Re:In theory, easier is better... In practice...?
on
Voting over the net?
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· Score: 1
Hmm. The question of who benefits most from the need to go to more trouble to vote is an open one. Perhaps it's those with more free time due to a higher disposable income, who in the UK might be expected to vote for the Conservative party (or New Labour - still not sure if there's any real difference). Then again, it might favour the unemployed, who after all have nothing better to do than vote on polling day.
On the whole, however, I feel that the current voting system favours people like me, who have to walk past their polling station on the way to and from work/the shops/the pub/the off-license/the station.
Seriously, though, switching over to a system that allows people to make a decision that may affect which party governs the country without any effort whatsoever may be a good thing or may be a bad thing: the only way to find out will be to give it a go. Concerns about security aside, I would imagine this approach would favour the opinions of those who are most likely to be connected to the Internet: students above all can expect their opinions to suddenly become more significant.
Hardly. There are more than enough die-hard Linux advocates with little grip on the real world to cause any damage that needs causing (see the Mindcraft hate-mail if you need evidence of this - the worst of the Amiga fanatics couldn't have done better).
And, of course, there are plenty of Amiga advocates who are more capable of rational argument than the majority of Linux advocates. That said, I doubt that any of them are particularly excited by the news: most of the coherent Amiga advocates I know are already running some version of Linux...
My experience with Win95 has been even worse: of the copies of Win95 I've bought, about 50% have come without a working boot disk. So you can't install them on a fresh PC without modifying the supplied boot disk until it works. Never have I had such an interesting experience with Linux (except possibly when I tried to install Linux on a 4MB Acorn A5000 without a CD drive:)
And, of course, they suffer from the same problem as all futuristic sword-type weapons, in that you become incredibly vulnerable to anyone with a gun. Without the ability to use the force to deflect bullets you're pretty much dead...
At the risk of turning this into a Yorkshiremen thread, I started out on a 1K ZX80. Later, of course, we got a real computer (BBC Micro), which had so many expansions they didn't fit inside the case, so we kept them in a cardboard box by the side of it connected with a ribbon cable. The biggest storage unit was a double-sided, double-density disk, weighing in at about 720k, IIRC.
Of course, you know what the first thing we'll do with 200GB hard drives is. Fill them up, then complain that we only have 200GB hard drives and even cheap new machines come with 50TB. I mean, 200GB is hardly enough to store Windows 2005, let alone any applications...
You're assuming a price of $600 for the PSX2. That's very unlikely to be the price it launches at. Among others, FGNOnline is reporting an expected $250 launch price in Japan, and while that may be a bit on the low side, Sony aren't sufficiently stupid to price themselves out of the market.
Prices come down. PSX2 isn't going to hit the US untill mid-2000 at the earliest. That's plenty of time for the price of the bundle you suggest to come down to less than $400
While polygon counts do tend to be BS, it's true that the PSX does push more flat polygons per second than the N64. However, the superior effects available on the N64 make the graphics look nicer with less/similar numbers of polygons. That's why you'll see plenty of comparison tables where the Playstation seems to do remarkably well, but a footnote warns 'no comparable effects'.
As for the article itself, it seems to be based pretty much entirely on the standard set of rumours that are doing the rounds: some of the information is even out of date/misleading.
...and the current implementations are getting faster all the time (see IBM's new JVM for an example).
As for bloat, Sun do appear to be doing their best. The latest release of the JDK is something in the region of 24457274 bytes. That's not small, IMHO. Especially when put up against earlier releases of the JDK.
The current trend seems to be to load in as many new APIs as possible (Java3D, Java2D, Java telephony API, Java speech recognition API, Java chicken-breeding API) while leaving nasty nasty bugs in the core code (such as the fun and exciting one which prevents all apps/applications using a GUI from shutting down properly - number 4030718 in the bug parade, reported over two years ago, and still nothing more useful than 'Well, you can litter your code with calls to system.exit(), because we're too busy to fix this one'...)
Interesting you should mention that, Psion. I've just come back from a talk given by Professor Kevin Warwick, who puts forward the view that the long-term effect of computer technology is possibly the extinction of the human race - from the point of view of a computer expert rather than the point of view of, for example, a religious fundamentalist.
Certainly there's been a lot of discussion in the past about modern medicine eventually being responsible for creating superbugs which are resistant to all forms of treatment and will go through the human race like a flamethrower through a low-fat vegetable spread.
And if you believe their detractors, the long-term effect of the Tele-Tubbies is that children will grow up incapable of speaking English and students will lie around their flats all day going 'Eh-oh' and giggling a lot. Research points to the latter prophecy already coming true...
But is that a rational justification for deliberate ignorance either? Because we don't know either way we should just have a go and see what happens?
There was an interesting discussion in the Q&A session after Professor Warwick's talk. He took a question which turned out to be more of an accusation of a lack of scientific knowledge and good research methods. He countered with the question, "Have you read my book?" The reply came: "No, I refuse to on principle."
Just because people seem to espouse views that we don't like or agree with doesn't mean we should refuse to listen to anything they say and rush as fast as we can towards the opposite extreme. The concerns people have with medicine, Tele-Tubbies, computer technology and GM foods should be taken on board, although we shouldn't let them paralyse us completely as some people seem to suggest. Nonetheless, if holding off for a little more controlled research is possible, who does it harm?
