"Somebody please tell me why HTML5 isn't worse than anything Microsoft ever tried to do with the browser - why it isn't platform lock-in."
This one's easy. Microsoft creates Windows-proprietary extensions to lock people into their platform. HTML 5 is an open standard that is implemented by all major browsers on all major operating systems, so there is no platform lock-in.
Browsers don't "read" any video files - they use CODECs to do so. Pretty much every OS comes with (or can easily have installed) an h.264 decoder at no cost to the user.
Many media formats have licensing costs - MP3, MP4, DivX, etc. Those costs are usually paid by the OS vendor, who covers the licensing costs in the cost of the OS. And if there's a decoder in hardware, the licensing cost is covered in the chip cost. You may not realize it, but every MP3 player pays a fee to the inventor of the MP3 format. And so on for pretty much every CODEC.
"When the corporations are moving overseas to places with lower taxes this means your taxes are too high"
Your premise is incorrect. Corporations aren't moving overseas. They are US corporations, selling products in the US and taking advantage of the services that we provide with our taxes. What they're doing is filing paperwork that runs their profits through international loopholes in a scam to avoid paying their taxes. When individuals do this, they go to jail. The loophole needs to be closed.
"The only way there is a bandwidth shortage is if... They have oversold their networks (not my problem),"
All ISPs sell consumers "over-sold" bandwidth, in that they build out enough capacity to support average usage, not simultaneous peak for all customers. This is how consumers get such cheap internet access.
If you want committed bandwidth, you have to pay for it. For example, if I really wanted 15 Mbps of committed bandwidth, that would cost at least $300/month, because they I'd have to pay for the guaranteed capacity (plus local loop charges, and a real router...).
Instead, I get 15 Mbps of "best effort" bandwidth for $45/month. It's cheap, but there's no guaranteed Service Level Agreement, and if everyone in the system tried to use it at once, there's not enough capacity to support it, because it's a shared infrastructure scaled to support normal usage patterns (i.e. not everyone uses 100% of their bandwidth 24/7).
If you choose to buy "best effort" bandwidth instead of "committed" bandwidth in order to save money, you don't to get to complain that you're not getting committed bandwidth.
"it shouldn't matter how much bandwidth end users use...the cost for the ISP is the same regardless. What ISPs should be encouraging is the reduction of peak usage, not total usage"
Theoretically this is true, in that all bandwidth is free except for the peak bit at the peak instant. In reality, however, nobody would agree to a pricing model in which the one user that uses the top bit of the peak pays the entire cost of the internet, and everyone else is free. So, like all of the other "fixed cost / capacity" companies, like the the phone companies, the power companies, the water companies, etc., the ISPs came up with a pricing model to allocate the cost of the infrastructure to customers. Unlike most of those, the ISPs don't (in the US) charge directly for volume of usage, which is a good thing - flat rate internet access allowed for the massive growth of the internet over the last 15 years! Instead, ISPs charge for tiers of performance, which IMO is a pretty good balance of the interests of consumers and ISPs.
"I realised if a small business owner tells you that 15 years ago he set up a system at minimal cost and is only now looking at changing because the hardware is noticeably ageing, you'd have a hard time explaining to him that it's going to be *harder* to set up a system with similar longevity nowadays."
A computer system 15 years ago might have cost around $2,000, which is over $2,800 now. You can get a decent PC now for $500. This drop in price is achieved, in part, by reducing the quality of the engineering. For example, consumer PC's now have much worse power supplies, components that can't be repaired, etc., all of which drives down purchase price.
It's probably worth digging into why he hasn't upgraded in 15 years. Does he really hate spending money? Or does he think that because his 1994 computer was hard to learn (Windows 3.1, crappy networking, etc.) that he'd have to go through the same thing again? This may sound silly, but I've known many older folks that stuck with truly horrible software for years because it took them forever to learn that software, and they think that any new software will require as much effort. But if you stick them in front of a modern machine, with modern software, they're fine, because in reality modern software is much easier to use than software from 15 years ago.
I'd second (third?) the suggestion of using virtualization. That way any modern PC can look exactly like his museum-pieces, and (assuming he's got backups) he can swap PC's without any changes.
"Calling the modules Seven would make no sense unless the command module is called Blake."... or if there are 9 modules (and the program director *really* liked Voyager).
You're heavily oversubscribed. And doing protocol-specific traffic shaping is asking for trouble. So you should think about optimizing traffic patterns.
