But that does not mean you are right to jump to conclusions that every workplace experience is like yours.
There are awful managers and there are great managers. There are horrible places to work and awesome places to work.
Stop being angry and bitter and start getting smart.
If office politics are the problem then start learning how office politics work. Learn how to cover your ass, document your work, and acquire friends and allies.
Good at software engineering? Great - now you need to work on your social and business skills.
Be smart, learn what your weaknesses are, and solve the problem. Don't be a victim.
Can't get past your anger to work on a solution? Then go find a good friend or get a good therapist. Get it all out, and then move on.
This is a life experience. Use it or be destroyed by it.
Well, the article indicates that the 20% time off is relatively rare (or possible even unique to Google). It would hardly be newsworthy if all companies did this.
Your analogy is good - I would modify it by saying it is analogous to the actuary getting 2 months off a year to do or write *anything* -- from a personal novel to actuarial journals.
My guess is that Google believes that people doing creative work *need* significant time off from day-to-day projects to refresh their enthusiasm and creativity. The 20% lossage of their time is more than set up if/when they come up with the big ideas that generate massive $$$.
For google, this has already happened - their unorthodox search-engine system turned conventional architecture (small clusters of powerful, reliable, expensive systems) on its head (massive cluster of inexpensive, unreliable systems). They hope to attract a similar set of people as the Google inventors, perhaps in the hope of having lightning strike twice.
It's not just the talent, but the mindset. Some people like the solve the current problem at hand as efficiently as possible. Others gravitate towards interesting problems (possibly without solutions) and are willing to take the time to really examine them to find novel solutions.
I have one friend who has been coding professionally since his teen years and is almost completely self-taught. I have another friend who recieved his degree in engineering, and then his Ph.D in computer science. Which one would I hire to create a reliable, user-friendly, efficient software package on time? The first one, no question about it. Which one do I expect to create new and novel solutions in his area of expertise? The second one, without a doubt.
What's interesting here is that Google is betting that they can hire people to do both. It will be interesting to see in the long run if this pays off for them.
Or do you mean standard for PhDs [to be given free time for research]? I don't see why they should have special treatment.
First of all, RTFA. *All* the employees get 20% of their time off for research.
Secondly, even if it were Ph.D's only, this would not be special treatment - it would be appropriate treatment. Ph.D's, by definition, have proven that they are inclined, willing, and able to perform original and significant research in their chosen field. So let them do research!
Google is not being biased or overly-generous - it's hired talent that can research potentially ground-breaking projects -- so it would be idiotic not to give them the time off regular projects to do that. It would be like hiring an actuary to do your accounting.
Unlike virii which was coined by stupid people trying to sound smart and thus unintentionally sounding even more stupid than they really are, boxen was coined by actual smart people to sound stupid on purpose.
You're partially correct - boxen was probably coined by smart people. However, the motive is icorrect -- there was a little bit of irony in coining "boxen", but they weren't trying to pretend to be stupid.
Let's refer to the venerable jargon file for a more realistic explanation:
Hackers, as a rule, love wordplay and are very conscious and inventive in their use of language. These traits seem to be common in young children, but the conformity-enforcing machine we are pleased to call an educational system bludgeons them out of most of us before adolescence. Thus, linguistic invention in most subcultures of the modern West is a halting and largely unconscious process. Hackers, by contrast, regard slang formation and use as a game to be played for conscious pleasure. Their inventions thus display an almost unique combination of the neotenous enjoyment of language-play with the discrimination of educated and powerful intelligence.
This may seem like a small nitpick, but there's a large difference in mindset -- on one hand you have the ironic-stupid-as-humor mindset (as classically illustrated by "Ren and Stimpy") and on the other hand you have creative, irreverent play with the rules of the English language (as in "ghoti == fish").
Alas, this AC seems unable to read, as the parent post was about gas consumption, not emissions. Your beloved escalade is hogging down 16 mpg gallon while that 1993 Tercel (assuming in good condition) is sipping 30 mpg. Which is better for staving off a oil-greedy foreign policy? Yes, that's right, the Tercel.
