Why would your teacher choose QNX over Linux? Linux is free and easy to install. With the Linux source code, students can study (and play with) real operating system internals. Did QNX make a "donation" to your school or something?;-)
You KBVote screenshots are very confusing. Why is party listed on every question? Are the checkboxes for choosing party or "Options"? After checking a checkbox, must the user press the Next button? Or do they press the Done button when they are "done" voting for THIS particular question?
Why is there a Done button on every screen? You shouldn't be able to finish until you have voted (or explicitly abstained) from every question. Conversely, why is there a Next button on the last screen? There should only be Done and Previous buttons.
but what if I connect the tail of arrow A with the head of arrow B? You are trying to create an intuitive visual interface. This can cause confusion because the computer/scanner is using a different model than the voter's visual mental model.
Slicker was a clever idea (lifted from Mac OS 9;-) and I think it sparked a lot of interest because there is so little good "innovation" with KDE/Gnome. Sometimes I think KDE/Gnome would almost be better off if they simply copied the time-tested Mac OS 9 HIG. Instead of copying Windows' mistakes and reinventing the wheel, copy something that has worked since 1984.. and THEN fix it incrementally.
I think IRV is probably too complicated for Joe American. Approval Voting sounds elegant, but how do you prevent vote count fraud? Since there is no 1:1 correlation between votes and voters, a corrupt vote counter could add a bunch of votes to ballots of people who voted for other people. As long as the cheating candidate does not receive more votes than voters, how would this fraud be detected?
BTW Taco! Fix your site. Mozilla 1.4 posting is broken. IE and Konq work fine.
The bug is obviously a Mozilla bug, not a Slashdot bug. If IE posting was broken, but Mozilla and Konquer worked, you would probably say it was an IE bug.
Clayton Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma" is a great book. It is very similar to Richard Gabriel's "Worse Is Better". This theory also explains why inferior products like DOS, Windows, C++, and Java succeeded. They sucked in many ways, but they were better in some small, important way.
Too bad they don't mention how lacking Diebold's security is, e.g. how easy it is to open Diebold's Access DB and add users/passwords, to change vote results.
Not just the security of Diebold's voting machines, but the security of Diebold the company. Their web site was hacked, revealing private code and documents. If they can't keep their own secrets secret, how can we trust them to keep OUR secretes secret? And why in the world was their code internet-accessible?!!
and don't forget that the War on Terror is actually a religous crusade of Christianity against Islam (sound familiar?). Consider this recent news story about a terrorist and his arsenal in Michigan.
"Federal agents arrest a Muslim man, a member of a radical sect, living in Michigan on gun and drug charges. When they search his home, they discover a bunker containing a cache of weapons and explosives worthy of an army: an anti-aircraft gun capable of firing 550 rounds per minute up to four miles away, machine guns, explosives, thousands of rounds of ammunition, and booby traps. Investigators also find pictures of President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with scope cross-hairs drawn over them."
oh wait a minute. He was not Muslim. He was a white militia member, so he does not get shipped off to Cuba without a lawyer!
If the US truly knew that Iraq possessed WMD, then the mutally assured destruction would have been a deterent to US invasion. I don't see GWB invading Iran or North Korea, which are KNOWN to possess nuclear weapons. Saddam was just an easy target for oil and PR.
There was a ST:NG episode where the crew discovers a second Riker (#2 #1??). He had beamed up from some planet, but a storm caused the transmission to be reflected back to the planet. So #1 #1 appeared on the Enterprise and #2 #2 fell back to the planet's surface. I don't remember how it ended. Maybe a three-way with Commander Troi.;-)
Slashdot could add a new lameness filter to prevent people from posting comments that contain the words "BSD" and "dead". How often do you really need to use the word dead in casual converstation?
I was originally going to just joke that any comment that contained the word "BSD" should be filtered, but the idea of filtering "BSD AND dead" is not that bad an idea.
or the hardware could use public/private key signatures to only allow firmware updates signed by the hardware manufacturer? hmm, I guess that is Microsoft's Palladium..
Slashdot Mirror
Code can be GPL'd, but can "data" be GPL'd?
Why would your teacher choose QNX over Linux? Linux is free and easy to install. With the Linux source code, students can study (and play with) real operating system internals. Did QNX make a "donation" to your school or something?
Who says you need to replace the machine? What prevents people from voting more than once?