If your bandwidth is primarily being consumed by p2p traffic, you can look into using P4P (http://www.openp4p.net/) to allow the p2p traffic to be optimized within your network. Field tests have shown that P4P internalized over 80% of p2p traffic, which would significantly help your network, and by putting a p2p cache server in your network.
If your bandwidth is primarily being consumed by download traffic from CDNs (e.g. YouTube) you could save a lot with an HTTP cache configured to cache large files, or by getting the CDNs to put servers in your infrastructure.
I'd suggest that computers are more expandable than ever, but they do so primarily using external expansion - INTERNAL expansion isn't as important these days. I'm a power user and I'm perfectly happy with my Mac Mini. Of course, it helps to have an 8-drive server in the basement (I love ZFS!).
About the only thing that might be worth upgrading is the graphics hardware. It's fine for my needs (web, mail, programming) but someone really into computer games would want better graphics hardware. (And probably a PC instead of a Mac). But I do my videogaming on consoles, not computers.
The reports are (at least the ones I've read) clear, thorough and unbiased answers to some pretty good questions, which makes them valuable because they provide good, objective reports that should be the basis of decision making.
So while these reports don't reveal any secret information, they reveal the thought processes of Congress. That is, every one of these reports was written because some Congressman wanted the answer. So reading these reports tells you what they thought was important, and what they were told about it.
For example, the existence of ""Phantom Traffic" - Problems Billing for the Termination of Telephone Calls" tells you that some Congressman wanted to do something to help rural telco's, and wanted some data to make the case. And "COLAs for Military Retirees: Summary of Congressional and Executive Branch Action, 1982-2004" tells you that some Congressman is concerned that veterans' cost of loving adjustments are falling short.
"I have yet to meet anybody that said their new web-based app whipped the llama's azz compared to the old thin-client or mainframe app"
Nice to meet you. Gmail and Google Docs are _way_ more useful to me than Outlook and Office. Sure, Office is a great set of app's. But I don't need a million features, just basic text editing, but I work from several different computers, and with Google Doc's and Gmail I have complete, easy access to all of my communications and the documents that I'm working on from any web browser. And being able to have a group of people who are geographically distributed collaborate on shared doc's, where they can see each other's edits in real-time, is extremely powerful. So for me, easy, integrated, and accessible is more valuable than "features".
Sure, sometimes I need to work offline. Then I export the doc's that I need to my laptop, work on the plane, then upload them when I'm back online.
Actually, web apps aren't much line client/server at all. For example:
- The "client" is code that will run in any web browser. In client/server, the client is proprietary code specific to the user's OS and environment, so the client needs to be implemented for each device. For example, if a company builds an app in VB, they can run it on Windows, and might require Office to be installed, etc., but not run on on Mac's, mobile devices, etc. Web apps can run on any environment with a standards-compliant browser. - There's no client to install (the client logic is automatically sent wherever it is needed), so applications are much easier to deploy and maintain. For example, compare deploying a web app to upgrading 10,000 desktops. Worse, consider what it takes to upgrade 10,000 desktops with a mandatory upgrade, where people can't do their jobs until they're upgraded. - The standards are open, with many companies and individuals shaping the definition of the standards that everyone works against. So unlike the client/server world where the platform is defined by your vendor (i.e. you picked between MS, IBM, Oracle, etc., and then used whatever they sold), the web app world is based on a shared set of standards used by all vendors, so the competition is in how well they support standards.
Web apps are actually much more like "mainframe" or X/Windows computing than client/server, in that the application and data lives on a server, and any terminal can run the application. Of course, now the "terminal" is much more powerful, and can do much more of the work, and can even allow multiple "applications" to interact (via "mashups"), which is all great. But it has the advantage of the mainframe model in that all of the apps and data run in a managed, safe environment that can be accessed from anywhere.
"Web apps don't magically work everywhere. At least some client (browser?) is needed. 40 platforms vs 40 browsers and we have moved nowhere.'
Surely you're not saying that it's the same level of effort to make a web app render in IE, Mozilla and Safari as to make a GUI app run on Windows, Mac, and Linux? Web apps are built on standards, and there are plenty of good frameworks that take care of the fairly minor inter-browser issues, so writing standards-based web apps that work on all modern browsers is easy. OS's have no portable standards (i.e. Win32 != Coca), so writing GUI apps that run across all OS's is quite difficult.
"Other than a simple form-type interaction, why bother with it in enterprise applications? A company can require the install of anything they want in their required configuration, so why not a rich client that follows UI standards?"
