The only reason there were problems was that some locations were using "outdated" voting technology. Most of the country was not using "outdated" voting technology. All that is necessary is to get those places who were using the "outdated" machines to start using the machines the rest of the country was using, which already exists. There's no need whatsoever for anything newer than what was used in most of the country.
"One of the reasons Hollywood studios support this is because the video is uncompressed," McCarron said. "By compressing it, it's easier to transmit over the Internet because it's smaller. Because of its size when uncompressed, it's harder to trade or copy."
So they believe that because the format does not utilize compression, it cannot be compressed for transmission using some 3rd party compression?
Allright, alright. First of all, everyone's going to have a different list of games they think are the most influential so bickering isn't necessary.
I would like to suggest that Rise of the Triad (aka "ROTT") by Apogee has been more influential than a couple of the ones on the top 15 and several on the runners-up list. I would also like to back this up with evidence. There are too many reasons to post here, so just check out this great article written by Kevin Bowen: ROTT in Hell.
Unfortunately, lack of examples does not a proof make.
Granted, I too see JS used for trivial or annoying purposes more ofthen than for legitimate ones. However, there are very good uses for it, and I bet there are pages you visit that use it to make a better experience without you even knowing it.
Even in situations where the functionality can be implemented on the server, moving it to (or duplicating it on) the client end when possible *will* give a better user experience. For instance, if you can do a form validation instantly on the client end and save the user the 1-20 seconds it could take to get the same response from the server, the user is much better off. Plus you save some server processing time as well.
I absolutely agree that all content should be deliverable under lynx, but JS's usefulness extends beyond that of just content delivery, though that is usually where it is abused.
Whenever possible, I try to make it so JS will only enhance the site and is therefore not required. However, there are some user interfaces that just can't be done well with scriptless HTML and HTML forms (I'd include an example URL, but the ones that I can think of off the top of my head that I've done aren't visible to the public). In those cases, while any browser (lynx as the normal test case) can be used to access the site, the user's experience will be significantly less rich and perhaps even frustrating because an adequate interface for doing what the web site needs to do can't be implemented effectively without using client-side processing.
If you used JVM-level classes, then yes, you could.
You'd be limited by the OO conventions of Java (which are handled at the JVM level), namely single inheritance (though you could probably get around that at the compiler level using interfaces).
There's nothing that restricts the JVM to only running "Java". Compilers exist for many languages that compile into Java bytecode. I was in a group that wrote such a compiler for a class -- from that experience and other bytecode level Java projects I've been involved with I can say that yes, the JVM is definately meant for running Java/OO code. However, you can easily write a compiler for even non-OO languages that will execute in the JVM environment.
Also, I think you'll find few people who think that MS will write MS-CLR engines for lots of other OSes. Perhaps they will release source such that their engine can be ported by 3rd parties, but I haven't heard anything one way or the other on that issue.
I wonder if, at some level, a MS-CLR engine could be implmented on top of the JVM -- I wouldn't doubt it...
[this is all based on the assumption that what currently is most likely to happen does indeed happen.]
So it looks like the best that could happen for GWB is that he is elected to the office of President on a technicality (calling the Electoral College a technicality might be a *bit* harsh, but...). This would be because despite the fact that more voting Americans want AG to be the next President than GWB, GWB will actually win because of the Electoral College vote.
This is not an attack on the Electoral College system, as if the current situation plays out, many other people will do that for me (as I suggest below). Instead, I'm worried about what GWB *should* do.
GWB is 100% constitutionally/legally entitled to the office, and he would not be the first to be elected in such a manner.
However, GWB has run *most* of his campaign on the "character issue" in one form or another. Issues were discussed, but too often those discussions ended with him evoking the cry of electing someone who is not a "Washington insider" (though I'm not sure the son of a former VP and President who spent as many years as his father did in Washington can be considered an outsider, but that's another story).
What kind of character does a person have if they take the office as 100% theirs and theirs alone if more people wanted someone else to have it? A poor one. A decent person would keep the office (because they have legally been appointed to it), but spend a great deal of time making ammends to RESPECT the decisions indicated by the citizens of the United States.
So I'm curious: what do you think that he could do in this reguard? Any historians who know if those who were elected under similar circumstances did anything of the sort?
