Actually, from an engineering standpoint it's exactly as you describe. It's most likely to break right away than at any other particular time, assuming a randomly distributed set of flaws, which is common. Most electronics don't wear out so much as they fall victim to chance power and temperature fluctuations. Robustness will vary wildly in manufacturing, so any item that makes it past the beginning is pretty likely to last a while.
That's not true of things that are engineered to wear out (like tires or brake pads, but also like the bearing and motor in a HD) but in a HD the parts that wear out last quite a while, random failures are a more likely cause.
So I'd keep your old drives - and I'd keep redundant data; you shouldn't trust ANY drive.
But if you're throwing out those old 200 GB drives - or really anything over 10GB - I'd love to have them!
>>> the two party system isn't what causes that it is simply another way of stating that effect: the cause is the use of majority-runoff and plurality elections in single member districts for legislative elections combined with the usual rule of winner-take-all statewide elections of multi-seat slates of Presidential electors.
I agree largely. You're quite right that I neglected in this discussion (which was a question about who to vote for):
Work for voting machines where your human readable printed ballot only goes in the recounting box by your hand. "optical scan" works fine. touchscreen with an EXTERNAL printout works fine. touchscreen that prints inside a box and you can't tell which votes it wiped out is NOT fine.
Work for IRV/RCV. This won't suddenly happen in national election, but use it in as many local elections as possible.
The electoral college isn't a problem, but winner-take-all electors ARE a problem - and that isn't the way it always was, either.
HOWEVER, I also think that it is possible to have a grassroots movement grow about avoiding blind voting for major parties - and I think the single biggest thing that would convince people would be higher numbers for independent candidates. This might not be EASIER the above, but if someone asks me "how to vote" and not "what to do to reform the electoral system" that's the answer they get. If you can be reasonably assured that your candidate won't win, this is much more effective than 'boycotting the vote'
>>> "make it hard to get anything done" idea had been taken way too far..
This post was long, I didn't want to make it superlong. I completely agree, the Constitution toned it down. In particular it went from "NEVER get anything done" to "only get anything done if there is a lot of consensus, and consensus is hard." But the checks and balances system is still a system primarily of substantial inhibition of anyone actually having a lot of control to do something. It's a great balancing act of "WE are very powerful" and "I can't get anything done"
>>> Its been a feature of American government practically since the adoption of the Constitution,
I believe it's worse now and has steadily been getting worse. More candidates running - and ELECTED based on party and not on positions/policies (even if they might be lies) More votes cast along party lines in opposition to the positions of those same congresspersons. (Not that wheeling and dealing never happened... but now it's happening in a bulk unit.) In short, you used to choose a party to match your positions, now to a much larger extent your positions are chosen match your party.
As recently as Eisenhower we had a president who wasn't strongly affiliated with either party - he has publicly stated he felt like he ought to pick a party to run...
Summary: vote Dem this time - vote Independent often (explanation below)
The two-party system is NOT part of the American way. The strangehold of the two party system is what gets all kind of bad politicians - from both sides - to get elected without having real positions on issues, and then to pass laws that suck because it's politicially infeasible to vote against your party. It didn't use to be that way.
I'm no fan of the current administration or of the current members of congress who have aligned themselves most closely with it. Which is funny, because I'm really and old-school Republican. But I'm not going to rail against them here. I also have a lot more to be unhappy with from the people in charge - the Dems haven't been ABLE to do anything federally I really didn't like recently. But there are definitely people I love and hate in both parties. What's sick is the number of votes along party lines for crappy legislation...
But our government was founded on the policy of it being hard to get anything done. That's what "checks and balances" means. You should need broad-based support from different sectors to get anything done. Our current two party system doesn't do that. As long as no one is going to stand up to their party, we need at least one house of congress or the president to be different than the other two until we can change that or get more independents.
My first piece of advice is this: In THIS election, for the House at least, vote Democrat. House terms are only two years. For the next two years we are basically guaranteed of a Republican President. This situation is peculiar to mid-term elections... In this particular mid-term I have the same advice about the Senate, because there is zero chance of the Dems getting more than an EXTREMELY narrow majority at this point, so the impact after 2008 is minimal.
Next, if you can't make an informed vote - a vote informed enough for you - then I say make a real effort to vote independent, and do it for local races too. Green and Libertarian seem to be the dominant third parties - one for each direction. But even if they AREN'T your alignment, vote for one of them, preferably whoever is polling higher. It takes almost no research to see that in most major races they have no chance, and therefore your vote can be guaranteed not have an effect on THIS election - which is what you wanted, right? But those results are published far and wide.
The increasing number of independent votes helps finance independent parties, helps establish their creditibility with voters (most of whom have the reverse of the submitter's position - they don't want to "waste" their vote - people hate voting for a loser) and generally gives them an increasing chance to win some elections (starting at the local level) If enough people do it, it also sends a message to the politicians in both major parties that they have something to worry about and that what they actually do in office might just be important.