You have the logic backwards. Installing and managing desktop applications is extremely expensive compared to browser-based app's. So unless there's an extremely good reason to install a desktop app (e.g. you really need complex local interaction, or are dealing with huge data such as video) why bother installing desktop software?
I just saw the Pre, and I was very impressed. Not because of the tech spec's - there are plenty of WinCE phones with great spec's, and they all kinda suck to use.
The thing that makes the Pre a great product (at least potentially) is that they rethought the human interaction, as a while, so the phone is extremely touch oriented, intuitive and fun to use. The phone is highly visual and responsive. If anything, it's even a bit slicker/richer than the iPhone. It will be interesting to see Apple respond to. So while there are many nice 'features', the impact
One innovation is that they introduced some gestures that start in an offscreen (but touch sensitive) area, that perform fundamental actions such as going 'back', and bringing up the 'main screen'. So applications can take over the whole screen, rather than having to all use screen space for back/home/etc. buttons.
It's also nice that you can have multiple apps running at the same time, which is a nice change from the old PalmOS, and the iPhone.
Some other things: - It has a keyboard, which would be faster than a screen keyboard. - It charges through induction (i.e. no contacts), so you just put it down on the dock, it magnetically sticks to it and starts charging. And if you get a call, you pick up the phone, and it knows that it was picked up and answers the call. - The apps run in 'cards', which shrink and grow. So when you're on the 'home screen' seeing multiple apps, the 'icons' are live app windows (i.e. showing the live window contents, still scrolling, etc.), not just static, representative icons.
So overall, a win. Palm has finally gotten back to its user-centered design of the original Palm.
What model from what manufacturer? The last time I looked, most LED displays had prehistoric or proprietary interfaces, and a display that connects via USB and is easily programmable sounds like a lot of fun.
There are all sorts of key business metrics to put on such a display, making them more visible to everyone in your company. This is good because it makes people aware of something that they should be thinking about.
For example: - Number of registered users (for a social site or MMORPG, which cares about community size) - Number of ad impressions (if that's your revenue model) - Number of sales (or dollar amount, etc.) for eCommerce sites - Time since last server outage (to get people to focus on uptime) - Number of downloads (for an app)
Or whatever is appropriate for your business/technology.
I'll second this. While Logo has a reputation as a limited language, it's actually as expressive as Lisp, which is to say that it's a more powerful language than most, though teachers tend not to go too far with it.
Back when I taught kids programming, I found that the best languages were the ones that supported iterative development so that users could easily try ideas. For this, Logo is perfect. Once kids learn Logo, they know about variables, scope, functions with parameters and return values, recursion, closures, etc., all of which apply to any civilized language.
There more modern instructional language options, such as Squeak/Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/) and OpenStarLogoTNG (http://education.mit.edu/starlogo-tng/) that are really fun as well. They are (IMO) a bit too complex for very young programmers (I taught 5-6 year olds simple Logo programming, as it's designed to be super-approachable for kids, but I think that a kid would have to be 7-8 to tackle those).
I disagree - if the scientific question is whether there's something outside the system affecting it or not, it's entirely possible to address, though of course not by the mechanism of performing an experiment on multiple universes, some with God and some without, and comparing the result. You can approach it analytically; if you can accurately model the internal behavior of the system (admittedly a tricky proposition), then observe something that can only have happened to an external input, you've proven that there's something outside the system affecting the system.
That being said, God is generally carefully defined in a way that existence can't be proven. God supposedly wants people to believe in him due to "faith" rather than "proof", and therefore will never allow proof to exist (and thus, will never do anything that can't have otherwise happened).
So, strangely enough, that means that if you prove an external input into the system, that apparently can't be proof of God, at least as generally described by religions.
"For me, both systems can be corrupted, but the electronic system is better because, given the same level of precaution before and after the election, the electronic system gives faster results."
It's not particularly important how fast election results are generated. What is important is how trustworthy the results are.
If votes are cast on paper ballots, then you can inspect the ballot box before the election to see that there are no ballots in it, you can watch as people cast their ballots, and you can watch the box after the voting is done, and you can watch the ballots being counted, and you can physically secure the box, and you can recount the ballots, inspect them, audit them, etc. All of this relies only on direct human observation, not trust of any individual or third party.
