that I certainly don't think Diebold has the nation's best interests at heart--but just saying "look, they changed it after getting certified, they're traitors!" is going a bit far.
After all, why would one make changes to a system after being certified - if not to compromise it in some way - then why?
Forgive my lack of tinfoil-hattedness, but perhaps they just found a bug that was missed by the certification, or they just wanted to clean up the code or prettify the interface? Less negligent and more breach of contract/law (and just plain stupid, too), but certainly not what I'd call malicious.
I'd skip the Linux live CD and give a charitable donation to The Human Fund instead. It's much more meaningful.
Meaningful to the world at large, perhaps, but you're missing (what is to most of us) the whole point of Christmas or season's greetings cards: to communicate with family and friends. Donating to charity has no connection with that whatsoever, and deliberately saying "I donated to charity with this card" comes off as pretty egotistical--it's implying "now did you?", which is not really a warm greeting.
For that matter, I don't see how giving people CDs and donating to charity are mutually exclusive in the first place . . .
Along the same lines, I had at one point a link "~achurch" in my public_html directory, for compatibility after my homepage changed URLs. So (you can guess what comes next, I'm sure) I decided one day, several years later, to clean up my web stuff:
I have no idea why mny.xcdroast was 000, but it saved me a huge amount of frustration. I now place a file "..norm-r", mode 000, in important directories and rename things around to make sure it's always first in the directory file. And I never, ever use -f.
The human brain is excellent at coping with degraded input.
Yes, but I would argue that degradation requires added effort, and therefore time. Try removing all the punctuation and upper/lower-case distinctions from your post, then ask someone to read it; you may find that it takes longer than you expect.
There is a study that shows, interestingly enough, that provided the first and last letters are intact, the remaining letters in a word can be scrambled and we'll still be able to correctly identify it.
You mean this story, don't you? (I could have sworn there was another one, but the link escapes me . ..) And even so, again it takes time for the brain to reconstruct the intended meaning, more so as the degradation increases.
What's more, your argument ends up against your position. [...] As it happens, it requires far more time to copy edit a post than it does to understand what a minor mistake is supposed to mean.
Until you multiply the additional time it takes readers to interpret your unedited post by the total readership. I don't feel it appropriate to save two minutes of my time if it costs hundreds of readers two seconds each; put another way, I feel that if I'm going to take the time to post something, I should take the time to do it well, so that readers who don't have much time won't have to expend as much effort to read it. (Perhaps I would feel differently if I posted more frequently.)
I think that in the end, we have two different views on how Internet forum posts "should be", and no amount of debating is likely to change that. This discussion is completely off-topic anyway, so why don't we just agree to disagree?
Standards are different when you're talking with people you know (e.g. friends) versus people you may not know (Slashdot audience). I have no problem with friends using all-lowercase text, lazy grammar, and the like; but for people I don't know, I have only the appearance of something from which to judge whether it's worth spending my time on, so--regrettably--appearance does become a significant factor in a first impression. If you have the time to give a detailed examination to everything that comes your way, then I can only envy you, because I don't.
[What's even more fascinating] Is that people whine about spelling so much.
Maybe because not making the effort to use proper spelling and grammar demonstrates a lack of respect for the reader? Nobody's perfect, but even without a spell checker you can catch the vast majority of your errors by just re-reading your post, and if you don't know the spelling of a word, there's a handy thing called a dictionary (there are even onlinedictionaries) to help you out. I'll agree that criticizing another's errors is generally uncalled for, but the nature of Slashdot (an "informal Internet forum", as you put it) doesn't mitigate the impression your post makes on readers--especially given the emphasis many people here seem to put on proper spelling and grammar.
Worth mentioning that that price only works if you live in an apartment and your apartment already has fiber installed (or if you can convince the owner to do so). The rest of us pay about $60/month.
I'd suspect it would have something to do with it not being able to focus that close. Just like if you point a camera at something 5 cm in front of the lens, it wouldn't be able to focus on it, and you'd get a really fuzzy picture.
So what you're saying is they forgot to implement a macro mode on Hubble. Silly astronomers--oh wait...
the several times they explicitly state that "The Google Desktop Search program does not make your computer's content accessible to Google or anyone else"?
YOu mentioned you were in Japan already, so a lot of what you see as POTS "just working" is probably going to be stuff that isn't true in America.
Just for the record, I lived in the US (Maryland, near DC) for 21 years before moving to Japan, and what I said about my POTS experience includes (in fact is mostly) my experience in the US. I do recall a nightmare trying to get an ISDN line from then-Bell Atlantic at one point, but that was administrative, not technical.