Furthermore, why did you choose the avalanche when you could have gotten a 2003 Celica with a reasonable (but not great) 26 mpg? It's a bit sporty, and I don't have that big SUV/truck ass blocking my vision on the highway.
Chris Pratley makes it seem like Microsoft had the superior development method by picking on Wordstar and Wordperfect.
He conveniently ignores other products that *were* made for Windows from the get-go, like Ami Pro (was generally considered superior to Word) or Quattro Pro (same thing) see this for another viewpoint.
So, if these guys met or beat Word/Excel on features, how did Microsoft win? It wasn't their plan of development -- it was being part of Microsoft - an unfair advantage.
Secrecy and Changability are *not* the primary criteria for authentication. The primary criteria is (and always will be): can someone else duplicate your authentication and pose as you?
If the biometric is impossible to duplicate or bypass then it doesn't matter if it's unchangeable and obvious.
Clearly this is not the case with fingerprints; however, if we do find a biometric that is near impossible to duplicate (possible candidate: a retinal scan of blood flow) then this should be far superior to carrying around passwords in your head.
1) It's an instantaneous model - it treats brewing as an atomic (all or nothing act), where someone may want to try and model brewing coffee a continuous process that takes time (as it does in real life).
2) There's no obvious way to know that the water and grounds are consumed by the brewing process -- but the pot is not.
3) If the process is interrupted, what is the intermediate state of all the objects? Should we still have separate (and "unconsumed") water and coffee grounds objects? Or are other objects (weakCoffee, partiallyUsedGrounds) created?
The best thing we can have is competition between different vendors, then we'll get some innovation.
Not yet, apparently. The Yahoo search interface is a blatant ripoff of Google, from the names of the tabs down to the "SafeSearch" image search setting.
This bodes ill for Google - it's basically a one-trick pony (searching), while Yahoo has branched out into several services. And now Yahoo has set up a Google clone. Soon anyone else who licenses Inktomi's technology will be able to set up Google clones. Google's technology just took one giant leap to being commodotized.
Looks like the window on a huge Google IPO has closed folks.
Very interesting article - her biggest idea seems to be that objects are too rigid to change over time - the lack of intuitive ways to say something changes over time -- for example, you can have a "coffee grounds" object and a "water object", but how do you model the brewing process to make coffee out of those two objects?
"The sequence of the routine itself -- what comes before what under what conditions based on what causality -- simply has no meaningful representation in OO, because OO has no concept of sequencing, or state, or cause."
I'm far from an experienced programming expert, so maybe other Slashdotters care to argue/defend her point?
While the article casually mentions Jaron, it has nothing to do with his ideas. In fact, Victoria Livschitz essentially says that she has completely different ideas than Jaron.
You're absolutely right, regarding the specific case of a building. A civil engineer must sign off on the design.
However, your analogy is poor, because I know of no single "sign-off" required for a multi-state electrical power system.
To follow your analogy, civil engineers would have to have the ability to force decisions on:
1) adding power plants to increase capacity/tolerances to acceptable levels.
2) preventing the closing power plants -- which may lower capacities and tolerances below acceptable levels.
Find reasonable evidence for both, and I'll buy your argument. Otherwise, you're unfairly assigning responsibility for something the engineers had little control over.
Apparently you couldn't understand the reasoning of the parent posts when it was couched in nice terms, so maybe if I state it more bluntly, you'll get it.
Why did the system fail? Because you, the company managers and shareholders, and Mr. Joe Public himself didn't want to pay for it.
The engineers could have easily designed a system with enough tolerance to handle the load. But because Mr. CEO and Joe Public felt it cost too much money to pay for the additional powerplants and capacities, this didn't happen.
Joe Public just got what he paid for -- a cheaper system that was more likely to fail.
Not true. You example ("Some people who live in Brooklyn speak with a Brooklyn accent") is an accurate claim, but you admit that no conclusion (accurate or otherwise) can be drawn from it. That is the danger of exclusively using this type of deductive logic.
Wow, you're missing the obvious. How about this:
"Clay Sharkey might speak with a Brooklyn accent."
