I just wrote a software application that I'm going to charge $400 for. However, I'm also going to donate 100,000 copies to the UN; that's $40 million dollars worth of software I'm giving away, for free! Ain't I generous?
Obviously it's a waste to be spending so much on sending robots to Mars. Why not send the robots to Morocco instead? Talk about saving money on airfare!
Heck, I'll even make you a better deal: send me to Morocco for just a fraction of the cost of your multi-million dollar robot.
Good point. However, Munich wasn't only a LAN migration -- it included a desktop migration as well. For that matter, those anecdotes of this or that county in the US have included desktop migrations as well.
I'm not about to argue that they haven't been mostly LAN migrations, but a fair share of both large and small instances have been desktop migrations.
Recalling a comment on this, which is quoted loosely, and I can't remember the source:
"Every year we had been hearing that this year was to be the year of the LAN. Allsorts of hype, and eventually it died down, and when it did, LANs were everywhere."
I highly suspect that it is going to be like this for linux:)
This is really insightful.
And why not? Just because last year was the Linux Desktop year, why can't this year also be the Linux Desktop year? In fact, for the past couple of years we've been hearing about high profile migrations from Windows to Linux -- Munich, IBM -- and I'd argue that this is an indication that there are many more smaller, lower profile migrations going on that we don't hear about.
So, yeah... if we see another couple of big migrations to Linux on the desktop, then I think this year, too, qualifies as the year of Linux on the Desktop.
Another aspect that this ignores is the fact that, sometimes, code just isn't worth keeping. You write code, you learn from it, and sometimes you throw out what you've written and start over. Even if the basic architecture is still the same, rewriting code can often result in less buggy code than can be obtained by intensive debugging. You do this with your own code; surely it can be just as useful to do it to someone else's.
There were two tactical things about Matrix: Revolutions that bothered me.
The EMP burst doesn't affect equipment that is turned off when it is detonated (proof: they're able to fly the Nebekanezer after setting of an EMP). So why didn't the humans just put a bunch of EMP generators in the cave, and coordinate a series of bursts?
Why didn't the machines just roll a nuke down the hole, or have one embedded in the tunneler?
In the US, highways and roads are tax-supported and government subsidized. Airlines are subsidized, and operate with extensive tax exemptions. Trains, on the other hand, are expected to be self-supporting.
I've never understood this. You could make a cultural argument about the road systems in the US -- Americans being hyper-individualistic and all -- but what about the airlines? Talk about cattle cars...
The only discriminating factor that I can see is that trains are more fuel efficient. What am I missing?
When you start compromising on testing, checking, and rechecking your information, then you are indeed paying money to discover things that could have been determined with much less money, and without compromising the mission. Since the only thing they learned from that particular mission was that they had made that mistake, then I feel entirely justified in making the claim that they paid to learn the difference between SI and metric.
Let me restate that Socratically: they probably won't make that mistake again, so they learned something. What was it?
Nasa's success rate has been dropping drastically. They're spending money discovering mistakes they could avoid, and they're doing it in ways that cost not only money, but lives.
The big lesson Nasa needs to learn is to slow down. Spend more on quality, and less on quantity. Don't make excuses, and don't take shortcuts. I'm not saying anything new here; people internal to Nasa have been saying the the same thing for years. Even if the US government starts giving Nasa reasonable funding, they need to correct their procedures to avoid all of the recent mistakes -- something is broken in the process they're using that no amount of money will fix.
I haven't put anything on the surface of Mars, but neither have I spent several million dollars to discover that feet are not meters.
The problem isn't with how the votes are gathered
on
Cringley on E-voting
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Slashdot, home of the self-styled intellectuals. Where are the Condorcet and Approval Voting proponents?
The main problem in the USA isn't how we gather votes, although there are problems in some states (Florida). There is a more fundamental problem in that we aren't using the right voting mechanism. In the US, we use plurality voting -- a.k.a "first across the line" -- to determine who wins an election. This means that a candidate for whom only 30% of the people voted can win an election simply because there was no other single candidate with more votes.