What kind of a neighborhood is this? Conventional door locks are SO easy to break into, or just push hard on, or use a tiny crowbar on, that I've repeatedly been advised to expect that anyone who wants to break into your house just will...
Unless these were like a bunch of kids or something.
First The Fear: I don't have the document you're looking for. But I think the basic problem is this: in the Real World, if you leave your door unlocked (I didn't say "open") in most neighborhoods it'll take years, at least, before you get broken into. Most people aren't going around trying residential doors. (Assuming you aren't conspicuously advertising more wealth than your neighbors) And if you're going to get broken into, having a locked door won't make much difference...
I would say the mean time before someone breaks into your house BECAUSE you didn't lock the door averages at LEAST years.
The mean time until your online (routable) Windows computer is compromised if you don't have a reasonable firewall is something like 15 minutes (and falling) You need to strike home the fact that that's the AVERAGE time until someone WILL try to attack their computer. If someone is trying to steal from you every 15 minutes, you NEED to be paranoid.
Second, of course, is education. First you need to decide whether you're going to keep fixing whatever messes they're going to make - or you need to say: "I've wasted enough time on your computer. If you don't follow the rules I set out for using it safely, I'm not fixing the problems you have - or I'm at least waiting weeks before I do." - and you need to be serious. If you fix it all for free, there is no incentive.
One rule is not to download and install anything without your approval. If they see that warning screen and click "yes" - that's their problem. Those smiley toolbars don't get there by themselves.
Then you need to do what you can for them automatically. I agree with another poster that logging off is not a high priority. A good "hardware" firewall is - with the "gaming" port forward OFF. Turn on automatic updates. Getting a mac is great : )
If you can't do that, disabling ActiveX - COMPLETELY - (preferably also removing the IE icon and installing an alternate browser) helps a lot. Installing Spybot SSD and it's automatic protections helps.
It's more nuts than that - she called the page BOTH disproportionately wide AND disproportionately long. If it's in both directions, the word for that is "big" not "disproportionate" It makes me think she's viewing it on a monitor smaller than that of your intended/. reader.
(And yes, I realize it's very important a website be LEGIBLE on a small monitor, which not all sites are. But it's also very reasonable to also _optimize_ the design for the monitors you think your viewers have...)
I do not believe that we must not have machines in order to have a reasonable level of fraud resistance. I believe that machines with human-readable-only recountable ballots which are placed, by the voter, into a box that is easily visible to all election judges is a great solution. If the machine never places those votes into the machine itself, you have a reasonably suitable audit trail.
And then the machines are used for what they're supposed to be - speeding up the initial vote count.
That said, I DO think we should throw out the machines until we can get them right.
Also, I'm not sure about mentioning "again" - I don't see anywhere you previously mentioned your blog post on here.
You, the voter, need to physically move your verified ticket into a box under the watchful eye of the election judge. This MUST NOT be done by machine, unless the machine also does it in an easily visible fashion under the watchful eye of an election judge - which is simply not what's going on.
I early voted on a Diebold voter verified machine - and it's NOT good enough. I even had a nice conversation with the technical election judge, and since it did print a verified trail I did have to go home and think about this before I realized how it sucked.
They totally and complete circumvented the idea of a voter verified paper trail.
The way this machine works is you vote, it prints, you can see-but-not-touch the printout. You can vote AGAIN (up to 3 times) and it voids the previous printouts. Again, without you touching them. Which means the process expects that some percentage of its paper trail will be voided. The printouts get sent into some magic compartment.
So 1) there's no way except by noise for the election monitors to know if it printed a variety of extra votes. And they were pretty quiet.
2) There's absolutely zero way to know if it went back and voided your vote, because there's plenty of precedent for voiding votes.
3) It can absolutely tell via paper alone who voted in which order; it's on a spool. Which could be easily tracked by anyone who watched what order people voted at that machine. Your votes are even less anonymous.
*sigh*
(Ok, so I posted this on the previous Diebold story - sue me. It's important, so I reposted it, Karma be damned.)
You, the voter, need to physically move your verified ticket into a box under the watchful eye of the election judge. This MUST NOT be done by machine, unless the machine also does it in an easily visible fashion under the watchful eye of an election judge - which is simply not what's going on.
I early voted on a Diebold voter verified machine - and it's NOT good enough. I even had a nice conversation with the technical election judge, and since it did print a verified trail I did have to go home and think about this before I realized how it sucked.
They totally and complete circumvented the idea of a voter verified paper trail.
The way this machine works is you vote, it prints, you can see-but-not-touch the printout. You can vote AGAIN (up to 3 times) and it voids the previous printouts. Again, without you touching them. Which means the process expects that some percentage of its paper trail will be voided. The printouts get sent into some magic compartment.
So 1) there's no way except by noise for the election monitors to know if it printed a variety of extra votes. And they were pretty quiet.