On NBC this morning (early morning) someone suggested that one way would be for GWB to appoint a primarily Democratic cabinet, which would be especially appropriate given his battle cry of bipartisan cooperation. One thing he would have to do to have any of my respect would be to do all he could do, as President and notible member of the majority party in the House and Senate, to get an ammendment that would eliminate the role of the Electoral College.
[of course, all this is moot if somehow a few hundred thousand national votes are found to be in GWB favor or the Florida recount results in a AG win there. also, if i've made any *mistakes* above, i welcome corrections.]
Scharf is a homeless voter who said he had planned to vote for Gore anyway, and that voters weren't told about the free cigarettes till after they were at the polls.
"They didn't mention that until we got down there anyway," he said.
...
But one voter said that he did not feel like he was bribed for his vote.
"They just came and asked us to go and vote," Bob Socha said. Socha also said that he enjoys voting and was already planning to vote for Gore.
...
"...These volunteers were from out of state, acting on their own and this was not part of any official Democratic 'get out the vote' activity in Wisconsin. They have left the state and we will not invite them to return," wrote Susan Lagana, a spokeswoman for the Democratic Coordinated Campaign.
Yes, I know he doesn't actually "work" there. I didn't expect him to be there, but I thought it was odd they didn't even have any way to get in touch with him at all. I tried VA after trying to get a hold of someone at the ISP he does (or used to do) some work for.
We sent him emails that day, and he had not responded to emails from us for quite some time (at least a week before the event) including [if i remember correctly] ones asking for phone numbers and such. I could be wrong about that.
for cryin' out loud. stop making the damn boxes. they're already taking a loss -- just make some really nice graphics APIs. if they make the money off of licensing and game sales anyway, having the boxes be the limiting factor only hurts them.
I was involved with a local ACM chapter and LUG who co-sponsored an event (not in an official capacity, so I do not represent the views of either). We had several speakers, but ESR was the "draw". We had a tiny budget going into it, but did just have enough to fly ESR in and out. All the arrangements with ESR were finalized many months in advance.
As is the tradition, we decided to try to sell T-Shirts to help pay for things. I paid for these out of my own pocket. More on this later.
I happened to be the person with a car who had the lightest schedule that day (I'd only have to miss one class to pick him up), so as soon as my class was out I picked up the person who had arranged ESR's visit and we drove the 80 miles to the airport as quickly as possible.
When we got to the airport, we searched the airport from top to bottom. No ESR. We talked to a series of airline employees trying to find out if they had any idea what happened to him. About an hour after we got to the airport we finally got someone to tell us that he never got on the plane. After more inquiry to see if he had for some reason switched flights (he didn't) and after checking voice mail to see if he had let us know he wouldn't be there (he didn't) we drove home.
Then I spent about an hour trying to get him on the phone. Here's a little tidbit: most people who answer phones at VALinux don't even know who he is, and those who do don't have ANY idea how to get in touch with him.
I finally gave up and went to class. Later (much later) that afternoon, we finally got an email from him. His explanation was that he "forgot", but that if we would buy another ticket for him he still MIGHT be able to make it. This was about 16 hours before the symposium was scheduled to start. Even if we could have gotten tickets at that point, we wouldn't be able to afford them.
Being the honest people we are, we notified everyone that ESR would in fact not be attending. As a result, there are still 90 T-Shirts left over (anyone want to buy one?).
[Luckily, another person involved in the event (thanks Andy!) got a hold of someone to fill in (who did a great job), which combined with the rest of the talks we had made a great conference.]
Only pay for his trip, eh? Let's see:
Plane tickets: $350
T-Shirts: $400 - $100 for the t-shirts we actually sold
Other: ~$150
PLUS at least two people wasting 10 hours combined just on ESR arrangements.
What did we get? Not a damn thing. I'm still out $400.
"I think it is very fair to say that the Internet would not be where it is in the United States without the strong support given to it and related research areas by the vice president in his current role and in his earlier role as senator"
--Vinton Cerf
in any case, the current BeFS still has some DBesque traits, in that anything in the FS can have attributes, and the filesystem supports queries for those attributes. check the new stuff out here:
http://www-classic.be.com/documentation/be_book/ The%20Storage%20Kit/index.html
I don't remember all the specifics, but from what I do remember, the filesystem was really more of an DBMS rather than just a bunch of named inodes. The BeBoxes used to have a way, in firmware, to rebuild the indices of the database which would get corrupted every once in a while (this was actually a very quick operation).