This has a number of problems, but they can all be summed up by saying that plurality is one of the least fair, if not the least fair, way of determining the winner of a democratic election that you can get. Consider:
Say 40% of the people vote for candidate A
35% of the people want candidate B
25% want candidate C
In the US, candidate A will win. However, what if all of the voters for C would rather have B than A? Then 60% of the population would rather have B than A, and the minority candidate has won.
This situation encourages strategic voting; that is to say, voters for C have to decide whether they want to vote honestly, for C, or whether they should vote for B just to make that they don't get their least favorite candidate, A.
This is why we only have two parties in the US, and why -- despite the large number of Greens and Libertarians, neither party has a chance of winning. We don't even know what percentage of the US population is Green or Libertarian (or anything else, for that matter) because they aren't voting honestly. They're voting for the lesser of two evils. This system practically guarantees alienation of the largest number of people -- the majority ends up with a candidate they don't want, unless they lie when voting and vote for the candidate that they dislike the least who also has the best chance of winning.
There are voting mechanisms which allow people to vote their true opinion without being alienated. The most popular are Condorcet -- complex, but the most fair; Approval Voting -- not as fair as Condorcet, but much simpler, and can be implemented with existing voting technology; and Instant Runoff -- less fair than approval, no more simple -- but better than plurality.
Many democratic countries do not use plurality voting, although plurality is the most common. For example, Australia, Northern Ireland, and the Irish Republic (among others) use single transferable vote[1]. In fact, 68 countries (~2b ppl) use plurality, 31 countries (~400m ppl) use single transferable vote, and two countries (~18m ppl) use IRV (instant runoff) -- this is according to International IDEA Handbook.
There is a huge amount of information about Condorcet and Approval Voting available on the web. The Citizens for Approval Voting page is a good start, if you're at all interested in improving voting in the US. If you're interested in the mechanics and mathematics of the systems, start with Condorcet -- most sites that talk about Condorcet are less about how to get it implemented politically, and are more about how it works, fairness tests, and how it compares to other systems. The Wikipedia entry for "voting system" is particularly useful.
Well, the Native American were the first people on your continent too. So we'll follow your example and let you build up a nice base and then we'll come and sell you some blankets with some neat virus as secret bonus.
There is strong evidence that the "native americans" you speak of were not the first people on the North American continent, either. The original peoples of the continent -- as far as we now know -- seem to be more closely related to Australian Aborigines, and were probably wiped out by the descendants of the modern "native americans", who crossed over the land bridge from Asia.
I have the same experiences. None of the color PDAs can hold a candle, as far as battery life goes, to the older PDAs like the Palm V. However, I take my Tungsten without a charger on vacation for weeks at a time, and use it about as much as I normally do.
That said, I can drain the battery playing audio in a few (4-6) hours, so I watch that when I'm not near a charger.
Why? Basically because they have more respect for that plumber than for you. They can understand that:
This isn't even vaguely true. This past thanksgiving, I helped an aunt (1) install the software to get a PocketPC device to connect to her Windows98 machine[1], and (2) fix her kitchen plumbing, which was leaking.
Furthermore, a few years back I had a next-door neighbor who was a contractor; he helped me install in-ground irrigation and lent me his tractor on the occasion that I needed it.
This strange condition is called "being helpful", and quite a few good humans suffer from it.
[1] This was the singlemost unpleasant computer-related experience I've ever encountered, aside from having to fix a corrupt ext2 superblock a few years back. It took me an hour of installing drivers, rebooting, uninstalling drivers and *reinstalling* drivers -- all of these numerous times -- before I could get it it work. A PocketPC device... a Windows 98 computer... two Microsoft products.. come on!
Note that this patch doesn't apply directly to any of the 2.6 kernels; I just make the change by hand, since it is only one line. I have no idea why Linus isn't including this patch; it has been available for months, and it isn't exactly huge. It does fix the Radeon frame buffer issues.
Also note that/. is munging the code; it insists on inserting a "&nbs p;" that shouldn't be in there. I can't seem to get rid of it. Gotta love buggy software.