2) There's absolutely zero way to know if it went back and voided your vote, because there's plenty of precedent for voiding votes.
3) It can absolutely tell via paper alone who voted in which order; it's on a spool. Which could be easily tracked by anyone who watched what order people voted at that machine. Your votes are even less anonymous.
I'd actually clarify this even more, because Flex is in this space too - it's an awesome tool for producing wonderful powerful Flash applications and has its own sweet bag of tricks.
At this point Flash the IDE is for designers - programmers targetting swfs should be using Flex (which is ALSO free, btw, if you don't want "Flex Builder" which is basically Dreamweaver for Flex) or Laszlo.
Maybe someone has another source I'm missing, but from this article alone this sounds like they don't have enough spares IN the space station... Did they really bring an 800 lb Gyro back down? Sounds more likely they would've tried to replace just part of it...
I could be wrong, but my impression is that it doesn't work that way; the near-total lack of pressure overcomes the freezing cold.
More precisely: Even after your hypothetical water freezes, it will continue to "boil" (actually sublime) directly from solid to vapor without passing through liquid. It will do this until the vapor pressure around it gets to be a little higher - which will never be stable so basically your water will constantly evaporate. Of course, water is also heavy and heavy = precious in space. While certainly both are a pain, as a rule, size is not as big of a factor as weight.
You'd be much more likely to spray the space-equivalent of Great Stuff expanding foam sealant on the back of the mirror than liquid water; foams have a high rigidity to weight. That's polyurethane, although I saw some stuff about aluminum foams which might be ideal.
I agree that it never mentions it. I was simply pointing out that the SUMMARY implied something that's basically totally fabricated because it isn't there.
However, I must say that if it was really as good or better than a battery in each regard the press release would've pointed that out - instead they merely say it has some qualities of each.
Electric cars have bigger and less currently soluable problems with range than discharge. A limited hybrid, on the other hand, this might be very helpful with under certain circumstances. But the trend seems to be to make them more-electric which again brings you up against the range problems.
First let me say that it's pretty unquestionably true that increasing clock speeds was an important part of making the CPU actually faster to some extent. No one's trying to suggest all computers should be running at 15Mhz or anything, nor trying to complain about an increase in Mhz when that was the most efficient improvement (which I agree should generally have preceded dual-core designs)
HOWEVER, to a significant extent the increase in Mhz was done at the _expense_ of improved performance. That is, development of chips that could have a higher advertised Mhz was prioritized over chips that actually performed faster (regardless of why they performed faster)
Late Pentium IIIs are faster clock-for-clock than early PIVs. The Pentium Pro was faster clock-for-clock than PIIs. The Pentium M kicked everything's butt in the Intel lineup when it came out, and Core Solo was still clock-for-clock way faster than most everything else single-core in the roadmap.
AMD tried to make their chips WORK faster and then simply made up a rating number to compete in the fake Mhz war, which was why you got models like "3200+" which basically meant "like a 3.2 Ghz Pentium, even though it's slower"
So the real thing people are complaining about is mostly that Intel, especially with a big part of the Pentium IV line, made a choice to develop for "Mhz" so they could market with it instead of developing for performance.
Except it's not going to cost you a ton more money unless you need to have cutting edge effects that push the envelope of all those systems. (more, yes. Tons more? no. Anything like 8x for 8 consoles, no) As long as you live within the least-common-demoninator constraints, it's bad but not THAT bad, especially if you already have experience developing for each platform.
I haven't seen this game, but it sounds like it's well written and well executed - not necessarily the most cutting edge graphics ever seen. (Which doesn't mean they're not, say, really good for a couple years ago)
Yes, according to the article: A BATTERY has high storage, low power. A CAPACITOR has high power, low storage.
This has more storage than a low-storage capacitor and more power than a low-power battery.
It does not in any place, at all, say that it has more - or even as much - storage as a battery or power as a capacitor. If it had 100 times the storage of a battery it would change a lot of things.
The summary is pretty bad. If I'm reading the article right:
This is neat, but not a revolution, it's exactly the hybrid of a battery and a capacitor - it has some advantages of both.
This device has similar or less storage capacity than a battery, but can deliver its power much faster. It has similar or less power delivery abilities than a capacitor, but twice the storage capacity.
In MANY devices, the real problem is that the batteries drain. This doesn't help that in the least bit. This will not make your electric car go farther. This only helps the situation with ultra-high-drain requirements, where a normal battery just wouldn't work.
As a small business owner, those are really lame statistics especially as they are relevant to this discussion because they're looking at the wrong thing.
There are plenty of reasons why someone might start a doomed small business, especially a microbusiness, which doesn't mean that for several years they aren't a good part of the economy. Even more important, the smaller the business the lower the investment in whatever gamble that business is making... so the fact that for every successful small business at six years there were 4 that closed up doesn't mean that the successful small businesses aren't a vibrant part of our economy.
