If you will recall, one of Microsoft's stipulations when it invested its $130 million dollars in Corel was that Corel would have to implement MS's.NET framework whenever Microsoft said so.
Now, I'm no rocket scientist, but it occurs to me that people might quite possibly start snatching up copies of Corel PerfectOffice the moment that Office XP ships. The people who, rightly, dont feel too warm and fuzzy about renting software. Under the previous arrangement, don't think that MS wouldn't make that phone call to Corel about.NET as soon as they saw Office sales/rentals/subscriptions start to slip.
What I think that this boils down to is that MS realized that the Slash And Burn Dep^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Corporate Acquisition Department realized that if the DoJ was *already* looking into the investment, before.NET even got off the ground, then they might have done too tidy a job of cornering the market.
Before you get too weepy-eyed about _The_Impending_Death_Of_Corel_, please remember that Perfect Office has been the hot potato of the software world for over a decade. Corel, Borland, Novell, WordPerfect Inc., that product has been second-tier for many years now.
And, dont forget that they also supplied what many considered to be the worst ever distribution of Linux. Buggy and insecure.
No, I dont feel bad for Corel. I like WordPerfect, but I never like CorelDraw or any of Corel's homegrown applications.
What it boils down to is that Corel will most likely fall by the wayside, but the last gasp of that dying company will be to sell PerfectOffice to someone with a little more capital. Perhaps Sun, perhaps Compaq.
Either way, PerfectOffice will go on, and I for one like the idea of a Perfect Office unencumbered by.NET far more than the alternative.
Actually, since HDTV as you pointed out is MPEG, only the changes from frame to frame will be transmitted.
The upshot of this is that the borders caused by improper aspect ratios will only get transmitted once, since they will presumably be black till the end of program or commercial break.
Think cruise missles. These work on their own in PRECISELY the same manner. UCAV just adds the availability of a human flying the thing remotely, as well as not destroying the vehicle.
The thing that you have either missed or chose to miss is that UCAV is not a ROBOT vehicle, it is merely unmanned.
UCAV is controlled by humans in remote locations, presumably out of harms way. UCAV does have some automated functionality, but nothing more complicated than cruise control.
Sheesh. You replace the pilot with a camera and suddenly everyone starts talking talking Asimov and Heinlein.
Hey, I've got an idea, while we watch the UCAV demo, lets put on our flying backpacks and eat some Soylent Green for lunch.
The moral of this story is that things are usually not as much as they appear to be, be it nifty, insidious, nefarious, exciting, whatever.
How about a small, detatched (existing only inside the polling place), dedicated network?
I think that we need to forget about using the Internet to vote, for at least the short term. There are many, many issues that are a long way off from being resolved with Internet voting.
What I propose is to simply move to electronic machines to tabulate votes. A box, with a paper voting book attached to it, with a row of lighted buttons down one side. The button lights up when a selection is made. When one is finished, one could press a "Cast vote" button. The vote is sent to a portable server, located on the premesis. You could make this server as fault tolerant as you wished, and voting tallies could be encrypted and digitally signed to preserve integrity. Put it on zip disk, jaz, floppy, CD-R, CompactFlash, whatever you want. The trick in preserving integrity that the polling place network isnt connected to anything else.
All the precincts could then send the data media to the commissioner, or wherever the ballots generally go.
This would give you the benefit of not having paper media to individually count (or dispute). No "chad" to deal with, no ballots to get mutilated in the card readers (sheesh, sounds like I'm talking about old minframes here).
An electronic on-site polling system would eliminate the need for recounts. If you vote, $CANDIDATE_TOTAL_VOTE gets incremented.
You wouldn't get the snazzy instant tabulation that some people want from the internet voting system, but you would get security, the removal of ambiguity, and less opporunity for ballot fraud.
Like I said in opening, perhaps one day we could manage a remote voting system over an open network like the Internet, but that time is yet far away, I believe. However, I think that electronic on-site voting is an idea whose time is long overdue.