Everybody is focusing on the pros and cons of the formatting, availability, and navigation abilities of the alternatives. The thing that makes man a killer app for me -- and the lack of which which is the only reason why I dislike html documentation -- is 'man -k'.
Hmm... now, there's an open source project waiting to happen. A front-end to links (or lynx) that does everything that 'man' does; namely, locate the information page for me, or search the information database for a keyword.
Since I switched to Linux and KDE, I've been able to:
Inline view most of the online-available movie trailers in my browser (kmplayer) -- even better, easily switch the display to full-screen mode.
User quality music software (xmms, noatun)
Use an interface builder (qt designer, ebuilder, qt architect)
Standby/Resume an easy way (apm)
Use StarOffice and KSpread, and discover that there are a number of enterprise quality alternatives for Linux
Use StarOffice, Karbon14, and the peerless Sodipodi...
No losing time trying to figure out how to force the OS to open a Word document that I know is a Word document, but that the OS, for some unfathomable reason, has decided isn't a Word document and absolutely refuses to open
Use my smartmedia/pcmcia adapter without going through 20 kernel/pcmcia-cs modules recompilations
Synchronize my Palm Tungsten T to the Address Book and the Datebook
Sorry for being snide. IME, Linux isn't as idiot-proof as MacOS, but it hasn't required rocket science for years, and lately (the past year or so) has been pretty much plug-and-play for me.
In order to be taken seriously -- indeed, to even be considered scientific -- a physical theory should be falsifiable.
Unless, of course, it happens to be _true_.
I think you misunderstood what he was saying.
By "falsifiable", he was saying that a good theory is one for which you can contrive an experiment that is sufficient to prove the theory false. The idea being that the experiment failing lends credence to the theory.
How soon it'll be on all cars? I wouldn't even begin to have an idea. Bluetooth could easily be replaced with some other technology before it gets widely adopted, but I think that -- since there is no rival technology with the popularity of Bluetooth -- that it is early to predict its demise.
If you're asking how soon the 2004 Prius will be out, supposedly in September. However, I know several people who have pre-ordered theirs; rumor has it they may not be easy to come by, at least initially.
Color laser won't replace color inkjet as long as inkjet keeps doing a better job at producing photo-quality prints. The most expensive color laserjet still doesn't, and may never, produce photo prints that are equal to low-end inkjets. Can you get archival-quality color toner for a laser printer?
I'd buy their argument that inkjets are on the way out if the market for photo printers was anything less than enormous. As it is, inkjet and laser are different tools for different uses.
The 2004 model of Toyota's hybrid car "Prius" has built-in bluetooth. Among other things, it'll connect to a bluetooth cellphone and route the audio (out) through the car's speakers. One of the options packages includes a built-in, GPS nav system; one can imagine communicating GPS data with a bluetooth-enabled Palm like the Tungsten T. Being able to play audio in the car from a bluetooth-enabled MP3 player, like -- again -- the Tungsten T or some hypothetical bluetooth-enabled iPod, would be nice -- keep all of your audio in one place.
Bluetooth may be dead, but some companies are still investing in it.
My God, moderators... put some effort into what you're reading before you mod this parent up. Jezus.
The tone of the letter you wrote was great; it is nice to see a well behaved advocate. However, you read the benchmarks wrong.
The only place the G5 did better than any of the x86 CPUs was when they used two G5s. All of the x86 configurations were single-CPU machines. The single G5 configuration had worse numbers than any of the x86 counterparts. So your comment:
In this test, the G5 beat everything on offer from the x86 world by quite a handy margin.
was wrong, as was your comment about video memory.
Caveat: I'm not trying to validate the benchmarks, but I get sick of lazy moderators.
I had ext3 on my wife's laptop for a while, and it failed twice. By "fail", I mean that, due to Linux crashes, the filesystem had errors that had to be recovered by hand. By "fail", I mean actual, significant data loss.
