How many Windows users do you know with a swap partition?
Probably about as many Windows users as OS X users; both of 'em use a file/files as backing store for anonymous pages. (You could probably arrange to have those files on a separate partition, as per Vectronic's comment.)
No, it's only the fundamentalist Christians who would think that...
You seem to imply that all churches...
How did we get from "fundamentalist Christians" to "all churches"? (And, no, those quotes aren't out of context. The poster to whom you were responding didn't say that all churches in the US were biblical literalists, he/she said that only "fundamentalist Christians" were.)
Wow, that's a horrible law. Actually cutting someone completely out of the democratic process because they don't have a popular belief. That's getting dangerously close to fascism.
It's also dangerously close to an overstatement of the law. "Cutting someone completely out of the democratic process" happens if you don't get to vote at all; not being allowed to be a poll worker because you're not a registered member of one of a selected set of parties doesn't completely cut you out of the democratic process, as long as you can still participate in that process by voting.
Nevertheless, I do agree that it's a stupid law, and that, as 0xdeadbeef noted:
The impartiality of the process is the only thing that gives an election any credibility. Every citizen does have an equal right to become a poll worker, assuming they meet the qualifications, and an ideological litmus test should not be part of the application.
...i.e., that such a law would cut people out of a significant part of the democratic process because they don't have a popular belief.
(Stupid, or at least not well-thought-out; the part of the Ohio code stinerman cited sounds as if it might have been a well-intentioned attempt to make sure you didn't have all Democrats or all Republicans as poll workers - but, given that other election officials don't appear to have to be members of "the two major political parties", at least as I read that part of the code, perhaps they could have designed that part of the code better.)
I've tried on several occasions and have been turned away each time because I refuse to register as either a Democrat or Republican.
So presumably you tried to become one of the "additional officials, equally divided between the two major political parties", who apparently need to be a member of one of "the two major political parties", rather than a judge or election officer, where, at least as I read the quoted section of the code, it'd be OK to be a Libertarian or a Green or a Constitution Party member or a Socialist Workers Party member or..., as long as that doesn't push the count of members of that party over half, and it'd be OK not to be a member of any political party at all, even if all the judges or election officers were independents.
(Unless, of course, the people who turned you away didn't actually understand all the details of that section of the Ohio Revised Code, and thought you have to be a Democrat or Republican to hold any of those posts, which I could easily believe.)
"This thing we built to do one thing and one thing only does it inaccurately and insecurely."
Butbutbut... Premier Election Solutions seems to be implying that they provide "reliable system solutions"!
To realize the promise of modern election system technology, you need a strong, dedicated partner that provides reliable system solutions and long-term service. Premier Election Solutions offers the strength, experience, and manufacturing capacity needed to meet your unique needs. These attributes make Premier Election Solutions, the nation's leading supplier of election solutions, uniquely qualified to partner with large and small jurisdictions nationwide.
Surely their marketing department wouldn't just be bullshitting us....
A story in the Washington Post gives a bit more technical detail; it sounds as if this might be a problem not in the voting machine software but in the software in the central computer to which the voting machines upload their vote counts, if the electoral district using the machines chooses to do that (not all do, apparently), and that the problem might be a race condition that shows up if multiple voting machine memory cards are uploaded in parallel.
...There are NO race conditions. There is NO need for parallel execution....
I'm not so sure of that. At least according to the Washington Post story on the problem, the problem appears to be with counting votes from the memory cards from multiple machines at a time, and sounds a bit like, err, umm, it might be a race condition:
A voting system used in 34 states contains a critical programming error that can cause votes to be dropped while being electronically transferred from memory cards to a central tallying point, the manufacturer acknowledges.
The problem was identified after complaints from Ohio elections officials following the March primary there, but the logic error that is the root of the problem has been part of the software for 10 years, said Chris Riggall, a spokesman for Premier Election Solutions, formerly known as Diebold.
The flawed software is on both touch screen and optical scan voting machines made by Premier and the problem with vote counts is most likely to affect larger jurisdictions that feed many memory cards to a central counting database rapidly.
...
The problem is most likely to affect larger jurisdictions that upload multiple memory cards during counts, Riggall said. The GEMS system is supposed to save information from one card at a time to be counted in order as the cards are read by a database that Riggall described as the "mother ship." But a logic error in the program can cause incoming votes to essentially shove aside other votes that are waiting in the electronic line before they are counted. The mistake occurs in milliseconds, Premier's customer notice says.