1. Vonage's VOIP technology is based on a system that is FAR more complicated and less tested than POTS. [...] Less reliabile is unavoidable.
I'm well aware of this, and not arguing the fact. I'm just puzzled as to why such a complex, untested system is seen as a sufficient replacement for a simple, well-tested system.
2. For $20 a month I get features that would cost me nearly $100 using POTS. [...] Vonage gives me WAY more bang for my buck.
If the reduced cost is worth the inconvenience, then I guess that counts as a reason. Personally, I'd get a POTS phone line for phone service and a separate data connection for Internet service--but then again, I live in Japan where they already have fiber to the home in major cities, so maybe that's not an option for you. (I also don't subscribe to the "cheaper is better" theory, so that may by itself put me in the minority.)
3. As an engineer I'm not happy unless something "just works" but I also recognize how rare that really is.
It doesn't have to be. Pencil and paper (or charcoal and hide, if you like) "just work", for an extreme example. Bridges "just work". Even POTS "just works". Certainly the latter examples have had a lot of effort put into them, but declaring at the outset that stability, "just works"-ness if you will, is rare--and, by implication, not a feasible goal--seems overly pessimistic, and is certainly disappointing to hear from an engineer.
I'm not going to stop using a new technology just because all the bugs haven't been worked out.
Nor am I suggesting you do--I'm just expressing surprise that you'd stop using a tested technology just because a newer one exists. I certainly wouldn't want to be in your place if a burglar broke into your house and you couldn't call 911 because your router was on the blink . . .
I can readily recommend [Vonage] if you can tolerate the occasional (and easily fixed) downtime.
. . . Wow. As if the tolerance of Windows BSODs wasn't bad enough, now this? Whatever happened to "you pick up the phone and it just works"? In 26 years of using POTS, the only thing I can recall even approaching an outage is very occasional "circuit full" messages on long distance calls on holidays, and I haven't even heard those for over a decade.
If you can deal with not having a functional phone every now and then, then I'm certainly not going to argue with you, but this casual acceptance of "things break" is rather surprising. And somewhat disturbing, as it reduces the incentive to make things work well. I, at least, would vastly prefer a pencil and paper that "just work" to an electronic notepad that did OCR and networking but a habit of conking out at the most inopportune times; I've got enough stress to deal with as it is.
I mean, stupidity seems to be the norm in politics, and this sounds like it was pushed through by the telecoms to avoid having to look bad to their customers, but still, this is just so ridiculous . . . *sigh*
What's interesting is that I blocked out the rest of the picture by covering it with other windows, leaving just parts of those two squares visible...and they STILL look like different shades.
Make sure you cover up the letters, too, or the contrast (one letter is light, the other dark) will trick your brain just like the surrounding squares. I was able to see through the illusion by covering up everything but the corners of both squares.
Why should corporations and universities overlook crimes [illegal entry/overstay] being actively committed by canditates? Or if they don't, why shouldn't they be punished?
This ["$"] works the same in OO.org and Excel, and is a VERY useful if underdocumented trick that I have discovered.
Underdocumented? Excel 97 explains it pretty clearly in Help -> Topics -> Formulas -> References -> Relative and Absolute References [or whatever they're called in English, I have the Japanese version].
I haven't had any problems with burning DVDs at 4x--in fact, my drive refuses to burn at anything less. Which is why all this talk of 16x writers worries me:
$ echo $[1385*16]
22160
$ hdparm -Tt/dev/loop7 # cryptoloop
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 3.02 seconds = 21.16 MB/sec
$ test $[2116*1024/100] -lt 22160 && echo ':('
:(
from the time I decided I was done taking pills and crap for every minor problem out there and let my body do its own healing, I have been a healthier, stronger person
I've always held that the human body does an excellent job of keeping itself functional; after all, it's had millions of years to get that way. If you catch a cold, then the sniffles and cough aren't bad--they're the signs of your body working correctly to get the virus out. I likewise avoid medicines when I can, under the old "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" principle. And I likewise haven't gotten seriously ill in ages, discounting the occasional harmless cold.
Unfortunately, here in Japan the people have this obsession with cleanliness and health, which is good for the most part but leads to doctors prescribing medicines for just about anything. There has been some recognition recently of the problem of antibiotic-resistant bacteria strains, but I guess it's tough to overcome tradition . . .
Slashdot Mirror
. . . after dissing Volkerding's Google-based self-diagnosis?
that I certainly don't think Diebold has the nation's best interests at heart--but just saying "look, they changed it after getting certified, they're traitors!" is going a bit far.
After all, why would one make changes to a system after being certified - if not to compromise it in some way - then why?