When I got my new laptop (from QliLinuxPC), they formatted the HD into one big partition (well, one for/boot and one for/), and formatted those as ext3. I didn't switch to ReiserFS, because QliLinuxPC said they'd had good luck with ext3. In the past year, I've had three seperate filesystem corruptions of / on that machine.
On my older laptop (now functioning as a print server), I have had ReiserFS for the past three years, and ReiserFS again on a desktop system for the past 5. I've only had one problem with ReiserFS, and that was three or four years ago, and I don't remember what it was -- although I remember it being a real pain to recover, and I think it involved LVM.
Considering I've tried it on two systems with entirely different hardware components, I'm faulting ext3. My conclusion is that ext3 sucks, but my opinion is based on the fact that, for a journelled filesystem, ext3 seems to be terrible at surviving sudden power failures, and has given me as many, if not more, filesystem failures than ext2 ever did.
I used to like fountain pens, but they're rather limited use. And don't take one on an airplane or over a mountain pass. That said, a well-used fountain pen will probably give you the smoothest action you'll ever get. If you really want a fountain pen, you might like the Namiki, a retractable fountain pen that can be handy.
I personally prefer rollerballs to ballpoints, gels, or fountain pens. You can press hard enough to carbon copy, and they're convenient to carry (read: "safe"), smooth, and rich. Of the rollerballs I own (and I own some dozen-plus from different companies), I like the Rotring and Pelikan the most. The Pelikan is the superior ink/delivery mechanism, but you could club someone over the head with most Rotrings -- they're satisfyingly heavy, durable pens. The one pen I haven't tried yet are the Kyocera ceramic rollerballs.
Of course, your requirements for writing implements may lead you to a pencil. I usually use both; I find pencils more useful if I'm diagramming, or scribbling pseudo-code, or what-not. The two best mechanical pencils I've had have been Sanfords -- one a Phd, and the other a Logo4. The Logo4 lasted through my last two years of college (with heavy use in my CS degree), and in the intervening 8 years. Considering that the barrel of the Logo4 is plastic, that's pretty amazing. I have no doubt that a Rotring -- I've never owned a Rotring pencil -- would survive that long, but most of my plastic mechanicals lasted a year at most before something broke on them.
Slashdot Mirror
Is that tax deductable?
"Of course corporations exhibit underhanded, selfish, profit-driven behavior. Its what they get rewarded for."
Heck, I'll even make you a better deal: send me to Morocco for just a fraction of the cost of your multi-million dollar robot.
I'm not about to argue that they haven't been mostly LAN migrations, but a fair share of both large and small instances have been desktop migrations.
This is really insightful.
And why not? Just because last year was the Linux Desktop year, why can't this year also be the Linux Desktop year? In fact, for the past couple of years we've been hearing about high profile migrations from Windows to Linux -- Munich, IBM -- and I'd argue that this is an indication that there are many more smaller, lower profile migrations going on that we don't hear about.
So, yeah... if we see another couple of big migrations to Linux on the desktop, then I think this year, too, qualifies as the year of Linux on the Desktop.
Another aspect that this ignores is the fact that, sometimes, code just isn't worth keeping. You write code, you learn from it, and sometimes you throw out what you've written and start over. Even if the basic architecture is still the same, rewriting code can often result in less buggy code than can be obtained by intensive debugging. You do this with your own code; surely it can be just as useful to do it to someone else's.
I've never understood this. You could make a cultural argument about the road systems in the US -- Americans being hyper-individualistic and all -- but what about the airlines? Talk about cattle cars...
The only discriminating factor that I can see is that trains are more fuel efficient. What am I missing?
When you start compromising on testing, checking, and rechecking your information, then you are indeed paying money to discover things that could have been determined with much less money, and without compromising the mission. Since the only thing they learned from that particular mission was that they had made that mistake, then I feel entirely justified in making the claim that they paid to learn the difference between SI and metric.
Let me restate that Socratically: they probably won't make that mistake again, so they learned something. What was it?
Nasa's success rate has been dropping drastically. They're spending money discovering mistakes they could avoid, and they're doing it in ways that cost not only money, but lives.