Not quite - in each case he uses a flawed set of axioms, then expands on them to show that the world is not a black-and-white place, which then shows that the technique is invalid when applied to most real-world data.
This then shows nothing of the sort.
Speaking of syllogisms, both you and Shirkey appear to be making the following logical argument:
1. A technique that is not universally applicable is not useful. 2. Deductive logic is not universally applicable. 3. Therefore deductive logic is not useful. 4. The Semantic Web relies on deductive logic. 5. Any technology that relies on a not-useful technique is not useful. 6. Thefore the Semantic Web is not useful.
And of course, premise is absurd, and therefore the final conclusion is equally absurd. You simply cannot draw the conclusion that this technology is useless.
Re:Two things you can't say
on
What You Can't Say
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Just because stereotyping is taboo doesn't mean it's not legitimately poor thinking.
When chosing your dancer for example, are you going to turn your brain off and choose the black participant, or are you actually going to evaluate all comers, black or white?
Will you automatically chose the male candidate to drive your truck, or will you take the time to figure out if the female candidate has better driving skills?
I've yet to hear of a dancing gene, and I've yet to see a study that indicates that the darker your skin the better the dancer you are.
Yes, people are different, and the sexes have (obvious) biological differences (though probably far less than you think). But that doesn't excuse you if you make the jump from sterotyping to prejudice, and finally to discrimination.
"Kin Ki stays competitive, workers say, by paying them 24 cents an hour in Shenzhen, where the legal minimum wage is 33 cents. When the Etch A Sketch line shut down in Ohio just after the Christmas rush in 2000, wages for the unionized work force there had reached $9 an hour."
$9.00/hour versus $0.24/hour -- exactly how is "radical reform of the tax code and radical limits of government spending" supposed to even come close to equalizing this discrepancy?
Why, thanks for trying to indoctrinate me with yet another libertarian diatribe.
By the way, I find Sowell's conclusion that rent control is causing homelesness in New York to be laughable. Last I checked, rental controls limit the amount a landlord can increase rental rates. So these landlords -- if they are boarding up their apartments -- are doing so because they can't charge enough. And if the rent controls are released, and the landlords get to charge as much as they want, these homeless people are somehow going to be able to afford these new -- higher -- rental prices?
Once again, the reason it's so expensive to live in San Francisco is because everyone and their brother wants to live there. The cost of living is due to the larger market forces of supply and demand. Until people are unwilling to pay $xxxx/month for a small studio in SF, that's how much it's going to cost, no matter what you do to streamline and remove the beauracracy.
If all you have in your thinking toolkit is libertarian ideology, then every problem looks like a law to hammer down. Too bad your libertarian ideology is making you blind to larger economic realities.
As long as we build towards a global economy, the more our jobs will slide over to places where people are willing to accept a lower standard of living than ours. And while there may be many ways for us to improve our government, reduce corruption and remove unncessary beauracracy and legal cruft, this inexorable economic fact overrides any possible effect governmental tinkering could provide (short of blowing off free trade and going back to protectionist policies).
"genrm" and whomever modded up this ridiculous piece of nonsense should go back to their "alien plane in a sea of Aether", because they're clearly not living on this planet.
Last I checked, the biggest bite in anyone's cost of living was rent or mortgage. And for those completely clueless, there was Prop 13, which *reduced* property taxes significantly for Calfornia. Have property values (and hence cost of living) gone down since then? No -- in fact they've gone up over 10x in several places (SF - Bay Area) in particular. Did the government push up those housing prices? Find me one landlord who said, "based on the current taxation policies of the state of California, I really must push the asking price for this house up $50,000." You won't find one, because property owners raised their prices based soley on individual greed (e.g. what the market will bear).
Speaking of the Bay Area, where were those taxes during the 1849 Gold Rush? Cost of living then was notoriously expensive, way before federal or state income tax.
The fact is, California has a high cost of living because PEOPLE ARE WILLING TO PAY FOR IT. It has nothing to do with taxes and everything to do with economic opportunities and percieved quality of life.