Here's a couple problems:
What happens if I start a company that has _1_ employee, me, then I decide to take another job. Or maybe it has two and we BOTH go work for another firm. Or maybe I start a consulting firm after I leave my corporate job, then I retire. If the firm was really just ME (even if I had some assistants) it can't last after I'm not there.
Or heck, what if I start a small business, then we close that one down because my brother and I want to start one together. Or I want to start one in a different state. In those cases the net gain/loss is zero.
Those statistics are intended to say "starting a small business is hard, take it seriously" - which is true. But they don't imply that small business are a weak part of our economy.
I'm an OSS fan, but "voter verified" recountability matters, OSS does not.
There is no way for you to independently verify that the VERSION of the OSS software on a machine is actually what you think it is.
You MUST have a system where the voter can verify what their machine thinks their vote is (eg a slip of paper) in such a way that you can reliably recount it by hand (and by multiple people, of course) However, once you HAVE a recountable system suddenly it doesn't really matter how trustworthy the machines are; if anyone suspects anything or it's close you trigger a hand-recount.
Speed: Remote Desktop solutions are reasonably secure (for the client) because the client only draws stuff. However, they are incredibly slow if you have a lot of users - because the you're doing ALL the work for EVERY client on the serverside. A well written Flash/Flex application does the vast majority of the work on the client side and only talks to the server when it needs to share something. This problem is tied to the responsiveness problem - even if it works over a low bandwidth connection, it can't work well over a high LATENCY connection. That is, if all the thinking is done on the server, the user experience must wait for a whole round trip before anything changes, which blows if you have any kind of latency at all.
Sandbox: So you have to move most of the UI stuff to the client side so that user feedback happens without waiting for one or more round trips, and you want to move some random execution there so you can give the programmer complex and rich control over this. Of course, if you're going to do this, you need a secure sandbox to keep the computer safe from the remote app.
Congratulations, we've just invented Flash, or Java applets.
Your Flash info is circa 2001. Now it has a real programming language behind it, and many of the most-used slownesses are optimized in the native player code so for many types of things you get surprisingly fast performance. (Obviously it's not native performance for real number crunching.. but the recent player versions take many things - like event management - and do them natively, so that part IS at native speed.)
With Flex there's a really nice programming interface for every single part of Flash - no GUI required to create in Flex.
In principle I don't disagree with you about the endpoint, but I think your post is missing a major point: Sandboxing.
What Flash brings to the table is an environment that is powerful, that users will generally HAVE, and that users can trust. That's the key part - I tell everybody to disable ActiveX - if they're even using an OS/browser it's supported on, but Flash* has a very secure sandbox.
Running things outside of a sandbox is why we have native code. Being able to run random applets I don't necessarily trust is why Flash is great. Reasonable security viewing random websites is the key to the web - even web 1.0. In fact, this same sandbox nature is why it is easily crossplatform.
Regarding the stack: Sure, drop HTML - flash doesn't need it. Drop the browser too - Flash only needs the plugin, it doesn't need the browser. Maybe you want to replace SOAP because you want a more optimized protocol than HTTP...
But in the front of any stack you need a rich _sandboxed_ UI, and while there's certainly room for Flash to grow in that department it should not be thrown out just because it currently uses a stack you don't like to get to your machine - it'll happily use another one.
*Note: everything in this post applies to Java applets, too, although I think Flash is more powerful presently. My real point is why on earth, given two existing standards rich UI sandbox standards, would you go make some more and reduce the standardization.
Let me get this straight: your complaint with Flex is that Adobe got slashdotted?
and to the parent or grandparent or whatever - it does NOT use ColdFusion in any important way. That is, certainly they made nice connections between them, but it also connects nicely with any kind of service and can interface well with all kinds of backends, including Java ones - I can assure you.
The government DID step in. And instead of implementing some sort of system that would tend to balance the standards of living, they have created INCENTIVES for offshoring.
At the level of issue he's talking about, it might well be hiring a consultant for 2 hours. Heck, we'd do it for two hours, but a local consultant probably costs less for a day.
My other piece of advice is similar to what I've already seen: Ignore bandwidth, look for reliability. As recently as 2003 we had 4 users in the US on a single 56k line - and really, it was fine if you weren't trying to download big files. But it was a rock solid 56k that didn't lose any packets.
If you have actual DSL disconnections, you do not have a bandwidth problem... (Unless you're getting disconnected from the VPN only because something took too long)
If bandwidth was really expensive and you wanted to be really hardcore you could setup the Linux Advanced Routing stuff (or possibly just get a gaming router, depending on the model, but I haven't tried) and set it up to make sure that it responds to interactive connections rapidly at the expense of any other downloads. But from the sound of it you might need some help getting that setup.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, from an engineering standpoint it's exactly as you describe. It's most likely to break right away than at any other particular time, assuming a randomly distributed set of flaws, which is common. Most electronics don't wear out so much as they fall victim to chance power and temperature fluctuations. Robustness will vary wildly in manufacturing, so any item that makes it past the beginning is pretty likely to last a while.