The mistake is not immediately apparent, Riggall said, and would have to be caught when elections officials went to match how many memory cards they fed into a central database against how many show as being read by that database. Each card carries a unique marker.
Perhaps there's no need for parallelism, but, for better or worse, it sounds as if there might be parallelism.
In the 90's, the AS/400 went from a 32-bit CISC processor to a 64-bit RISC processor.
If this were Intel, we would have had to go through the code looking for bustage (like we did when Windows' wParam went from 16 to 32 bits). This being an AS/400, we didn't even have to recompile! Just copy everything to the new system; on first execution, programs are converted to 64-bit opcodes.
ALL AS/400 (iSeries, System i) programs have been 64-bit since the mid-90s; no programmer intervention required.
...because the compilers available to application developers generated code in a very high-level pseudo instruction set that the low-level system code translated to native code on first execution. The high-level code was (usually) kept around, so that on the first execution on a RISC system it could be translated to the (extended) PowerPC code the RISC processors run.
The System/360-to-z/Architecture machines didn't do that. 32-bit data/24-bit address programs stay 32-bit data/24-bit address programs even when run on 32-bit data/31-bit address or 64-bit data/64-bit address machines, and 32-bit data/31-bit address programs stay 32-bit data/31-bit address programs even when run on 64-bit data/64-bit address machines.
However, the processors can, at least, still run those programs (just as, for example, x86-64 processors can run IA-32 programs, or SPARC v9 processors can run SPARC v7 or SPARC v8 programs, or..., OS permitting).
You forgot the clever design that prevents people from resizing their windows from any edge, like we've been able to do side the first GUI days in the 80s.
On systems that allow resizing of windows along one axis by dragging on the side, I have, at times, resized a window when I didn't intend to; that doesn't happen to me in OS X.
On the other hand, being an old fart, I like to have my terminal windows 80 columns wide, and it's annoying that I can't conveniently change only the height of a Terminal window - and whether "having fewer places where you will end up resizing a window when you don't intend to" is the rationale for only allowing resizing from the corner, and whether it's an adequate rationale for that, is another matter.
How about a dial with numbers 0-9 on it, with small holes next to each number.
To input a particular number you would place the included stylus into the corresponding hole, then turn the dial clockwise until it stops.
Upon releasing the stylus, the dial will return to its resting position, and your chosen digit will appear on the screen.
Did it connect the lappy to the net via the iPhone
Yes. It's a SOCKS proxy; you point other machines, such as your notebook, at it as a SOCKS proxy, and network requests that go through whatever code paths can be switched to a SOCKS proxy get sent to the phone's proxy app, and it forwards them to the Internet over the cellphone connection.
I took a look at the application screenshots and it looks like squid with a gui wrapper
Can Squid run as a SOCKS proxy? (Not "can Squid access the Internet through a SOCKS proxy?", but "*can* Squid *itself* run as a SOCKS proxy?") If not, then NetShare isn't particularly like Squid with a GUI wrapper, as NetShare is a SOCKS proxy (and, as far as I know, doesn't cache Web pages, as Squid does).
In that case, it's even more unforgivable that it's not universally followed.
Yes, it is. What were some of the applications X and Y where you couldn't copy from X to Y? Do you happen to know what versions of what toolkits they were using?
This is, so far as I can tell, due to the highly modular nature of Linux
Given that the same problems appear on *BSD, Solaris, etc., it's not due to the anything of Linux, unless it's "the X11-based window system of Linux".
there is no one pasteboard implementation, or even one pasteboard API that can be implemented by different libraries, that all apps can count on having available to them on all Linux systems.
Remove every single thing in Ubunut that has absolutely nothing to do with photos, mail, webbrowsing, movies
Yeah! And then Apple should do the same thing! What's this "TextEdit" thing doing on my disk, and what are those "Activity Monitor", "Disk Utility", "Directory Utility", "Console", "Network Utility", "Terminal", etc. things doing there?
If you mean that a default installation of Ubuntu could be smaller than than it is, perhaps. Pretending that OS X has had everything removed from it "that has absolutely nothing to do with photos, mail, webbrowsing, movies" is, however, nonsense. Yeah, some of it's hidden in/Applications/Utilities, but it's still there....