...he says after he drives to work on government funded freeways, connects to an ARPA-originated Internet and then writes a Slashdot comment bemoaning the behaviors of corporate entities like Microsoft and Diebold.:P
Your comments are partially insightful and partially misguided.
Yes, you are correct, open source is not going to automatically make the software more reliable. The article poster was wrong to make that implication.
And no, open-source (alone) is not the silver bullet. For example, it's entirely possible (open source/closed source - it doesn't matter) for the actual assembler of the machines to inject a back door into the software (just before compiling to the machines). Such a back door wouldn't appear in the source code repositories, but it would still break the election. There has to be other security checks (physical security, monitoring) and balances in place.
However, you're wrong to assume that software with a deadline must mean the software has to be closed source. Just make a contract for deliverable software with the requirement that the software be released to public domain. Pay the contractors incentives to be on time. Pretty simple, isn't it? This is what's done with public constructions like bridges, so it's not anything new (the contractors don't get to "own" the bridge).
Furthermore, a deadline for election software cannot be immutable -- for the same reason that you cannot have software for a medical machine have immutable deadlines: it's too important to screw up. If the software isn't working just about damn perfectly by the election time, then don't use it. Period.
But the primary reason for open sourced election software is not to create more solid software - that's where you (and the poster) are completely missing the point.
The fact is that no single closed-source company can provide trustworthy election software. There's too many incentives ($$$) to release buggy software and try to cover your ass afterward. With open-source election software, that's not possible, because any party can check to see if you messed up.
This is not even mentioning companies that have a political bias. The potential for confict of interest is just to great for any one closed-source company.
Sure, you could try and create a system of multiple closed-source companies (one to create the election system, one to create software to verify the election results), but in the end, the best (and simplest) system is to demand that the election software be in the public domain for everyone's view.
Does open source automatically mean better software? No it doesn't. Is open-source mandatory for a public election system? Yes, absolutely.
Slashdot Mirror
You have every right to be bitter and angry.
But that does not mean you are right to jump to conclusions that every workplace experience is like yours.
There are awful managers and there are great managers. There are horrible places to work and awesome places to work.
Stop being angry and bitter and start getting smart.
If office politics are the problem then start learning how office politics work. Learn how to cover your ass, document your work, and acquire friends and allies.
Good at software engineering? Great - now you need to work on your social and business skills.
Be smart, learn what your weaknesses are, and solve the problem. Don't be a victim.
Can't get past your anger to work on a solution? Then go find a good friend or get a good therapist. Get it all out, and then move on.
This is a life experience. Use it or be destroyed by it.
as an allowance for amusing alternatives we accept amusing alliteration abuse.
Perhaps you were thinking of this word?
Well, the article indicates that the 20% time off is relatively rare (or possible even unique to Google). It would hardly be newsworthy if all companies did this.
Your analogy is good - I would modify it by saying it is analogous to the actuary getting 2 months off a year to do or write *anything* -- from a personal novel to actuarial journals.
My guess is that Google believes that people doing creative work *need* significant time off from day-to-day projects to refresh their enthusiasm and creativity. The 20% lossage of their time is more than set up if/when they come up with the big ideas that generate massive $$$.
For google, this has already happened - their unorthodox search-engine system turned conventional architecture (small clusters of powerful, reliable, expensive systems) on its head (massive cluster of inexpensive, unreliable systems). They hope to attract a similar set of people as the Google inventors, perhaps in the hope of having lightning strike twice.
It's not just the talent, but the mindset. Some people like the solve the current problem at hand as efficiently as possible. Others gravitate towards interesting problems (possibly without solutions) and are willing to take the time to really examine them to find novel solutions.
I have one friend who has been coding professionally since his teen years and is almost completely self-taught. I have another friend who recieved his degree in engineering, and then his Ph.D in computer science. Which one would I hire to create a reliable, user-friendly, efficient software package on time? The first one, no question about it. Which one do I expect to create new and novel solutions in his area of expertise? The second one, without a doubt.
What's interesting here is that Google is betting that they can hire people to do both. It will be interesting to see in the long run if this pays off for them.
Or do you mean standard for PhDs [to be given free time for research]? I don't see why they should have special treatment.