If votes are cast electronically, they are by definition invisible, and not open to direct inspection. At best, you can use tools provided by a vendor to do so. This means that you must trust the vendor for every step in the process. You can't prove that the machines have no votes stored, just that the report ran and printed a '0'. You can't prove that the votes were recorded properly during voting. You can't prove that the votes were communicated properly. And you can't prove that the votes were counted properly.
In particular, the DRE voting systems with flash cards that you used in your election are completely untrustworthy. Even if you followed every procedure precisely, there's no reason to believe that the reported vote tallies were accurate.
"is rigging the machines not just as bad as encouraging and aiding voter fraud by fraudulently registering voters multiple times, fake voters, etc?"
Rigging machines is much worse. Rigging machines can affect every vote cast in the machines.
Registering fake voters results in no fake votes, because fake voters don't show up to vote. It is legal for people to register multiple times, so long as they only vote once.
So you're right that "if it is bad for one side, it is bad for the other side too". But in simply saying that doesn't magically make the behavior of the two parties identical.
Historically the Republicans have been the minority party that applies superior tactics and funding to win national elections. When you're the majority party you don't need to cheat - you need to have the rules enforced. When you're the minority party, you do all you can to get every vote.
For example, changing people's voter registrations between parties without their knowledge (http://conspireality.tv/2008/10/20/finally-an-actual-arrest-in-vote-fraud-case-and-its-a-republican/), however, turns out to be illegal.
"why bother with rigging the voting machines...it seems this year a simpler method has been found, with Acorn registering everyone they can, dead, undead, fictional or alive"
This is, as the poster must be surely be aware by now, not what happened. What actually happened is that a few ACORN employees got lazy and filled out fake voter registrations using the. names of athletes, characters from fiction, etc.). ACORN found out, fired the people responsible, and identified the bad registrations to the authorities when they turned them in. They were required to turn them in by law, as it is illegal to not hand in any voter registration forms due to the obvious potential for abuse if the registration organization is allowed to be selective about which registrations to submit.
Because ACORN identified the suspicious registrations, and because the government agencies that process the registrations validates them, there were likely few or no fake voters actually registered to vote.
And, of course, Micky Mouse, etc., is not going to show up to vote.
So the fraud was not the creation of fake votes, but of ACORN (and to a degree the voter registration agencies) getting their time and money wasted by a few former ACORN employees. Given that ACORN hired 13,000 people and generated 1.3m legitimate registrations, the number of bad registrations reported so far is surprisingly small (a few thousand is claimed).
For actual voter fraud, you'll have to look elsewhere. Like, say, electronic voting machines, caging, etc.
Alaska's sunshine laws are quite clear, and require that all communications related to performing your job, including email deliberations and and all drafts of documents, must be archived. While she may have forgotten it, all government employees work for the public, and are paid by the public, so the public gets to review everything that they do in order to decide whether they've done the right thing.
To be clear, the law does not say that she cannot open a Yahoo account. The law does, however, say that she must properly archive all communications that are in any way related to her doing her job.
Yes, oversight can be a hassle. But in the long run lack of oversight is much worse, since it enables abuses and corruption. So while you can call oversight by names like "fishing expedition", I'd still rather have private citizens be able to call government employees to account. Luckily the law agrees with me, making Palin's evasion of oversight illegal.:-)
"But she didn't conduct any official business with the yahoo account! All that was in it were family pictures and emails to her friends. IMO, she did the correct thing by not using a govt.-paid for email account for personal communications."
This is incorrect. She specifically set up two Yahoo accounts, one for personal email (gov.sarah@yahoo.com) and another (gov.palin@yahoo.com). The latter was specifically set up because she could avoid Alaska's Sunshine Laws that require all government business to be archived and (with very narrow exceptions) available to the public. In the email archive is a discussion where she and her staff confirm that the use of the yahoo accounts hides their emails from court subpoena's, and she even reprimands one staffer for using her official email instead of the yahoo account.
So while Yahoo email accounts do have a legitimate expectation of privacy, I'd argue that Palin lost her claim to privacy when she engaged in illegal evasion of Alaska's Sunshine Laws.
Yes, there were (more recently) two different 'experiences'. In addition to the original one (Enterprise attacked by the Klingons, then fly the motion-ride shuttle) there's new one (Borg attack, with a 3D movie of the attack).
I am pretty sure that I would rather not be ionized, personally. Even a slight ionic charge would be bad on the electronics, and being turned into plasma would really suck. So I'm all in favor of IT being unionized.
Slashdot Mirror
"Somebody please tell me why HTML5 isn't worse than anything Microsoft ever tried to do with the browser - why it isn't platform lock-in."