That's not true of things that are engineered to wear out (like tires or brake pads, but also like the bearing and motor in a HD) but in a HD the parts that wear out last quite a while, random failures are a more likely cause.
So I'd keep your old drives - and I'd keep redundant data; you shouldn't trust ANY drive.
But if you're throwing out those old 200 GB drives - or really anything over 10GB - I'd love to have them!
>>> the two party system isn't what causes that it is simply another way of stating that effect: the cause is the use of majority-runoff and plurality elections in single member districts for legislative elections combined with the usual rule of winner-take-all statewide elections of multi-seat slates of Presidential electors.
I agree largely. You're quite right that I neglected in this discussion (which was a question about who to vote for):
Work for voting machines where your human readable printed ballot only goes in the recounting box by your hand. "optical scan" works fine. touchscreen with an EXTERNAL printout works fine. touchscreen that prints inside a box and you can't tell which votes it wiped out is NOT fine.
Work for IRV/RCV. This won't suddenly happen in national election, but use it in as many local elections as possible.
The electoral college isn't a problem, but winner-take-all electors ARE a problem - and that isn't the way it always was, either.
HOWEVER, I also think that it is possible to have a grassroots movement grow about avoiding blind voting for major parties - and I think the single biggest thing that would convince people would be higher numbers for independent candidates. This might not be EASIER the above, but if someone asks me "how to vote" and not "what to do to reform the electoral system" that's the answer they get. If you can be reasonably assured that your candidate won't win, this is much more effective than 'boycotting the vote'
>>> "make it hard to get anything done" idea had been taken way too far..
This post was long, I didn't want to make it superlong. I completely agree, the Constitution toned it down. In particular it went from "NEVER get anything done" to "only get anything done if there is a lot of consensus, and consensus is hard." But the checks and balances system is still a system primarily of substantial inhibition of anyone actually having a lot of control to do something. It's a great balancing act of "WE are very powerful" and "I can't get anything done"
>>> Its been a feature of American government practically since the adoption of the Constitution,
I believe it's worse now and has steadily been getting worse. More candidates running - and ELECTED based on party and not on positions/policies (even if they might be lies) More votes cast along party lines in opposition to the positions of those same congresspersons. (Not that wheeling and dealing never happened... but now it's happening in a bulk unit.) In short, you used to choose a party to match your positions, now to a much larger extent your positions are chosen match your party.
As recently as Eisenhower we had a president who wasn't strongly affiliated with either party - he has publicly stated he felt like he ought to pick a party to run...
Summary: vote Dem this time - vote Independent often (explanation below)
The two-party system is NOT part of the American way. The strangehold of the two party system is what gets all kind of bad politicians - from both sides - to get elected without having real positions on issues, and then to pass laws that suck because it's politicially infeasible to vote against your party. It didn't use to be that way.
I'm no fan of the current administration or of the current members of congress who have aligned themselves most closely with it. Which is funny, because I'm really and old-school Republican. But I'm not going to rail against them here. I also have a lot more to be unhappy with from the people in charge - the Dems haven't been ABLE to do anything federally I really didn't like recently. But there are definitely people I love and hate in both parties. What's sick is the number of votes along party lines for crappy legislation...
But our government was founded on the policy of it being hard to get anything done. That's what "checks and balances" means. You should need broad-based support from different sectors to get anything done. Our current two party system doesn't do that. As long as no one is going to stand up to their party, we need at least one house of congress or the president to be different than the other two until we can change that or get more independents.
My first piece of advice is this: In THIS election, for the House at least, vote Democrat. House terms are only two years. For the next two years we are basically guaranteed of a Republican President. This situation is peculiar to mid-term elections... In this particular mid-term I have the same advice about the Senate, because there is zero chance of the Dems getting more than an EXTREMELY narrow majority at this point, so the impact after 2008 is minimal.
Next, if you can't make an informed vote - a vote informed enough for you - then I say make a real effort to vote independent, and do it for local races too. Green and Libertarian seem to be the dominant third parties - one for each direction. But even if they AREN'T your alignment, vote for one of them, preferably whoever is polling higher. It takes almost no research to see that in most major races they have no chance, and therefore your vote can be guaranteed not have an effect on THIS election - which is what you wanted, right? But those results are published far and wide.
The increasing number of independent votes helps finance independent parties, helps establish their creditibility with voters (most of whom have the reverse of the submitter's position - they don't want to "waste" their vote - people hate voting for a loser) and generally gives them an increasing chance to win some elections (starting at the local level) If enough people do it, it also sends a message to the politicians in both major parties that they have something to worry about and that what they actually do in office might just be important.