Progress bars, tray/dock type notifications
What about them? They exist in Ubuntu; presumably you think they should be better in some way.
Every WindowsXP or Visa ServicePack and update? FREE.
The equivalent of a Windows service pack for OS X is a "software update", and they're free. Going from OS X 10.N to OS X 10.N+1 is more like going from a Windows version to the next version, and I don't think you get a "FREE" update from, say, XP to Vista.
Slashdot Mirror
What?! You mean Ceren doesn't work there any more?
No, not for a while, actually.
How many Windows users do you know with a swap partition?
Probably about as many Windows users as OS X users; both of 'em use a file/files as backing store for anonymous pages. (You could probably arrange to have those files on a separate partition, as per Vectronic's comment.)
First couple of posts already covered the, "conservatives suck" remarks.
"Conservatives" != "young earth creationists" (although there's probably a depressingly large overlap).
No, it's only the fundamentalist Christians who would think that...
You seem to imply that all churches...
How did we get from "fundamentalist Christians" to "all churches"? (And, no, those quotes aren't out of context. The poster to whom you were responding didn't say that all churches in the US were biblical literalists, he/she said that only "fundamentalist Christians" were.)
Two letters: T9
In what alphabet is 9 a letter?
Given that he's actually inside the distortion field, for all we know he could just be a horse. Or a broom.
You meant "or a boom", right?
I would've linked to the original stories, but it seems that the Democracy Now website is currently down.
The Democracy Now! site isn't down now; see, for example, the original story about the arrest.
Can the iPhone access the whole Internet? Well, can it ping every valid IPv4 and IPv6 address, I ask? Can it or not?
Apparently not.
Wow, that's a horrible law. Actually cutting someone completely out of the democratic process because they don't have a popular belief. That's getting dangerously close to fascism.
It's also dangerously close to an overstatement of the law. "Cutting someone completely out of the democratic process" happens if you don't get to vote at all; not being allowed to be a poll worker because you're not a registered member of one of a selected set of parties doesn't completely cut you out of the democratic process, as long as you can still participate in that process by voting.
Nevertheless, I do agree that it's a stupid law, and that, as 0xdeadbeef noted:
...i.e., that such a law would cut people out of a significant part of the democratic process because they don't have a popular belief.
(Stupid, or at least not well-thought-out; the part of the Ohio code stinerman cited sounds as if it might have been a well-intentioned attempt to make sure you didn't have all Democrats or all Republicans as poll workers - but, given that other election officials don't appear to have to be members of "the two major political parties", at least as I read that part of the code, perhaps they could have designed that part of the code better.)
I've tried on several occasions and have been turned away each time because I refuse to register as either a Democrat or Republican.
So presumably you tried to become one of the "additional officials, equally divided between the two major political parties ", who apparently need to be a member of one of "the two major political parties", rather than a judge or election officer, where, at least as I read the quoted section of the code, it'd be OK to be a Libertarian or a Green or a Constitution Party member or a Socialist Workers Party member or..., as long as that doesn't push the count of members of that party over half, and it'd be OK not to be a member of any political party at all, even if all the judges or election officers were independents.
(Unless, of course, the people who turned you away didn't actually understand all the details of that section of the Ohio Revised Code, and thought you have to be a Democrat or Republican to hold any of those posts, which I could easily believe.)
"This thing we built to do one thing and one thing only does it inaccurately and insecurely."
Butbutbut... Premier Election Solutions seems to be implying that they provide "reliable system solutions"!
Surely their marketing department wouldn't just be bullshitting us....
A story in the Washington Post gives a bit more technical detail; it sounds as if this might be a problem not in the voting machine software but in the software in the central computer to which the voting machines upload their vote counts, if the electoral district using the machines chooses to do that (not all do, apparently), and that the problem might be a race condition that shows up if multiple voting machine memory cards are uploaded in parallel.
...There are NO race conditions. There is NO need for parallel execution. ...
I'm not so sure of that. At least according to the Washington Post story on the problem, the problem appears to be with counting votes from the memory cards from multiple machines at a time, and sounds a bit like, err, umm, it might be a race condition:
Perhaps there's no need for parallelism, but, for better or worse, it sounds as if there might be parallelism.