In this particular case, Professor Jones raises a number of very valid points, and even if you disagree with some of what he says, the rest should not be ignored.
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Hmm. The question of who benefits most from the need to go to more trouble to vote is an open one. Perhaps it's those with more free time due to a higher disposable income, who in the UK might be expected to vote for the Conservative party (or New Labour - still not sure if there's any real difference). Then again, it might favour the unemployed, who after all have nothing better to do than vote on polling day.
On the whole, however, I feel that the current voting system favours people like me, who have to walk past their polling station on the way to and from work/the shops/the pub/the off-license/the station.
Seriously, though, switching over to a system that allows people to make a decision that may affect which party governs the country without any effort whatsoever may be a good thing or may be a bad thing: the only way to find out will be to give it a go. Concerns about security aside, I would imagine this approach would favour the opinions of those who are most likely to be connected to the Internet: students above all can expect their opinions to suddenly become more significant.
Hardly. There are more than enough die-hard Linux advocates with little grip on the real world to cause any damage that needs causing (see the Mindcraft hate-mail if you need evidence of this - the worst of the Amiga fanatics couldn't have done better).
And, of course, there are plenty of Amiga advocates who are more capable of rational argument than the majority of Linux advocates. That said, I doubt that any of them are particularly excited by the news: most of the coherent Amiga advocates I know are already running some version of Linux...
My experience with Win95 has been even worse: of the copies of Win95 I've bought, about 50% have come without a working boot disk. So you can't install them on a fresh PC without modifying the supplied boot disk until it works. Never have I had such an interesting experience with Linux (except possibly when I tried to install Linux on a 4MB Acorn A5000 without a CD drive :)
And, of course, they suffer from the same problem as all futuristic sword-type weapons, in that you become incredibly vulnerable to anyone with a gun. Without the ability to use the force to deflect bullets you're pretty much dead...
Long-term Transformers fans may notice more than a passing resemblance to Scraplets, however.
At the risk of turning this into a Yorkshiremen thread, I started out on a 1K ZX80. Later, of course, we got a real computer (BBC Micro), which had so many expansions they didn't fit inside the case, so we kept them in a cardboard box by the side of it connected with a ribbon cable. The biggest storage unit was a double-sided, double-density disk, weighing in at about 720k, IIRC.
Of course, you know what the first thing we'll do with 200GB hard drives is. Fill them up, then complain that we only have 200GB hard drives and even cheap new machines come with 50TB. I mean, 200GB is hardly enough to store Windows 2005, let alone any applications...
To be fair, the Register is biased against everyone, not just MS and Intel. :-)
I believe Artdink were also responsible for Carnage Heart, one of the most underrated Playstation games of all time.
While polygon counts do tend to be BS, it's true that the PSX does push more flat polygons per second than the N64. However, the superior effects available on the N64 make the graphics look nicer with less/similar numbers of polygons. That's why you'll see plenty of comparison tables where the Playstation seems to do remarkably well, but a footnote warns 'no comparable effects'.
As for the article itself, it seems to be based pretty much entirely on the standard set of rumours that are doing the rounds: some of the information is even out of date/misleading.
...and the current implementations are getting faster all the time (see IBM's new JVM for an example).
As for bloat, Sun do appear to be doing their best. The latest release of the JDK is something in the region of 24457274 bytes. That's not small, IMHO. Especially when put up against earlier releases of the JDK.
The current trend seems to be to load in as many new APIs as possible (Java3D, Java2D, Java telephony API, Java speech recognition API, Java chicken-breeding API) while leaving nasty nasty bugs in the core code (such as the fun and exciting one which prevents all apps/applications using a GUI from shutting down properly - number 4030718 in the bug parade, reported over two years ago, and still nothing more useful than 'Well, you can litter your code with calls to system.exit(), because we're too busy to fix this one'...)
:erant.
Interesting you should mention that, Psion. I've just come back from a talk given by Professor Kevin Warwick, who puts forward the view that the long-term effect of computer technology is possibly the extinction of the human race - from the point of view of a computer expert rather than the point of view of, for example, a religious fundamentalist.
Certainly there's been a lot of discussion in the past about modern medicine eventually being responsible for creating superbugs which are resistant to all forms of treatment and will go through the human race like a flamethrower through a low-fat vegetable spread.
And if you believe their detractors, the long-term effect of the Tele-Tubbies is that children will grow up incapable of speaking English and students will lie around their flats all day going 'Eh-oh' and giggling a lot. Research points to the latter prophecy already coming true...
But is that a rational justification for deliberate ignorance either? Because we don't know either way we should just have a go and see what happens?
There was an interesting discussion in the Q&A session after Professor Warwick's talk. He took a question which turned out to be more of an accusation of a lack of scientific knowledge and good research methods. He countered with the question, "Have you read my book?" The reply came: "No, I refuse to on principle."
Just because people seem to espouse views that we don't like or agree with doesn't mean we should refuse to listen to anything they say and rush as fast as we can towards the opposite extreme. The concerns people have with medicine, Tele-Tubbies, computer technology and GM foods should be taken on board, although we shouldn't let them paralyse us completely as some people seem to suggest. Nonetheless, if holding off for a little more controlled research is possible, who does it harm?
In this particular case, Professor Jones raises a number of very valid points, and even if you disagree with some of what he says, the rest should not be ignored.