The big lesson Nasa needs to learn is to slow down. Spend more on quality, and less on quantity. Don't make excuses, and don't take shortcuts. I'm not saying anything new here; people internal to Nasa have been saying the the same thing for years. Even if the US government starts giving Nasa reasonable funding, they need to correct their procedures to avoid all of the recent mistakes -- something is broken in the process they're using that no amount of money will fix.
Stop being a shill.
I haven't put anything on the surface of Mars, but neither have I spent several million dollars to discover that feet are not meters.
The main problem in the USA isn't how we gather votes, although there are problems in some states (Florida). There is a more fundamental problem in that we aren't using the right voting mechanism. In the US, we use plurality voting -- a.k.a "first across the line" -- to determine who wins an election. This means that a candidate for whom only 30% of the people voted can win an election simply because there was no other single candidate with more votes.
This has a number of problems, but they can all be summed up by saying that plurality is one of the least fair, if not the least fair, way of determining the winner of a democratic election that you can get. Consider:
- Say 40% of the people vote for candidate A
- 35% of the people want candidate B
- 25% want candidate C
In the US, candidate A will win. However, what if all of the voters for C would rather have B than A? Then 60% of the population would rather have B than A, and the minority candidate has won.This situation encourages strategic voting; that is to say, voters for C have to decide whether they want to vote honestly, for C, or whether they should vote for B just to make that they don't get their least favorite candidate, A.
This is why we only have two parties in the US, and why -- despite the large number of Greens and Libertarians, neither party has a chance of winning. We don't even know what percentage of the US population is Green or Libertarian (or anything else, for that matter) because they aren't voting honestly. They're voting for the lesser of two evils. This system practically guarantees alienation of the largest number of people -- the majority ends up with a candidate they don't want, unless they lie when voting and vote for the candidate that they dislike the least who also has the best chance of winning.
There are voting mechanisms which allow people to vote their true opinion without being alienated. The most popular are Condorcet -- complex, but the most fair; Approval Voting -- not as fair as Condorcet, but much simpler, and can be implemented with existing voting technology; and Instant Runoff -- less fair than approval, no more simple -- but better than plurality.
Many democratic countries do not use plurality voting, although plurality is the most common. For example, Australia, Northern Ireland, and the Irish Republic (among others) use single transferable vote[1]. In fact, 68 countries (~2b ppl) use plurality, 31 countries (~400m ppl) use single transferable vote, and two countries (~18m ppl) use IRV (instant runoff) -- this is according to International IDEA Handbook.
There is a huge amount of information about Condorcet and Approval Voting available on the web. The Citizens for Approval Voting page is a good start, if you're at all interested in improving voting in the US. If you're interested in the mechanics and mathematics of the systems, start with Condorcet -- most sites that talk about Condorcet are less about how to get it implemented politically, and are more about how it works, fairness tests, and how it compares to other systems. The Wikipedia entry for "voting system" is particularly useful.
There is strong evidence that the "native americans" you speak of were not the first people on the North American continent, either. The original peoples of the continent -- as far as we now know -- seem to be more closely related to Australian Aborigines, and were probably wiped out by the descendants of the modern "native americans", who crossed over the land bridge from Asia.
That said, I can drain the battery playing audio in a few (4-6) hours, so I watch that when I'm not near a charger.
This isn't even vaguely true. This past thanksgiving, I helped an aunt (1) install the software to get a PocketPC device to connect to her Windows98 machine[1], and (2) fix her kitchen plumbing, which was leaking.
Furthermore, a few years back I had a next-door neighbor who was a contractor; he helped me install in-ground irrigation and lent me his tractor on the occasion that I needed it.
This strange condition is called "being helpful", and quite a few good humans suffer from it.
[1] This was the singlemost unpleasant computer-related experience I've ever encountered, aside from having to fix a corrupt ext2 superblock a few years back. It took me an hour of installing drivers, rebooting, uninstalling drivers and *reinstalling* drivers -- all of these numerous times -- before I could get it it work. A PocketPC device... a Windows 98 computer... two Microsoft products.. come on!