This one's easy. Microsoft creates Windows-proprietary extensions to lock people into their platform. HTML 5 is an open standard that is implemented by all major browsers on all major operating systems, so there is no platform lock-in.
"An open-source browser cannot legally read h264 video"
Browsers don't "read" any video files - they use CODECs to do so. Pretty much every OS comes with (or can easily have installed) an h.264 decoder at no cost to the user.
Many media formats have licensing costs - MP3, MP4, DivX, etc. Those costs are usually paid by the OS vendor, who covers the licensing costs in the cost of the OS. And if there's a decoder in hardware, the licensing cost is covered in the chip cost. You may not realize it, but every MP3 player pays a fee to the inventor of the MP3 format. And so on for pretty much every CODEC.
"When the corporations are moving overseas to places with lower taxes this means your taxes are too high"
Your premise is incorrect. Corporations aren't moving overseas. They are US corporations, selling products in the US and taking advantage of the services that we provide with our taxes. What they're doing is filing paperwork that runs their profits through international loopholes in a scam to avoid paying their taxes. When individuals do this, they go to jail. The loophole needs to be closed.
"The only way there is a bandwidth shortage is if ... They have oversold their networks (not my problem),"
All ISPs sell consumers "over-sold" bandwidth, in that they build out enough capacity to support average usage, not simultaneous peak for all customers. This is how consumers get such cheap internet access.
If you want committed bandwidth, you have to pay for it. For example, if I really wanted 15 Mbps of committed bandwidth, that would cost at least $300/month, because they I'd have to pay for the guaranteed capacity (plus local loop charges, and a real router...).
Instead, I get 15 Mbps of "best effort" bandwidth for $45/month. It's cheap, but there's no guaranteed Service Level Agreement, and if everyone in the system tried to use it at once, there's not enough capacity to support it, because it's a shared infrastructure scaled to support normal usage patterns (i.e. not everyone uses 100% of their bandwidth 24/7).
If you choose to buy "best effort" bandwidth instead of "committed" bandwidth in order to save money, you don't to get to complain that you're not getting committed bandwidth.
"it shouldn't matter how much bandwidth end users use...the cost for the ISP is the same regardless. What ISPs should be encouraging is the reduction of peak usage, not total usage"
Theoretically this is true, in that all bandwidth is free except for the peak bit at the peak instant. In reality, however, nobody would agree to a pricing model in which the one user that uses the top bit of the peak pays the entire cost of the internet, and everyone else is free. So, like all of the other "fixed cost / capacity" companies, like the the phone companies, the power companies, the water companies, etc., the ISPs came up with a pricing model to allocate the cost of the infrastructure to customers. Unlike most of those, the ISPs don't (in the US) charge directly for volume of usage, which is a good thing - flat rate internet access allowed for the massive growth of the internet over the last 15 years! Instead, ISPs charge for tiers of performance, which IMO is a pretty good balance of the interests of consumers and ISPs.
"I realised if a small business owner tells you that 15 years ago he set up a system at minimal cost and is only now looking at changing because the hardware is noticeably ageing, you'd have a hard time explaining to him that it's going to be *harder* to set up a system with similar longevity nowadays."
A computer system 15 years ago might have cost around $2,000, which is over $2,800 now. You can get a decent PC now for $500. This drop in price is achieved, in part, by reducing the quality of the engineering. For example, consumer PC's now have much worse power supplies, components that can't be repaired, etc., all of which drives down purchase price.
It's probably worth digging into why he hasn't upgraded in 15 years. Does he really hate spending money? Or does he think that because his 1994 computer was hard to learn (Windows 3.1, crappy networking, etc.) that he'd have to go through the same thing again? This may sound silly, but I've known many older folks that stuck with truly horrible software for years because it took them forever to learn that software, and they think that any new software will require as much effort. But if you stick them in front of a modern machine, with modern software, they're fine, because in reality modern software is much easier to use than software from 15 years ago.
I'd second (third?) the suggestion of using virtualization. That way any modern PC can look exactly like his museum-pieces, and (assuming he's got backups) he can swap PC's without any changes.
"Calling the modules Seven would make no sense unless the command module is called Blake." ... or if there are 9 modules (and the program director *really* liked Voyager).
You're heavily oversubscribed. And doing protocol-specific traffic shaping is asking for trouble. So you should think about optimizing traffic patterns.