First of all, RTFA. *All* the employees get 20% of their time off for research.
Secondly, even if it were Ph.D's only, this would not be special treatment - it would be appropriate treatment. Ph.D's, by definition, have proven that they are inclined, willing, and able to perform original and significant research in their chosen field. So let them do research!
Google is not being biased or overly-generous - it's hired talent that can research potentially ground-breaking projects -- so it would be idiotic not to give them the time off regular projects to do that. It would be like hiring an actuary to do your accounting.
You're partially correct - boxen was probably coined by smart people. However, the motive is icorrect -- there was a little bit of irony in coining "boxen", but they weren't trying to pretend to be stupid.
Let's refer to the venerable jargon file for a more realistic explanation:
This may seem like a small nitpick, but there's a large difference in mindset -- on one hand you have the ironic-stupid-as-humor mindset (as classically illustrated by "Ren and Stimpy") and on the other hand you have creative, irreverent play with the rules of the English language (as in "ghoti == fish").
Alas, this AC seems unable to read, as the parent post was about gas consumption, not emissions. Your beloved escalade is hogging down 16 mpg gallon while that 1993 Tercel (assuming in good condition) is sipping 30 mpg. Which is better for staving off a oil-greedy foreign policy? Yes, that's right, the Tercel.
Furthermore, why did you choose the avalanche when you could have gotten a 2003 Celica with a reasonable (but not great) 26 mpg? It's a bit sporty, and I don't have that big SUV/truck ass blocking my vision on the highway.
Chris Pratley makes it seem like Microsoft had the superior development method by picking on Wordstar and Wordperfect.
He conveniently ignores other products that *were* made for Windows from the get-go, like Ami Pro (was generally considered superior to Word) or Quattro Pro (same thing) see this for another viewpoint.
So, if these guys met or beat Word/Excel on features, how did Microsoft win? It wasn't their plan of development -- it was being part of Microsoft - an unfair advantage.
Hip hip hooray for Microsoft propaganda!
Secrecy and Changability are *not* the primary criteria for authentication. The primary criteria is (and always will be): can someone else duplicate your authentication and pose as you?
If the biometric is impossible to duplicate or bypass then it doesn't matter if it's unchangeable and obvious.
Clearly this is not the case with fingerprints; however, if we do find a biometric that is near impossible to duplicate (possible candidate: a retinal scan of blood flow) then this should be far superior to carrying around passwords in your head.
Keep the main goal in mind, please.
Problems with your model:
1) It's an instantaneous model - it treats brewing as an atomic (all or nothing act), where someone may want to try and model brewing coffee a continuous process that takes time (as it does in real life).
2) There's no obvious way to know that the water and grounds are consumed by the brewing process -- but the pot is not.
3) If the process is interrupted, what is the intermediate state of all the objects? Should we still have separate (and "unconsumed") water and coffee grounds objects? Or are other objects (weakCoffee, partiallyUsedGrounds) created?
The best thing we can have is competition between different vendors, then we'll get some innovation.
Not yet, apparently.
The Yahoo search interface is a blatant ripoff of Google, from the names of the tabs down to the "SafeSearch" image search setting.
This bodes ill for Google - it's basically a one-trick pony (searching), while Yahoo has branched out into several services. And now Yahoo has set up a Google clone. Soon anyone else who licenses Inktomi's technology will be able to set up Google clones. Google's technology just took one giant leap to being commodotized.
Looks like the window on a huge Google IPO has closed folks.
Very interesting article - her biggest idea seems to be that objects are too rigid to change over time - the lack of intuitive ways to say something changes over time -- for example, you can have a "coffee grounds" object and a "water object", but how do you model the brewing process to make coffee out of those two objects?
"The sequence of the routine itself -- what comes before what under what conditions based on what causality -- simply has no meaningful representation in OO, because OO has no concept of sequencing, or state, or cause."
I'm far from an experienced programming expert, so maybe other Slashdotters care to argue/defend her point?
This is off-topic (myopic?).
While the article casually mentions Jaron, it has nothing to do with his ideas. In fact, Victoria Livschitz essentially says that she has completely different ideas than Jaron.