Forgive my lack of tinfoil-hattedness, but perhaps they just found a bug that was missed by the certification, or they just wanted to clean up the code or prettify the interface? Less negligent and more breach of contract/law (and just plain stupid, too), but certainly not what I'd call malicious.
This was a bug back around Mozilla 1.8a3 / Firefox 0.9(?). Try upgrading your browser.
We have clear weather scheduled for Tokyo--if the sun doesn't get up first!
Stop the Earth, I want off . . .
I'd skip the Linux live CD and give a charitable donation to The Human Fund instead. It's much more meaningful.
Meaningful to the world at large, perhaps, but you're missing (what is to most of us) the whole point of Christmas or season's greetings cards: to communicate with family and friends. Donating to charity has no connection with that whatsoever, and deliberately saying "I donated to charity with this card" comes off as pretty egotistical--it's implying "now did you?", which is not really a warm greeting.
For that matter, I don't see how giving people CDs and donating to charity are mutually exclusive in the first place . . .
There may not actually have been a slash (if there was, it probably came from tabbing), but either way it doesn't matter:
$ touch ./~achurch
/home/achurch
$ echo rm -r ~achurch
rm -r
The shell expands "~achurch" before rm gets a chance to decide one way or the other.
Along the same lines, I had at one point a link "~achurch" in my public_html directory, for compatibility after my homepage changed URLs. So (you can guess what comes next, I'm sure) I decided one day, several years later, to clean up my web stuff:
$ rm -r tmp/ x.html [...] ~achurch/ /home/achurch/.xcdroast? _
rm: override permissions 000 for
I have no idea why mny .xcdroast was 000, but it saved me a huge amount of frustration. I now place a file "..norm-r", mode 000, in important directories and rename things around to make sure it's always first in the directory file. And I never, ever use -f.
The human brain is excellent at coping with degraded input.
Yes, but I would argue that degradation requires added effort, and therefore time. Try removing all the punctuation and upper/lower-case distinctions from your post, then ask someone to read it; you may find that it takes longer than you expect.
There is a study that shows, interestingly enough, that provided the first and last letters are intact, the remaining letters in a word can be scrambled and we'll still be able to correctly identify it.
You mean this story, don't you? (I could have sworn there was another one, but the link escapes me . . .) And even so, again it takes time for the brain to reconstruct the intended meaning, more so as the degradation increases.
What's more, your argument ends up against your position. [...] As it happens, it requires far more time to copy edit a post than it does to understand what a minor mistake is supposed to mean.
Until you multiply the additional time it takes readers to interpret your unedited post by the total readership. I don't feel it appropriate to save two minutes of my time if it costs hundreds of readers two seconds each; put another way, I feel that if I'm going to take the time to post something, I should take the time to do it well, so that readers who don't have much time won't have to expend as much effort to read it. (Perhaps I would feel differently if I posted more frequently.)
I think that in the end, we have two different views on how Internet forum posts "should be", and no amount of debating is likely to change that. This discussion is completely off-topic anyway, so why don't we just agree to disagree?
Standards are different when you're talking with people you know (e.g. friends) versus people you may not know (Slashdot audience). I have no problem with friends using all-lowercase text, lazy grammar, and the like; but for people I don't know, I have only the appearance of something from which to judge whether it's worth spending my time on, so--regrettably--appearance does become a significant factor in a first impression. If you have the time to give a detailed examination to everything that comes your way, then I can only envy you, because I don't.
[What's even more fascinating] Is that people whine about spelling so much.
Maybe because not making the effort to use proper spelling and grammar demonstrates a lack of respect for the reader? Nobody's perfect, but even without a spell checker you can catch the vast majority of your errors by just re-reading your post, and if you don't know the spelling of a word, there's a handy thing called a dictionary (there are even online dictionaries) to help you out. I'll agree that criticizing another's errors is generally uncalled for, but the nature of Slashdot (an "informal Internet forum", as you put it) doesn't mitigate the impression your post makes on readers--especially given the emphasis many people here seem to put on proper spelling and grammar.
Just a thought . . .
Worth mentioning that that price only works if you live in an apartment and your apartment already has fiber installed (or if you can convince the owner to do so). The rest of us pay about $60/month.
Okay, I'll stop bragging now (:
I'd suspect it would have something to do with it not being able to focus that close. Just like if you point a camera at something 5 cm in front of the lens, it wouldn't be able to focus on it, and you'd get a really fuzzy picture.
So what you're saying is they forgot to implement a macro mode on Hubble. Silly astronomers--oh wait...
the several times they explicitly state that "The Google Desktop Search program does not make your computer's content accessible to Google or anyone else"?