If your bandwidth is primarily being consumed by p2p traffic, you can look into using P4P (http://www.openp4p.net/) to allow the p2p traffic to be optimized within your network. Field tests have shown that P4P internalized over 80% of p2p traffic, which would significantly help your network, and by putting a p2p cache server in your network.
If your bandwidth is primarily being consumed by download traffic from CDNs (e.g. YouTube) you could save a lot with an HTTP cache configured to cache large files, or by getting the CDNs to put servers in your infrastructure.
"Expansion isn't as important these days"
I'd suggest that computers are more expandable than ever, but they do so primarily using external expansion - INTERNAL expansion isn't as important these days. I'm a power user and I'm perfectly happy with my Mac Mini. Of course, it helps to have an 8-drive server in the basement (I love ZFS!).
About the only thing that might be worth upgrading is the graphics hardware. It's fine for my needs (web, mail, programming) but someone really into computer games would want better graphics hardware. (And probably a PC instead of a Mac). But I do my videogaming on consoles, not computers.
The reports are (at least the ones I've read) clear, thorough and unbiased answers to some pretty good questions, which makes them valuable because they provide good, objective reports that should be the basis of decision making.
So while these reports don't reveal any secret information, they reveal the thought processes of Congress. That is, every one of these reports was written because some Congressman wanted the answer. So reading these reports tells you what they thought was important, and what they were told about it.
For example, the existence of ""Phantom Traffic" - Problems Billing for the Termination of Telephone Calls" tells you that some Congressman wanted to do something to help rural telco's, and wanted some data to make the case. And "COLAs for Military Retirees: Summary of Congressional and Executive Branch Action, 1982-2004" tells you that some Congressman is concerned that veterans' cost of loving adjustments are falling short.
"I have yet to meet anybody that said their new web-based app whipped the llama's azz compared to the old thin-client or mainframe app"
Nice to meet you. Gmail and Google Docs are _way_ more useful to me than Outlook and Office. Sure, Office is a great set of app's. But I don't need a million features, just basic text editing, but I work from several different computers, and with Google Doc's and Gmail I have complete, easy access to all of my communications and the documents that I'm working on from any web browser. And being able to have a group of people who are geographically distributed collaborate on shared doc's, where they can see each other's edits in real-time, is extremely powerful. So for me, easy, integrated, and accessible is more valuable than "features".
Sure, sometimes I need to work offline. Then I export the doc's that I need to my laptop, work on the plane, then upload them when I'm back online.
"It's client-server all over again."
Actually, web apps aren't much line client/server at all. For example:
- The "client" is code that will run in any web browser. In client/server, the client is proprietary code specific to the user's OS and environment, so the client needs to be implemented for each device. For example, if a company builds an app in VB, they can run it on Windows, and might require Office to be installed, etc., but not run on on Mac's, mobile devices, etc. Web apps can run on any environment with a standards-compliant browser.
- There's no client to install (the client logic is automatically sent wherever it is needed), so applications are much easier to deploy and maintain. For example, compare deploying a web app to upgrading 10,000 desktops. Worse, consider what it takes to upgrade 10,000 desktops with a mandatory upgrade, where people can't do their jobs until they're upgraded.
- The standards are open, with many companies and individuals shaping the definition of the standards that everyone works against. So unlike the client/server world where the platform is defined by your vendor (i.e. you picked between MS, IBM, Oracle, etc., and then used whatever they sold), the web app world is based on a shared set of standards used by all vendors, so the competition is in how well they support standards.
Web apps are actually much more like "mainframe" or X/Windows computing than client/server, in that the application and data lives on a server, and any terminal can run the application. Of course, now the "terminal" is much more powerful, and can do much more of the work, and can even allow multiple "applications" to interact (via "mashups"), which is all great. But it has the advantage of the mainframe model in that all of the apps and data run in a managed, safe environment that can be accessed from anywhere.
"Web apps don't magically work everywhere. At least some client (browser?) is needed. 40 platforms vs 40 browsers and we have moved nowhere.'
Surely you're not saying that it's the same level of effort to make a web app render in IE, Mozilla and Safari as to make a GUI app run on Windows, Mac, and Linux? Web apps are built on standards, and there are plenty of good frameworks that take care of the fairly minor inter-browser issues, so writing standards-based web apps that work on all modern browsers is easy. OS's have no portable standards (i.e. Win32 != Coca), so writing GUI apps that run across all OS's is quite difficult.