Note that this patch doesn't apply directly to any of the 2.6 kernels; I just make the change by hand, since it is only one line. I have no idea why Linus isn't including this patch; it has been available for months, and it isn't exactly huge. It does fix the Radeon frame buffer issues.
Also note that /. is munging the code; it insists on inserting a "&nbs p;" that shouldn't be in there. I can't seem to get rid of it. Gotta love buggy software.
Hmm... now, there's an open source project waiting to happen. A front-end to links (or lynx) that does everything that 'man' does; namely, locate the information page for me, or search the information database for a keyword.
Sorry for being snide. IME, Linux isn't as idiot-proof as MacOS, but it hasn't required rocket science for years, and lately (the past year or so) has been pretty much plug-and-play for me.
I think you misunderstood what he was saying.
By "falsifiable", he was saying that a good theory is one for which you can contrive an experiment that is sufficient to prove the theory false. The idea being that the experiment failing lends credence to the theory.
If you're asking how soon the 2004 Prius will be out, supposedly in September. However, I know several people who have pre-ordered theirs; rumor has it they may not be easy to come by, at least initially.
I'd buy their argument that inkjets are on the way out if the market for photo printers was anything less than enormous. As it is, inkjet and laser are different tools for different uses.
Bluetooth may be dead, but some companies are still investing in it.
The tone of the letter you wrote was great; it is nice to see a well behaved advocate. However, you read the benchmarks wrong.
The only place the G5 did better than any of the x86 CPUs was when they used two G5s. All of the x86 configurations were single-CPU machines. The single G5 configuration had worse numbers than any of the x86 counterparts. So your comment:
was wrong, as was your comment about video memory.
Caveat: I'm not trying to validate the benchmarks, but I get sick of lazy moderators.
I had ext3 on my wife's laptop for a while, and it failed twice. By "fail", I mean that, due to Linux crashes, the filesystem had errors that had to be recovered by hand. By "fail", I mean actual, significant data loss.
When I got my new laptop (from QliLinuxPC), they formatted the HD into one big partition (well, one for /boot and one for /), and formatted those as ext3. I didn't switch to ReiserFS, because QliLinuxPC said they'd had good luck with ext3. In the past year, I've had three seperate filesystem corruptions of / on that machine.
On my older laptop (now functioning as a print server), I have had ReiserFS for the past three years, and ReiserFS again on a desktop system for the past 5. I've only had one problem with ReiserFS, and that was three or four years ago, and I don't remember what it was -- although I remember it being a real pain to recover, and I think it involved LVM.
Considering I've tried it on two systems with entirely different hardware components, I'm faulting ext3. My conclusion is that ext3 sucks, but my opinion is based on the fact that, for a journelled filesystem, ext3 seems to be terrible at surviving sudden power failures, and has given me as many, if not more, filesystem failures than ext2 ever did.
I personally prefer rollerballs to ballpoints, gels, or fountain pens. You can press hard enough to carbon copy, and they're convenient to carry (read: "safe"), smooth, and rich. Of the rollerballs I own (and I own some dozen-plus from different companies), I like the Rotring and Pelikan the most. The Pelikan is the superior ink/delivery mechanism, but you could club someone over the head with most Rotrings -- they're satisfyingly heavy, durable pens. The one pen I haven't tried yet are the Kyocera ceramic rollerballs.
Of course, your requirements for writing implements may lead you to a pencil. I usually use both; I find pencils more useful if I'm diagramming, or scribbling pseudo-code, or what-not. The two best mechanical pencils I've had have been Sanfords -- one a Phd, and the other a Logo4. The Logo4 lasted through my last two years of college (with heavy use in my CS degree), and in the intervening 8 years. Considering that the barrel of the Logo4 is plastic, that's pretty amazing. I have no doubt that a Rotring -- I've never owned a Rotring pencil -- would survive that long, but most of my plastic mechanicals lasted a year at most before something broke on them.
The ledtronics link is especially good.