You KBVote screenshots are very confusing. Why is party listed on every question? Are the checkboxes for choosing party or "Options"? After checking a checkbox, must the user press the Next button? Or do they press the Done button when they are "done" voting for THIS particular question?
Why is there a Done button on every screen? You shouldn't be able to finish until you have voted (or explicitly abstained) from every question. Conversely, why is there a Next button on the last screen? There should only be Done and Previous buttons.
but what if I connect the tail of arrow A with the head of arrow B? You are trying to create an intuitive visual interface. This can cause confusion because the computer/scanner is using a different model than the voter's visual mental model.
thanks for the explaination. I used to support IRV, but after reading your links I think I will now advocate Approval Voting.
Slicker was a clever idea (lifted from Mac OS 9
I think IRV is probably too complicated for Joe American. Approval Voting sounds elegant, but how do you prevent vote count fraud? Since there is no 1:1 correlation between votes and voters, a corrupt vote counter could add a bunch of votes to ballots of people who voted for other people. As long as the cheating candidate does not receive more votes than voters, how would this fraud be detected?
maybe the downloading is free, but the song "rights" are not.
BTW Taco! Fix your site. Mozilla 1.4 posting is broken. IE and Konq work fine.
The bug is obviously a Mozilla bug, not a Slashdot bug. If IE posting was broken, but Mozilla and Konquer worked, you would probably say it was an IE bug.
Clayton Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma" is a great book. It is very similar to Richard Gabriel's "Worse Is Better". This theory also explains why inferior products like DOS, Windows, C++, and Java succeeded. They sucked in many ways, but they were better in some small, important way.
Too bad they don't mention how lacking Diebold's security is, e.g. how easy it is to open Diebold's Access DB and add users/passwords, to change vote results.
Not just the security of Diebold's voting machines, but the security of Diebold the company. Their web site was hacked, revealing private code and documents. If they can't keep their own secrets secret, how can we trust them to keep OUR secretes secret? And why in the world was their code internet-accessible?!!
I think we need more truth in advertising for young geeks considering a career in engineering: "I want to be an engineer... sex can wait!"
Simon Peyton Jones: " I spend a most of my time on the design and implementation of the language Haskell. In particular, much of my work is focused around the Glasgow Haskell Compiler"
but how well was GNU doing without Linux? It is Linux people want, not GNU.
and don't forget that the War on Terror is actually a religous crusade of Christianity against Islam (sound familiar?). Consider this recent news story about a terrorist and his arsenal in Michigan.
"Federal agents arrest a Muslim man, a member of a radical sect, living in Michigan on gun and drug charges. When they search his home, they discover a bunker containing a cache of weapons and explosives worthy of an army: an anti-aircraft gun capable of firing 550 rounds per minute up to four miles away, machine guns, explosives, thousands of rounds of ammunition, and booby traps. Investigators also find pictures of President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with scope cross-hairs drawn over them."
oh wait a minute. He was not Muslim. He was a white militia member, so he does not get shipped off to Cuba without a lawyer!
If the US truly knew that Iraq possessed WMD, then the mutally assured destruction would have been a deterent to US invasion. I don't see GWB invading Iran or North Korea, which are KNOWN to possess nuclear weapons. Saddam was just an easy target for oil and PR.
who knew Bootsy Collins knew so much about particle physics?!!
OS/3?
There was a ST:NG episode where the crew discovers a second Riker (#2 #1??). He had beamed up from some planet, but a storm caused the transmission to be reflected back to the planet. So #1 #1 appeared on the Enterprise and #2 #2 fell back to the planet's surface. I don't remember how it ended. Maybe a three-way with Commander Troi.
no. Cold Fusion MX was rewritten in Java (from C++), but Dreamweaver MX and Flash MX are still C++ apps.
The ability to put stuff in the system tray.
btw, there is no such thing as the Windows "system tray". The correct term is "notification area". Raymond Chen, a Microsoft dev from the Windows 95 team, describes the original Win95 taskbar design: Why do some people call the taskbar the "tray"? Because they're wrong.
Slashdot could add a new lameness filter to prevent people from posting comments that contain the words "BSD" and "dead". How often do you really need to use the word dead in casual converstation?
I was originally going to just joke that any comment that contained the word "BSD" should be filtered, but the idea of filtering "BSD AND dead" is not that bad an idea.
&^%Q#^&%@#^*$@$#
or the hardware could use public/private key signatures to only allow firmware updates signed by the hardware manufacturer? hmm, I guess that is Microsoft's Palladium..