"Other than a simple form-type interaction, why bother with it in enterprise applications? A company can require the install of anything they want in their required configuration, so why not a rich client that follows UI standards?"
You have the logic backwards. Installing and managing desktop applications is extremely expensive compared to browser-based app's. So unless there's an extremely good reason to install a desktop app (e.g. you really need complex local interaction, or are dealing with huge data such as video) why bother installing desktop software?
I just saw the Pre, and I was very impressed. Not because of the tech spec's - there are plenty of WinCE phones with great spec's, and they all kinda suck to use.
The thing that makes the Pre a great product (at least potentially) is that they rethought the human interaction, as a while, so the phone is extremely touch oriented, intuitive and fun to use. The phone is highly visual and responsive. If anything, it's even a bit slicker/richer than the iPhone. It will be interesting to see Apple respond to. So while there are many nice 'features', the impact
One innovation is that they introduced some gestures that start in an offscreen (but touch sensitive) area, that perform fundamental actions such as going 'back', and bringing up the 'main screen'. So applications can take over the whole screen, rather than having to all use screen space for back/home/etc. buttons.
It's also nice that you can have multiple apps running at the same time, which is a nice change from the old PalmOS, and the iPhone.
Some other things:
- It has a keyboard, which would be faster than a screen keyboard.
- It charges through induction (i.e. no contacts), so you just put it down on the dock, it magnetically sticks to it and starts charging. And if you get a call, you pick up the phone, and it knows that it was picked up and answers the call.
- The apps run in 'cards', which shrink and grow. So when you're on the 'home screen' seeing multiple apps, the 'icons' are live app windows (i.e. showing the live window contents, still scrolling, etc.), not just static, representative icons.
So overall, a win. Palm has finally gotten back to its user-centered design of the original Palm.
What model from what manufacturer? The last time I looked, most LED displays had prehistoric or proprietary interfaces, and a display that connects via USB and is easily programmable sounds like a lot of fun.
There are all sorts of key business metrics to put on such a display, making them more visible to everyone in your company. This is good because it makes people aware of something that they should be thinking about.
For example:
- Number of registered users (for a social site or MMORPG, which cares about community size)
- Number of ad impressions (if that's your revenue model)
- Number of sales (or dollar amount, etc.) for eCommerce sites
- Time since last server outage (to get people to focus on uptime)
- Number of downloads (for an app)
Or whatever is appropriate for your business/technology.
I'll second this. While Logo has a reputation as a limited language, it's actually as expressive as Lisp, which is to say that it's a more powerful language than most, though teachers tend not to go too far with it.
Back when I taught kids programming, I found that the best languages were the ones that supported iterative development so that users could easily try ideas. For this, Logo is perfect. Once kids learn Logo, they know about variables, scope, functions with parameters and return values, recursion, closures, etc., all of which apply to any civilized language.
There more modern instructional language options, such as Squeak/Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/) and OpenStarLogoTNG (http://education.mit.edu/starlogo-tng/) that are really fun as well. They are (IMO) a bit too complex for very young programmers (I taught 5-6 year olds simple Logo programming, as it's designed to be super-approachable for kids, but I think that a kid would have to be 7-8 to tackle those).
I disagree - if the scientific question is whether there's something outside the system affecting it or not, it's entirely possible to address, though of course not by the mechanism of performing an experiment on multiple universes, some with God and some without, and comparing the result. You can approach it analytically; if you can accurately model the internal behavior of the system (admittedly a tricky proposition), then observe something that can only have happened to an external input, you've proven that there's something outside the system affecting the system.
That being said, God is generally carefully defined in a way that existence can't be proven. God supposedly wants people to believe in him due to "faith" rather than "proof", and therefore will never allow proof to exist (and thus, will never do anything that can't have otherwise happened).
So, strangely enough, that means that if you prove an external input into the system, that apparently can't be proof of God, at least as generally described by religions.
Science is a lot easier than theology.
"For me, both systems can be corrupted, but the electronic system is better because, given the same level of precaution before and after the election, the electronic system gives faster results."
It's not particularly important how fast election results are generated. What is important is how trustworthy the results are.
If votes are cast on paper ballots, then you can inspect the ballot box before the election to see that there are no ballots in it, you can watch as people cast their ballots, and you can watch the box after the voting is done, and you can watch the ballots being counted, and you can physically secure the box, and you can recount the ballots, inspect them, audit them, etc. All of this relies only on direct human observation, not trust of any individual or third party.