In the 90's, the AS/400 went from a 32-bit CISC processor to a 64-bit RISC processor.
If this were Intel, we would have had to go through the code looking for bustage (like we did when Windows' wParam went from 16 to 32 bits). This being an AS/400, we didn't even have to recompile! Just copy everything to the new system; on first execution, programs are converted to 64-bit opcodes.
ALL AS/400 (iSeries, System i) programs have been 64-bit since the mid-90s; no programmer intervention required.
...because the compilers available to application developers generated code in a very high-level pseudo instruction set that the low-level system code translated to native code on first execution. The high-level code was (usually) kept around, so that on the first execution on a RISC system it could be translated to the (extended) PowerPC code the RISC processors run.
The System/360-to-z/Architecture machines didn't do that. 32-bit data/24-bit address programs stay 32-bit data/24-bit address programs even when run on 32-bit data/31-bit address or 64-bit data/64-bit address machines, and 32-bit data/31-bit address programs stay 32-bit data/31-bit address programs even when run on 64-bit data/64-bit address machines.
However, the processors can, at least, still run those programs (just as, for example, x86-64 processors can run IA-32 programs, or SPARC v9 processors can run SPARC v7 or SPARC v8 programs, or..., OS permitting).
On systems that allow resizing of windows along one axis by dragging on the side, I have, at times, resized a window when I didn't intend to; that doesn't happen to me in OS X.
On the other hand, being an old fart, I like to have my terminal windows 80 columns wide, and it's annoying that I can't conveniently change only the height of a Terminal window - and whether "having fewer places where you will end up resizing a window when you don't intend to" is the rationale for only allowing resizing from the corner, and whether it's an adequate rationale for that, is another matter.
Auto unions also tend to produce employees who
...
Compare GM cars with Toyota, and the results should be obvious.
Sadly, this is clearly apparent in a comparison of any US automaker to Japanese or European alternatives...
Yeah, those cars built by those non-unionized Germans are so much better than those cars built by unionized Americans.
Oh, wait, never mind....
How about a dial with numbers 0-9 on it, with small holes next to each number. To input a particular number you would place the included stylus into the corresponding hole, then turn the dial clockwise until it stops. Upon releasing the stylus, the dial will return to its resting position, and your chosen digit will appear on the screen.
Done, except the iPhone doesn't support a stylus.
Also: iPhone Rotary.
You were saying?
Eh?
Yes. It's a SOCKS proxy; you point other machines, such as your notebook, at it as a SOCKS proxy, and network requests that go through whatever code paths can be switched to a SOCKS proxy get sent to the phone's proxy app, and it forwards them to the Internet over the cellphone connection.
Can Squid run as a SOCKS proxy? (Not "can Squid access the Internet through a SOCKS proxy?", but "*can* Squid *itself* run as a SOCKS proxy?") If not, then NetShare isn't particularly like Squid with a GUI wrapper, as NetShare is a SOCKS proxy (and, as far as I know, doesn't cache Web pages, as Squid does).
Yes, it is. What were some of the applications X and Y where you couldn't copy from X to Y? Do you happen to know what versions of what toolkits they were using?
Given that the same problems appear on *BSD, Solaris, etc., it's not due to the anything of Linux, unless it's "the X11-based window system of Linux".
Actually, there is a pasteboard/clipboard mechanism that all toolkits can count on and, if they all use it, apps can count on it as well. It's the X11 "selections" mechanism, combined with the PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD selections from the Inter-Client Communication Conventions Manual; see the X11 clipboard convention document.
Yeah! And then Apple should do the same thing! What's this "TextEdit" thing doing on my disk, and what are those "Activity Monitor", "Disk Utility", "Directory Utility", "Console", "Network Utility", "Terminal", etc. things doing there?
If you mean that a default installation of Ubuntu could be smaller than than it is, perhaps. Pretending that OS X has had everything removed from it "that has absolutely nothing to do with photos, mail, webbrowsing, movies" is, however, nonsense. Yeah, some of it's hidden in /Applications/Utilities, but it's still there....
What about them? They exist in Ubuntu; presumably you think they should be better in some way.
The equivalent of a Windows service pack for OS X is a "software update", and they're free. Going from OS X 10.N to OS X 10.N+1 is more like going from a Windows version to the next version, and I don't think you get a "FREE" update from, say, XP to Vista.