You're absolutely right, regarding the specific case of a building. A civil engineer must sign off on the design.
However, your analogy is poor, because I know of no single "sign-off" required for a multi-state electrical power system.
To follow your analogy, civil engineers would have to have the ability to force decisions on:
1) adding power plants to increase capacity/tolerances to acceptable levels.
2) preventing the closing power plants -- which may lower capacities and tolerances below acceptable levels.
Find reasonable evidence for both, and I'll buy your argument. Otherwise, you're unfairly assigning responsibility for something the engineers had little control over.
Apparently you couldn't understand the reasoning of the parent posts when it was couched in nice terms, so maybe if I state it more bluntly, you'll get it.
Why did the system fail? Because you, the company managers and shareholders, and Mr. Joe Public himself didn't want to pay for it.
The engineers could have easily designed a system with enough tolerance to handle the load. But because Mr. CEO and Joe Public felt it cost too much money to pay for the additional powerplants and capacities, this didn't happen.
Joe Public just got what he paid for -- a cheaper system that was more likely to fail.
Not true. You example ("Some people who live in Brooklyn speak with a Brooklyn accent") is an accurate claim, but you admit that no conclusion (accurate or otherwise) can be drawn from it. That is the danger of exclusively using this type of deductive logic.
Wow, you're missing the obvious. How about this:
"Clay Sharkey might speak with a Brooklyn accent."
Not quite - in each case he uses a flawed set of axioms, then expands on them to show that the world is not a black-and-white place, which then shows that the technique is invalid when applied to most real-world data.
This then shows nothing of the sort.
Speaking of syllogisms, both you and Shirkey appear to be making the following logical argument:
1. A technique that is not universally applicable is not useful.
2. Deductive logic is not universally applicable.
3. Therefore deductive logic is not useful.
4. The Semantic Web relies on deductive logic.
5. Any technology that relies on a not-useful technique is not useful.
6. Thefore the Semantic Web is not useful.
And of course, premise is absurd, and therefore the final conclusion is equally absurd. You simply cannot draw the conclusion that this technology is useless.
Just because stereotyping is taboo doesn't mean it's not legitimately poor thinking.
When chosing your dancer for example, are you going to turn your brain off and choose the black participant, or are you actually going to evaluate all comers, black or white?
Will you automatically chose the male candidate to drive your truck, or will you take the time to figure out if the female candidate has better driving skills?
I've yet to hear of a dancing gene, and I've yet to see a study that indicates that the darker your skin the better the dancer you are.
Yes, people are different, and the sexes have (obvious) biological differences (though probably far less than you think). But that doesn't excuse you if you make the jump from sterotyping to prejudice, and finally to discrimination.
From Sunday's NY Times comes this story of a toy plant in China. (reqistration required):
"Kin Ki stays competitive, workers say, by paying them 24 cents an hour in Shenzhen, where the legal minimum wage is 33 cents. When the Etch A Sketch line shut down in Ohio just after the Christmas rush in 2000, wages for the unionized work force there had reached $9 an hour."
$9.00/hour versus $0.24/hour -- exactly how is "radical reform of the tax code and radical limits of government spending" supposed to even come close to equalizing this discrepancy?
Why, thanks for trying to indoctrinate me with yet another libertarian diatribe.
By the way, I find Sowell's conclusion that rent control is causing homelesness in New York to be laughable. Last I checked, rental controls limit the amount a landlord can increase rental rates. So these landlords -- if they are boarding up their apartments -- are doing so because they can't charge enough. And if the rent controls are released, and the landlords get to charge as much as they want, these homeless people are somehow going to be able to afford these new -- higher -- rental prices?
Once again, the reason it's so expensive to live in San Francisco is because everyone and their brother wants to live there. The cost of living is due to the larger market forces of supply and demand. Until people are unwilling to pay $xxxx/month for a small studio in SF, that's how much it's going to cost, no matter what you do to streamline and remove the beauracracy.
If all you have in your thinking toolkit is libertarian ideology, then every problem looks like a law to hammer down. Too bad your libertarian ideology is making you blind to larger economic realities.