This was all rewritten, I believe, before any public (non DR) releases got to the general public...
Sorry I can't remember much off the top of my head, but it's been a while since I wrote an app for a Be release before the FS rewrite.
My roomate in HS had his computer confiscated simply because someone called up the university, accused my roomate of running software the caller owned (some "talker" software), and threatened to sue. He never even offered to produce evidence that his claims were valid, yet the university acted anyway.
After having delt with college computing facilities as a student and having worked at one, as well as hearing from friends who have done the same, I can speak with some authority. If the claims even appear to be valid and unless the computing center feels like risking relations with the other departments by putting the whole school in a situation where legal proceedings could be brought, they will likely do whatever the complainers say.
ok. even still, they could possibly contain enough data to refer to an index into a URL table and another number which could mean anything to the advertisor...
However, with the barcodes, it is possible that they are embedding other information in that barcode besides just a convienent way to get to additional information on the product.
This probably doesn't apply to the Radio Shack catalog, but for advertising, they could include information identifying which magazine/newspaper, even exactly which issue, the user is scanning.
This would give Wired and Fortune a darn good reason for footing the bill (see other comments about these two magazines' scanners) for the cost of the scanners. They could show their advertisers how effective advertising in their magazine is. Of course, this doesn't give exact numbers, but they would be able to say "at least" some number of hits to their site were because of this.
I have no evidence of this being in the barcodes (I have neither barcode scanner nor catalog/ad at this time), but it is a possibility...
Slashdot Mirror
The only reason there were problems was that some locations were using "outdated" voting technology. Most of the country was not using "outdated" voting technology. All that is necessary is to get those places who were using the "outdated" machines to start using the machines the rest of the country was using, which already exists. There's no need whatsoever for anything newer than what was used in most of the country.
"IT" is getting a bunch of people to endorse a non-existant idea so they can get a book deal...
You're *all* IT!
So they believe that because the format does not utilize compression, it cannot be compressed for transmission using some 3rd party compression?
Allright, alright. First of all, everyone's going to have a different list of games they think are the most influential so bickering isn't necessary.
I would like to suggest that Rise of the Triad (aka "ROTT") by Apogee has been more influential than a couple of the ones on the top 15 and several on the runners-up list. I would also like to back this up with evidence. There are too many reasons to post here, so just check out this great article written by Kevin Bowen: ROTT in Hell.
Unfortunately, lack of examples does not a proof make.
Granted, I too see JS used for trivial or annoying purposes more ofthen than for legitimate ones. However, there are very good uses for it, and I bet there are pages you visit that use it to make a better experience without you even knowing it.
Even in situations where the functionality can be implemented on the server, moving it to (or duplicating it on) the client end when possible *will* give a better user experience. For instance, if you can do a form validation instantly on the client end and save the user the 1-20 seconds it could take to get the same response from the server, the user is much better off. Plus you save some server processing time as well.
I absolutely agree that all content should be deliverable under lynx, but JS's usefulness extends beyond that of just content delivery, though that is usually where it is abused.
Whenever possible, I try to make it so JS will only enhance the site and is therefore not required. However, there are some user interfaces that just can't be done well with scriptless HTML and HTML forms (I'd include an example URL, but the ones that I can think of off the top of my head that I've done aren't visible to the public). In those cases, while any browser (lynx as the normal test case) can be used to access the site, the user's experience will be significantly less rich and perhaps even frustrating because an adequate interface for doing what the web site needs to do can't be implemented effectively without using client-side processing.
Damn. Beat me to it.
That's OK. It's a short flight, and well worth it.
Good point.
If you used JVM-level classes, then yes, you could.
You'd be limited by the OO conventions of Java (which are handled at the JVM level), namely single inheritance (though you could probably get around that at the compiler level using interfaces).
There's nothing that restricts the JVM to only running "Java". Compilers exist for many languages that compile into Java bytecode. I was in a group that wrote such a compiler for a class -- from that experience and other bytecode level Java projects I've been involved with I can say that yes, the JVM is definately meant for running Java/OO code. However, you can easily write a compiler for even non-OO languages that will execute in the JVM environment.
Also, I think you'll find few people who think that MS will write MS-CLR engines for lots of other OSes. Perhaps they will release source such that their engine can be ported by 3rd parties, but I haven't heard anything one way or the other on that issue.
