... ummm CE? Maybe not on a pilot, but other handhelds. I prefer PalmOS anyway.
personally, i've never called up tech support and said "Hey my client is working great today!"
Notes client crashes no more than any other windows app.
Notes is perfect for that. I could have all that up and running in less than 10 minutes. Notes comes with existing templates for address books, discussion groups, etc.
A rookie can pick up programming new apps is about a month. I wrote an entire ecommerce system in my first 6 months and it has been running for 2 years now.
ahem...domino has clustering built in...
I installed R5 on NT the day it came out and havn't rebooted since, and I run a lot more than just domino on that box in only 64mb of ram.
Just goes to show that its not always the OS/Hardware
If the view/form/document ident is unique, you can leave off the ?BlahBlah too. It also comes with a full url mapping system.
It may not be the best at anything, but it is 1 product that does almost everything. No need to tie together apps...start doing that and you start acting like MS.
You do have it wrong. There is a reason for those long URLs. Even so, it is not that different from any web based DB application. Notes is different. I am surprised at how many people knock it w/o truely understanding it. I took the time to learn it and am very glad I did. If it is a virus, then for once I am glad I'm sick.
> Um, this was about Linux. How did you happen to read it? I mean, heck, you even read and replied to comments on it.
I was reading it for the 911 part of the story. To clarify my statement: I stop reading anything about linux that contais "linux is the best thing to ever exist and MS just blows period."
I'm not boycotting, just filtering...
oops... forgot to say, an example of Notes in action can be found at the URL above (not a plug).
In my company, we use Lotus Notes R5 for everything except accounting. The server is coming for linux (you can get the beta now), already runs a some other *nix and works great at DB to Web conversion. Calandaring and Scheduling is build right in as well as many custom DB templates for document management and other things. And above all that, you get email, nntp, ldap, etc... If you know how to create a spreadsheet, you can program notes. Simple @functions do most of the programming issues. Lotus Script allows some lower level access to the systems, but is rarely needed. Java and Javascript as well as server side applets are fully supported and integrated in to the dev IDE. The DB is only a flat file, but it can access just about any ODBC DB out there. Even though I run my server on NT (dont know linux yet), I havn't had a crash yet (2 years). The client is a different story, but you only need that for development. As for accounting? We use peachtree. I'm the tech guy so I don't get much involved with that.
I never used the USPS for anything other than bills and such. The ease of email has allowed me to send little notes to people that I would never have used the USPS for. I have not sent any less mail through the USPS than normall although I sent about 20 emails a day.
If there is one company that is losing out on my email, its the phone company, not the USPS.
USPS will always be around...I have yet to be invited to a wedding through email.
I agree... as soon as someone says anything about linux not winning all the time, you are digitally thrashed. Its made me stop reading anything about linux (yes you are chasing people away), and visiting less often. I think its time the moderators start -1 a little more often. /. is starting to get a bad rep.
But...when users stop choosing distros because the suits have infiltrated, the "new" distros will become more and more popular. It will only be a matter of time before they try to capitalize on the popularity too.
Its only a matter of time before linux too is absorbed (atleast any of the distros that are worth anything) in to the corporate market place.
I like the idea of linux, not the biggest fan of it currently, but something good seldom goes unpurchased.
Will definatly be interesting in the next few years though.
Heh..that statement made my day.
That was funny.
Well, from reading the post further down, I realized that the application to write would be a distributed shell. One which basically contains the communication functions. Each distributed project would contain a config file for the data type and computation information the shell would need to do its work.
This way, to participate in a project would only require you to select from a menu of projects in the client...client d/ls the config file and starts working.
A lot more can be done. With permission, the server could change the project to meet the processing needs of a client (yes this could easilly be used to make $$$, and pay out to the end nodes).
Oh well, im just wandering now...
I run a K6-2 350 (OC372) at home and a k6-2 400 at work and I get 28 hrs and 32hrs respectivly. The 350 beats the 400 because i blank my screen instead of using their graphical screen saver. Havn't done that yet.
I will be interested in seeing what block rate the Athlon will turn out.
ciao
Wow...Simple but smart. It also offloads some of the verification processes and would allow them to concentrate on making those faster clients.
I for one just thought that they should increase the range of signals that they are capturing.
Who knows...
Your rank out of 916986 total users is: 146354th place.
Thats up 40,000 places since last week!
I'm Back.
Lotus is everywhere... check again.
40+ Million users... almost double the next most popular groupware product, which is exchange.
>...many of the posts indicated substantial experience with Notes...
:)
I think a couple of my posts have run together and after a record setting 15 (now 17) I may not have been to clear on the subject.
The question about experience with notes comes from a few responses that said they used it for 3 weeks or a couple of months. This is by no means enough time to learn the ins and outs of notes administration especially on a large scale. 3 months is definatly not enough time to conquer the programming aspect.
Notes is different, and it is not easy to understand some of the features in the product because there has never been a product like it before. Educating our customers has been the hardest part. All the documentation and explanations cause their eyes to glaze over. They actually need to see the product in use to understand it.
*My* experience in implementing notes has been nothing but positive. I have not run across 1 unhappy notes installation that my company has set up. The few we ran across that were unhappy we plain and simply set up incorrectly, or they were just using it for email (bloated). When you can walk in, start the web service and create a discussion area on the web in less than 5 minutes, eyes open widely.
The spreading of misinformation was because this was old news and people were spouting out at notes *because* they are jumping on the bandwagon...thats it.
>One problem is, though, that Lotus positions its
>product as being "zero-effort, go home at 6pm,
>turnkey, all problems solved if only you sign the
>purchase order"; reality is much different as you >yourself attest, isn't it.
I think that is a little exagerrated, but that is correct. If you have an experienced admin and programmers, then it is not true. It took me 1 hour to set up R5 and convert my apps from 4.6. It has been running since with no problems.
>Yes, yes, yes. You CLP. We hacker. You important. We stupid.
I am not a CLP, just an enthusiast much like yourself. But one thing I have noticed (not you) is that there is a lot of bias in favor of linux and oss.
Anyway...nice talking to ya...