As long as we build towards a global economy, the more our jobs will slide over to places where people are willing to accept a lower standard of living than ours. And while there may be many ways for us to improve our government, reduce corruption and remove unncessary beauracracy and legal cruft, this inexorable economic fact overrides any possible effect governmental tinkering could provide (short of blowing off free trade and going back to protectionist policies).
"genrm" and whomever modded up this ridiculous piece of nonsense should go back to their "alien plane in a sea of Aether", because they're clearly not living on this planet.
Last I checked, the biggest bite in anyone's cost of living was rent or mortgage. And for those completely clueless, there was Prop 13, which *reduced* property taxes significantly for Calfornia. Have property values (and hence cost of living) gone down since then? No -- in fact they've gone up over 10x in several places (SF - Bay Area) in particular. Did the government push up those housing prices? Find me one landlord who said, "based on the current taxation policies of the state of California, I really must push the asking price for this house up $50,000." You won't find one, because property owners raised their prices based soley on individual greed (e.g. what the market will bear).
Speaking of the Bay Area, where were those taxes during the 1849 Gold Rush? Cost of living then was notoriously expensive, way before federal or state income tax.
The fact is, California has a high cost of living because PEOPLE ARE WILLING TO PAY FOR IT. It has nothing to do with taxes and everything to do with economic opportunities and percieved quality of life.
It's the market, not the government, stupid.
...he says after he drives to work on government funded freeways, connects to an ARPA-originated Internet and then writes a Slashdot comment bemoaning the behaviors of corporate entities like Microsoft and Diebold. :P
Your comments are partially insightful and partially misguided.
Yes, you are correct, open source is not going to automatically make the software more reliable. The article poster was wrong to make that implication.
And no, open-source (alone) is not the silver bullet. For example, it's entirely possible (open source/closed source - it doesn't matter) for the actual assembler of the machines to inject a back door into the software (just before compiling to the machines). Such a back door wouldn't appear in the source code repositories, but it would still break the election. There has to be other security checks (physical security, monitoring) and balances in place.
However, you're wrong to assume that software with a deadline must mean the software has to be closed source. Just make a contract for deliverable software with the requirement that the software be released to public domain. Pay the contractors incentives to be on time. Pretty simple, isn't it? This is what's done with public constructions like bridges, so it's not anything new (the contractors don't get to "own" the bridge).
Furthermore, a deadline for election software cannot be immutable -- for the same reason that you cannot have software for a medical machine have immutable deadlines: it's too important to screw up. If the software isn't working just about damn perfectly by the election time, then don't use it. Period.
But the primary reason for open sourced election software is not to create more solid software - that's where you (and the poster) are completely missing the point.
The fact is that no single closed-source company can provide trustworthy election software. There's too many incentives ($$$) to release buggy software and try to cover your ass afterward. With open-source election software, that's not possible, because any party can check to see if you messed up.
This is not even mentioning companies that have a political bias. The potential for confict of interest is just to great for any one closed-source company.
Sure, you could try and create a system of multiple closed-source companies (one to create the election system, one to create software to verify the election results), but in the end, the best (and simplest) system is to demand that the election software be in the public domain for everyone's view.
Does open source automatically mean better software? No it doesn't. Is open-source mandatory for a public election system? Yes, absolutely.
Good to hear you're basing an oh-so-informed opinion on second-hand delcarations from your friend.
Given that there's no apparent Sun JVM for PPC and Apple's JVM seems to be pretty damn close behind Sun's, I do believe you need to do some simple fact-checking before relaying garbage from your friend's mouth to Slashdot.
Please mod parent down for lack of clue.
Probably bribes from Mom & Dad, especially if they are college-educated professionals. They like to encourage their kids to read.
In elementary school, my parents would let me go hog wild ordering books from the Scholastic Book Club. They didn't mind, as long as I was reading.
Sure, compare a 2002 distribution to a 1995 distribution -- real fair. How do your systems handle Windows XP?
Maybe instead of whining, perhaps you could actually contribute. this site would probably be a good place to start.