YOu mentioned you were in Japan already, so a lot of what you see as POTS "just working" is probably going to be stuff that isn't true in America.
Just for the record, I lived in the US (Maryland, near DC) for 21 years before moving to Japan, and what I said about my POTS experience includes (in fact is mostly) my experience in the US. I do recall a nightmare trying to get an ISDN line from then-Bell Atlantic at one point, but that was administrative, not technical.
1. Vonage's VOIP technology is based on a system that is FAR more complicated and less tested than POTS. [...] Less reliabile is unavoidable.
I'm well aware of this, and not arguing the fact. I'm just puzzled as to why such a complex, untested system is seen as a sufficient replacement for a simple, well-tested system.
2. For $20 a month I get features that would cost me nearly $100 using POTS. [...] Vonage gives me WAY more bang for my buck.
If the reduced cost is worth the inconvenience, then I guess that counts as a reason. Personally, I'd get a POTS phone line for phone service and a separate data connection for Internet service--but then again, I live in Japan where they already have fiber to the home in major cities, so maybe that's not an option for you. (I also don't subscribe to the "cheaper is better" theory, so that may by itself put me in the minority.)
3. As an engineer I'm not happy unless something "just works" but I also recognize how rare that really is.
It doesn't have to be. Pencil and paper (or charcoal and hide, if you like) "just work", for an extreme example. Bridges "just work". Even POTS "just works". Certainly the latter examples have had a lot of effort put into them, but declaring at the outset that stability, "just works"-ness if you will, is rare--and, by implication, not a feasible goal--seems overly pessimistic, and is certainly disappointing to hear from an engineer.
I'm not going to stop using a new technology just because all the bugs haven't been worked out.
Nor am I suggesting you do--I'm just expressing surprise that you'd stop using a tested technology just because a newer one exists. I certainly wouldn't want to be in your place if a burglar broke into your house and you couldn't call 911 because your router was on the blink . . .
I can readily recommend [Vonage] if you can tolerate the occasional (and easily fixed) downtime.
. . . Wow. As if the tolerance of Windows BSODs wasn't bad enough, now this? Whatever happened to "you pick up the phone and it just works"? In 26 years of using POTS, the only thing I can recall even approaching an outage is very occasional "circuit full" messages on long distance calls on holidays, and I haven't even heard those for over a decade.
If you can deal with not having a functional phone every now and then, then I'm certainly not going to argue with you, but this casual acceptance of "things break" is rather surprising. And somewhat disturbing, as it reduces the incentive to make things work well. I, at least, would vastly prefer a pencil and paper that "just work" to an electronic notepad that did OCR and networking but a habit of conking out at the most inopportune times; I've got enough stress to deal with as it is.
I mean, stupidity seems to be the norm in politics, and this sounds like it was pushed through by the telecoms to avoid having to look bad to their customers, but still, this is just so ridiculous . . . *sigh*
What's interesting is that I blocked out the rest of the picture by covering it with other windows, leaving just parts of those two squares visible...and they STILL look like different shades.
Make sure you cover up the letters, too, or the contrast (one letter is light, the other dark) will trick your brain just like the surrounding squares. I was able to see through the illusion by covering up everything but the corners of both squares.
Or if they don't, why shouldn't they be punished?
Should of course be "And if they do . . ."
Why should corporations and universities overlook crimes [illegal entry/overstay] being actively committed by canditates? Or if they don't, why shouldn't they be punished?
This ["$"] works the same in OO.org and Excel, and is a VERY useful if underdocumented trick that I have discovered.
Underdocumented? Excel 97 explains it pretty clearly in Help -> Topics -> Formulas -> References -> Relative and Absolute References [or whatever they're called in English, I have the Japanese version].
I haven't had any problems with burning DVDs at 4x--in fact, my drive refuses to burn at anything less. Which is why all this talk of 16x writers worries me:
from the time I decided I was done taking pills and crap for every minor problem out there and let my body do its own healing, I have been a healthier, stronger person
I've always held that the human body does an excellent job of keeping itself functional; after all, it's had millions of years to get that way. If you catch a cold, then the sniffles and cough aren't bad--they're the signs of your body working correctly to get the virus out. I likewise avoid medicines when I can, under the old "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" principle. And I likewise haven't gotten seriously ill in ages, discounting the occasional harmless cold.
Unfortunately, here in Japan the people have this obsession with cleanliness and health, which is good for the most part but leads to doctors prescribing medicines for just about anything. There has been some recognition recently of the problem of antibiotic-resistant bacteria strains, but I guess it's tough to overcome tradition . . .