If votes are cast electronically, they are by definition invisible, and not open to direct inspection. At best, you can use tools provided by a vendor to do so. This means that you must trust the vendor for every step in the process. You can't prove that the machines have no votes stored, just that the report ran and printed a '0'. You can't prove that the votes were recorded properly during voting. You can't prove that the votes were communicated properly. And you can't prove that the votes were counted properly.
In particular, the DRE voting systems with flash cards that you used in your election are completely untrustworthy. Even if you followed every procedure precisely, there's no reason to believe that the reported vote tallies were accurate.
"is rigging the machines not just as bad as encouraging and aiding voter fraud by fraudulently registering voters multiple times, fake voters, etc?"
Rigging machines is much worse. Rigging machines can affect every vote cast in the machines.
Registering fake voters results in no fake votes, because fake voters don't show up to vote. It is legal for people to register multiple times, so long as they only vote once.
So you're right that "if it is bad for one side, it is bad for the other side too". But in simply saying that doesn't magically make the behavior of the two parties identical.
Historically the Republicans have been the minority party that applies superior tactics and funding to win national elections. When you're the majority party you don't need to cheat - you need to have the rules enforced. When you're the minority party, you do all you can to get every vote.
For example, changing people's voter registrations between parties without their knowledge (http://conspireality.tv/2008/10/20/finally-an-actual-arrest-in-vote-fraud-case-and-its-a-republican/), however, turns out to be illegal.
"why bother with rigging the voting machines...it seems this year a simpler method has been found, with Acorn registering everyone they can, dead, undead, fictional or alive"
This is, as the poster must be surely be aware by now, not what happened. What actually happened is that a few ACORN employees got lazy and filled out fake voter registrations using the. names of athletes, characters from fiction, etc.). ACORN found out, fired the people responsible, and identified the bad registrations to the authorities when they turned them in. They were required to turn them in by law, as it is illegal to not hand in any voter registration forms due to the obvious potential for abuse if the registration organization is allowed to be selective about which registrations to submit.
Because ACORN identified the suspicious registrations, and because the government agencies that process the registrations validates them, there were likely few or no fake voters actually registered to vote.
And, of course, Micky Mouse, etc., is not going to show up to vote.
So the fraud was not the creation of fake votes, but of ACORN (and to a degree the voter registration agencies) getting their time and money wasted by a few former ACORN employees. Given that ACORN hired 13,000 people and generated 1.3m legitimate registrations, the number of bad registrations reported so far is surprisingly small (a few thousand is claimed).
For actual voter fraud, you'll have to look elsewhere. Like, say, electronic voting machines, caging, etc.
Alaska's sunshine laws are quite clear, and require that all communications related to performing your job, including email deliberations and and all drafts of documents, must be archived. While she may have forgotten it, all government employees work for the public, and are paid by the public, so the public gets to review everything that they do in order to decide whether they've done the right thing.
To be clear, the law does not say that she cannot open a Yahoo account. The law does, however, say that she must properly archive all communications that are in any way related to her doing her job.
Yes, oversight can be a hassle. But in the long run lack of oversight is much worse, since it enables abuses and corruption. So while you can call oversight by names like "fishing expedition", I'd still rather have private citizens be able to call government employees to account. Luckily the law agrees with me, making Palin's evasion of oversight illegal. :-)
"But she didn't conduct any official business with the yahoo account! All that was in it were family pictures and emails to her friends. IMO, she did the correct thing by not using a govt.-paid for email account for personal communications."
This is incorrect. She specifically set up two Yahoo accounts, one for personal email (gov.sarah@yahoo.com) and another (gov.palin@yahoo.com). The latter was specifically set up because she could avoid Alaska's Sunshine Laws that require all government business to be archived and (with very narrow exceptions) available to the public. In the email archive is a discussion where she and her staff confirm that the use of the yahoo accounts hides their emails from court subpoena's, and she even reprimands one staffer for using her official email instead of the yahoo account.
So while Yahoo email accounts do have a legitimate expectation of privacy, I'd argue that Palin lost her claim to privacy when she engaged in illegal evasion of Alaska's Sunshine Laws.
Yes, there were (more recently) two different 'experiences'. In addition to the original one (Enterprise attacked by the Klingons, then fly the motion-ride shuttle) there's new one (Borg attack, with a 3D movie of the attack).
I am pretty sure that I would rather not be ionized, personally. Even a slight ionic charge would be bad on the electronics, and being turned into plasma would really suck. So I'm all in favor of IT being unionized.