Slashdot Mirror
>When can we have linux on this?
Here is the obligatory /. answer:
About 3 months after you can have BSD on it
Now, I'm no rocket scientist, but it occurs to me that people might quite possibly start snatching up copies of Corel PerfectOffice the moment that Office XP ships. The people who, rightly, dont feel too warm and fuzzy about renting software. Under the previous arrangement, don't think that MS wouldn't make that phone call to Corel about .NET as soon as they saw Office sales/rentals/subscriptions start to slip.
What I think that this boils down to is that MS realized that the Slash And Burn Dep^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Corporate Acquisition Department realized that if the DoJ was *already* looking into the investment, before .NET even got off the ground, then they might have done too tidy a job of cornering the market.
Before you get too weepy-eyed about _The_Impending_Death_Of_Corel_, please remember that Perfect Office has been the hot potato of the software world for over a decade. Corel, Borland, Novell, WordPerfect Inc., that product has been second-tier for many years now.
And, dont forget that they also supplied what many considered to be the worst ever distribution of Linux. Buggy and insecure.
No, I dont feel bad for Corel. I like WordPerfect, but I never like CorelDraw or any of Corel's homegrown applications.
What it boils down to is that Corel will most likely fall by the wayside, but the last gasp of that dying company will be to sell PerfectOffice to someone with a little more capital. Perhaps Sun, perhaps Compaq.
Either way, PerfectOffice will go on, and I for one like the idea of a Perfect Office unencumbered by .NET far more than the alternative.
COREL IS DEAD! LONG LIVE COREL!
The upshot of this is that the borders caused by improper aspect ratios will only get transmitted once, since they will presumably be black till the end of program or commercial break.
Just my $.02
Think cruise missles. These work on their own in PRECISELY the same manner. UCAV just adds the availability of a human flying the thing remotely, as well as not destroying the vehicle.
The thing that you have either missed or chose to miss is that UCAV is not a ROBOT vehicle, it is merely unmanned.
UCAV is controlled by humans in remote locations, presumably out of harms way. UCAV does have some automated functionality, but nothing more complicated than cruise control.
Sheesh. You replace the pilot with a camera and suddenly everyone starts talking talking Asimov and Heinlein.
Hey, I've got an idea, while we watch the UCAV demo, lets put on our flying backpacks and eat some Soylent Green for lunch.
The moral of this story is that things are usually not as much as they appear to be, be it nifty, insidious, nefarious, exciting, whatever.
How about a small, detatched (existing only inside the polling place), dedicated network?
I think that we need to forget about using the Internet to vote, for at least the short term. There are many, many issues that are a long way off from being resolved with Internet voting.
What I propose is to simply move to electronic machines to tabulate votes. A box, with a paper voting book attached to it, with a row of lighted buttons down one side. The button lights up when a selection is made. When one is finished, one could press a "Cast vote" button. The vote is sent to a portable server, located on the premesis. You could make this server as fault tolerant as you wished, and voting tallies could be encrypted and digitally signed to preserve integrity. Put it on zip disk, jaz, floppy, CD-R, CompactFlash, whatever you want. The trick in preserving integrity that the polling place network isnt connected to anything else.
All the precincts could then send the data media to the commissioner, or wherever the ballots generally go.
This would give you the benefit of not having paper media to individually count (or dispute). No "chad" to deal with, no ballots to get mutilated in the card readers (sheesh, sounds like I'm talking about old minframes here).
An electronic on-site polling system would eliminate the need for recounts. If you vote, $CANDIDATE_TOTAL_VOTE gets incremented.
You wouldn't get the snazzy instant tabulation that some people want from the internet voting system, but you would get security, the removal of ambiguity, and less opporunity for ballot fraud.
Like I said in opening, perhaps one day we could manage a remote voting system over an open network like the Internet, but that time is yet far away, I believe. However, I think that electronic on-site voting is an idea whose time is long overdue.