What kind of a neighborhood is this? Conventional door locks are SO easy to break into, or just push hard on, or use a tiny crowbar on, that I've repeatedly been advised to expect that anyone who wants to break into your house just will...
Unless these were like a bunch of kids or something.
First The Fear: I don't have the document you're looking for. But I think the basic problem is this: in the Real World, if you leave your door unlocked (I didn't say "open") in most neighborhoods it'll take years, at least, before you get broken into. Most people aren't going around trying residential doors. (Assuming you aren't conspicuously advertising more wealth than your neighbors) And if you're going to get broken into, having a locked door won't make much difference...
I would say the mean time before someone breaks into your house BECAUSE you didn't lock the door averages at LEAST years.
The mean time until your online (routable) Windows computer is compromised if you don't have a reasonable firewall is something like 15 minutes (and falling) You need to strike home the fact that that's the AVERAGE time until someone WILL try to attack their computer. If someone is trying to steal from you every 15 minutes, you NEED to be paranoid.
Second, of course, is education.
First you need to decide whether you're going to keep fixing whatever messes they're going to make - or you need to say: "I've wasted enough time on your computer. If you don't follow the rules I set out for using it safely, I'm not fixing the problems you have - or I'm at least waiting weeks before I do." - and you need to be serious. If you fix it all for free, there is no incentive.
One rule is not to download and install anything without your approval. If they see that warning screen and click "yes" - that's their problem. Those smiley toolbars don't get there by themselves.
Then you need to do what you can for them automatically. I agree with another poster that logging off is not a high priority. A good "hardware" firewall is - with the "gaming" port forward OFF. Turn on automatic updates. Getting a mac is great : )
If you can't do that, disabling ActiveX - COMPLETELY - (preferably also removing the IE icon and installing an alternate browser) helps a lot. Installing Spybot SSD and it's automatic protections helps.
It's more nuts than that - she called the page BOTH disproportionately wide AND disproportionately long. If it's in both directions, the word for that is "big" not "disproportionate" It makes me think she's viewing it on a monitor smaller than that of your intended /. reader.
(And yes, I realize it's very important a website be LEGIBLE on a small monitor, which not all sites are. But it's also very reasonable to also _optimize_ the design for the monitors you think your viewers have...)
I do not believe that we must not have machines in order to have a reasonable level of fraud resistance. I believe that machines with human-readable-only recountable ballots which are placed, by the voter, into a box that is easily visible to all election judges is a great solution. If the machine never places those votes into the machine itself, you have a reasonably suitable audit trail.
And then the machines are used for what they're supposed to be - speeding up the initial vote count.
That said, I DO think we should throw out the machines until we can get them right.
Also, I'm not sure about mentioning "again" - I don't see anywhere you previously mentioned your blog post on here.
You, the voter, need to physically move your verified ticket into a box under the watchful eye of the election judge. This MUST NOT be done by machine, unless the machine also does it in an easily visible fashion under the watchful eye of an election judge - which is simply not what's going on.
I early voted on a Diebold voter verified machine - and it's NOT good enough. I even had a nice conversation with the technical election judge, and since it did print a verified trail I did have to go home and think about this before I realized how it sucked.
They totally and complete circumvented the idea of a voter verified paper trail.
The way this machine works is you vote, it prints, you can see-but-not-touch the printout. You can vote AGAIN (up to 3 times) and it voids the previous printouts. Again, without you touching them. Which means the process expects that some percentage of its paper trail will be voided. The printouts get sent into some magic compartment.
So 1) there's no way except by noise for the election monitors to know if it printed a variety of extra votes. And they were pretty quiet.
2) There's absolutely zero way to know if it went back and voided your vote, because there's plenty of precedent for voiding votes.
3) It can absolutely tell via paper alone who voted in which order; it's on a spool. Which could be easily tracked by anyone who watched what order people voted at that machine. Your votes are even less anonymous.
*sigh*
(Ok, so I posted this on the previous Diebold story - sue me. It's important, so I reposted it, Karma be damned.)
You, the voter, need to physically move your verified ticket into a box under the watchful eye of the election judge. This MUST NOT be done by machine, unless the machine also does it in an easily visible fashion under the watchful eye of an election judge - which is simply not what's going on.
I early voted on a Diebold voter verified machine - and it's NOT good enough. I even had a nice conversation with the technical election judge, and since it did print a verified trail I did have to go home and think about this before I realized how it sucked.
They totally and complete circumvented the idea of a voter verified paper trail.
The way this machine works is you vote, it prints, you can see-but-not-touch the printout. You can vote AGAIN (up to 3 times) and it voids the previous printouts. Again, without you touching them. Which means the process expects that some percentage of its paper trail will be voided. The printouts get sent into some magic compartment.
So 1) there's no way except by noise for the election monitors to know if it printed a variety of extra votes. And they were pretty quiet.
2) There's absolutely zero way to know if it went back and voided your vote, because there's plenty of precedent for voiding votes.
3) It can absolutely tell via paper alone who voted in which order; it's on a spool. Which could be easily tracked by anyone who watched what order people voted at that machine. Your votes are even less anonymous.
*sigh*
I'd actually clarify this even more, because Flex is in this space too - it's an awesome tool for producing wonderful powerful Flash applications and has its own sweet bag of tricks.
At this point Flash the IDE is for designers - programmers targetting swfs should be using Flex (which is ALSO free, btw, if you don't want "Flex Builder" which is basically Dreamweaver for Flex) or Laszlo.
Maybe someone has another source I'm missing, but from this article alone this sounds like they don't have enough spares IN the space station... Did they really bring an 800 lb Gyro back down? Sounds more likely they would've tried to replace just part of it...
I could be wrong, but my impression is that it doesn't work that way; the near-total lack of pressure overcomes the freezing cold.
More precisely: Even after your hypothetical water freezes, it will continue to "boil" (actually sublime) directly from solid to vapor without passing through liquid. It will do this until the vapor pressure around it gets to be a little higher - which will never be stable so basically your water will constantly evaporate. Of course, water is also heavy and heavy = precious in space. While certainly both are a pain, as a rule, size is not as big of a factor as weight.
You'd be much more likely to spray the space-equivalent of Great Stuff expanding foam sealant on the back of the mirror than liquid water; foams have a high rigidity to weight. That's polyurethane, although I saw some stuff about aluminum foams which might be ideal.
I agree that it never mentions it. I was simply pointing out that the SUMMARY implied something that's basically totally fabricated because it isn't there.
However, I must say that if it was really as good or better than a battery in each regard the press release would've pointed that out - instead they merely say it has some qualities of each.
Electric cars have bigger and less currently soluable problems with range than discharge. A limited hybrid, on the other hand, this might be very helpful with under certain circumstances. But the trend seems to be to make them more-electric which again brings you up against the range problems.
Not so much.
First let me say that it's pretty unquestionably true that increasing clock speeds was an important part of making the CPU actually faster to some extent. No one's trying to suggest all computers should be running at 15Mhz or anything, nor trying to complain about an increase in Mhz when that was the most efficient improvement (which I agree should generally have preceded dual-core designs)
HOWEVER, to a significant extent the increase in Mhz was done at the _expense_ of improved performance. That is, development of chips that could have a higher advertised Mhz was prioritized over chips that actually performed faster (regardless of why they performed faster)
Late Pentium IIIs are faster clock-for-clock than early PIVs. The Pentium Pro was faster clock-for-clock than PIIs. The Pentium M kicked everything's butt in the Intel lineup when it came out, and Core Solo was still clock-for-clock way faster than most everything else single-core in the roadmap.
AMD tried to make their chips WORK faster and then simply made up a rating number to compete in the fake Mhz war, which was why you got models like "3200+" which basically meant "like a 3.2 Ghz Pentium, even though it's slower"
So the real thing people are complaining about is mostly that Intel, especially with a big part of the Pentium IV line, made a choice to develop for "Mhz" so they could market with it instead of developing for performance.
Except it's not going to cost you a ton more money unless you need to have cutting edge effects that push the envelope of all those systems. (more, yes. Tons more? no. Anything like 8x for 8 consoles, no) As long as you live within the least-common-demoninator constraints, it's bad but not THAT bad, especially if you already have experience developing for each platform.
I haven't seen this game, but it sounds like it's well written and well executed - not necessarily the most cutting edge graphics ever seen. (Which doesn't mean they're not, say, really good for a couple years ago)
Yes, according to the article: A BATTERY has high storage, low power. A CAPACITOR has high power, low storage.
This has more storage than a low-storage capacitor and more power than a low-power battery.
It does not in any place, at all, say that it has more - or even as much - storage as a battery or power as a capacitor. If it had 100 times the storage of a battery it would change a lot of things.
The summary is pretty bad. If I'm reading the article right:
This is neat, but not a revolution, it's exactly the hybrid of a battery and a capacitor - it has some advantages of both.
This device has similar or less storage capacity than a battery, but can deliver its power much faster.
It has similar or less power delivery abilities than a capacitor, but twice the storage capacity.
In MANY devices, the real problem is that the batteries drain. This doesn't help that in the least bit. This will not make your electric car go farther. This only helps the situation with ultra-high-drain requirements, where a normal battery just wouldn't work.
As a small business owner, those are really lame statistics especially as they are relevant to this discussion because they're looking at the wrong thing.
There are plenty of reasons why someone might start a doomed small business, especially a microbusiness, which doesn't mean that for several years they aren't a good part of the economy. Even more important, the smaller the business the lower the investment in whatever gamble that business is making... so the fact that for every successful small business at six years there were 4 that closed up doesn't mean that the successful small businesses aren't a vibrant part of our economy.
Here's a couple problems:
What happens if I start a company that has _1_ employee, me, then I decide to take another job. Or maybe it has two and we BOTH go work for another firm. Or maybe I start a consulting firm after I leave my corporate job, then I retire. If the firm was really just ME (even if I had some assistants) it can't last after I'm not there.
Or heck, what if I start a small business, then we close that one down because my brother and I want to start one together. Or I want to start one in a different state. In those cases the net gain/loss is zero.
Those statistics are intended to say "starting a small business is hard, take it seriously" - which is true. But they don't imply that small business are a weak part of our economy.
I'm an OSS fan, but "voter verified" recountability matters, OSS does not.
There is no way for you to independently verify that the VERSION of the OSS software on a machine is actually what you think it is.
You MUST have a system where the voter can verify what their machine thinks their vote is (eg a slip of paper) in such a way that you can reliably recount it by hand (and by multiple people, of course) However, once you HAVE a recountable system suddenly it doesn't really matter how trustworthy the machines are; if anyone suspects anything or it's close you trigger a hand-recount.
Speed:
Remote Desktop solutions are reasonably secure (for the client) because the client only draws stuff. However, they are incredibly slow if you have a lot of users - because the you're doing ALL the work for EVERY client on the serverside. A well written Flash/Flex application does the vast majority of the work on the client side and only talks to the server when it needs to share something. This problem is tied to the responsiveness problem - even if it works over a low bandwidth connection, it can't work well over a high LATENCY connection. That is, if all the thinking is done on the server, the user experience must wait for a whole round trip before anything changes, which blows if you have any kind of latency at all.
Sandbox:
So you have to move most of the UI stuff to the client side so that user feedback happens without waiting for one or more round trips, and you want to move some random execution there so you can give the programmer complex and rich control over this. Of course, if you're going to do this, you need a secure sandbox to keep the computer safe from the remote app.
Congratulations, we've just invented Flash, or Java applets.
Your Flash info is circa 2001. Now it has a real programming language behind it, and many of the most-used slownesses are optimized in the native player code so for many types of things you get surprisingly fast performance. (Obviously it's not native performance for real number crunching.. but the recent player versions take many things - like event management - and do them natively, so that part IS at native speed.)
With Flex there's a really nice programming interface for every single part of Flash - no GUI required to create in Flex.
In principle I don't disagree with you about the endpoint, but I think your post is missing a major point: Sandboxing.
What Flash brings to the table is an environment that is powerful, that users will generally HAVE, and that users can trust. That's the key part - I tell everybody to disable ActiveX - if they're even using an OS/browser it's supported on, but Flash* has a very secure sandbox.
Running things outside of a sandbox is why we have native code. Being able to run random applets I don't necessarily trust is why Flash is great. Reasonable security viewing random websites is the key to the web - even web 1.0. In fact, this same sandbox nature is why it is easily crossplatform.
Regarding the stack: Sure, drop HTML - flash doesn't need it. Drop the browser too - Flash only needs the plugin, it doesn't need the browser. Maybe you want to replace SOAP because you want a more optimized protocol than HTTP...
But in the front of any stack you need a rich _sandboxed_ UI, and while there's certainly room for Flash to grow in that department it should not be thrown out just because it currently uses a stack you don't like to get to your machine - it'll happily use another one.
*Note: everything in this post applies to Java applets, too, although I think Flash is more powerful presently. My real point is why on earth, given two existing standards rich UI sandbox standards, would you go make some more and reduce the standardization.
Let me get this straight: your complaint with Flex is that Adobe got slashdotted?
and to the parent or grandparent or whatever - it does NOT use ColdFusion in any important way. That is, certainly they made nice connections between them, but it also connects nicely with any kind of service and can interface well with all kinds of backends, including Java ones - I can assure you.
The government DID step in. And instead of implementing some sort of system that would tend to balance the standards of living, they have created INCENTIVES for offshoring.
a ks_for_.htmlR J8OVF&b=32409
http://techpolicy.typepad.com/tpp/2004/03/tax_bre
http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJ
These were high up in Google, that's my only endorsement of these sources. It was a hot issue in 2004...
At the level of issue he's talking about, it might well be hiring a consultant for 2 hours. Heck, we'd do it for two hours, but a local consultant probably costs less for a day.
My other piece of advice is similar to what I've already seen: Ignore bandwidth, look for reliability. As recently as 2003 we had 4 users in the US on a single 56k line - and really, it was fine if you weren't trying to download big files. But it was a rock solid 56k that didn't lose any packets.
If you have actual DSL disconnections, you do not have a bandwidth problem... (Unless you're getting disconnected from the VPN only because something took too long)
If bandwidth was really expensive and you wanted to be really hardcore you could setup the Linux Advanced Routing stuff (or possibly just get a gaming router, depending on the model, but I haven't tried) and set it up to make sure that it responds to interactive connections rapidly at the expense of any other downloads. But from the sound of it you might need some help getting that setup.