I wonder if, at some level, a MS-CLR engine could be implmented on top of the JVM -- I wouldn't doubt it...
[this is all based on the assumption that what currently is most likely to happen does indeed happen.]
So it looks like the best that could happen for GWB is that he is elected to the office of President on a technicality (calling the Electoral College a technicality might be a *bit* harsh, but...). This would be because despite the fact that more voting Americans want AG to be the next President than GWB, GWB will actually win because of the Electoral College vote.
This is not an attack on the Electoral College system, as if the current situation plays out, many other people will do that for me (as I suggest below). Instead, I'm worried about what GWB *should* do.
GWB is 100% constitutionally/legally entitled to the office, and he would not be the first to be elected in such a manner.
However, GWB has run *most* of his campaign on the "character issue" in one form or another. Issues were discussed, but too often those discussions ended with him evoking the cry of electing someone who is not a "Washington insider" (though I'm not sure the son of a former VP and President who spent as many years as his father did in Washington can be considered an outsider, but that's another story).
What kind of character does a person have if they take the office as 100% theirs and theirs alone if more people wanted someone else to have it? A poor one. A decent person would keep the office (because they have legally been appointed to it), but spend a great deal of time making ammends to RESPECT the decisions indicated by the citizens of the United States.
So I'm curious: what do you think that he could do in this reguard? Any historians who know if those who were elected under similar circumstances did anything of the sort?
On NBC this morning (early morning) someone suggested that one way would be for GWB to appoint a primarily Democratic cabinet, which would be especially appropriate given his battle cry of bipartisan cooperation. One thing he would have to do to have any of my respect would be to do all he could do, as President and notible member of the majority party in the House and Senate, to get an ammendment that would eliminate the role of the Electoral College.
[of course, all this is moot if somehow a few hundred thousand national votes are found to be in GWB favor or the Florida recount results in a AG win there. also, if i've made any *mistakes* above, i welcome corrections.]
don't forget, it is their candidates' drunk driving arrests, not "candidate's"
[i'll correct myself now -- i just checked and we didn't explicitly ask for a phone number]
Yes, I know he doesn't actually "work" there. I didn't expect him to be there, but I thought it was odd they didn't even have any way to get in touch with him at all. I tried VA after trying to get a hold of someone at the ISP he does (or used to do) some work for.
We sent him emails that day, and he had not responded to emails from us for quite some time (at least a week before the event) including [if i remember correctly] ones asking for phone numbers and such. I could be wrong about that.
for cryin' out loud. stop making the damn boxes. they're already taking a loss -- just make some really nice graphics APIs. if they make the money off of licensing and game sales anyway, having the boxes be the limiting factor only hurts them.
I was involved with a local ACM chapter and LUG who co-sponsored an event (not in an official capacity, so I do not represent the views of either). We had several speakers, but ESR was the "draw". We had a tiny budget going into it, but did just have enough to fly ESR in and out. All the arrangements with ESR were finalized many months in advance.
As is the tradition, we decided to try to sell T-Shirts to help pay for things. I paid for these out of my own pocket. More on this later.
I happened to be the person with a car who had the lightest schedule that day (I'd only have to miss one class to pick him up), so as soon as my class was out I picked up the person who had arranged ESR's visit and we drove the 80 miles to the airport as quickly as possible.
When we got to the airport, we searched the airport from top to bottom. No ESR. We talked to a series of airline employees trying to find out if they had any idea what happened to him. About an hour after we got to the airport we finally got someone to tell us that he never got on the plane. After more inquiry to see if he had for some reason switched flights (he didn't) and after checking voice mail to see if he had let us know he wouldn't be there (he didn't) we drove home.
Then I spent about an hour trying to get him on the phone. Here's a little tidbit: most people who answer phones at VALinux don't even know who he is, and those who do don't have ANY idea how to get in touch with him.
I finally gave up and went to class. Later (much later) that afternoon, we finally got an email from him. His explanation was that he "forgot", but that if we would buy another ticket for him he still MIGHT be able to make it. This was about 16 hours before the symposium was scheduled to start. Even if we could have gotten tickets at that point, we wouldn't be able to afford them.
Being the honest people we are, we notified everyone that ESR would in fact not be attending. As a result, there are still 90 T-Shirts left over (anyone want to buy one?).
[Luckily, another person involved in the event (thanks Andy!) got a hold of someone to fill in (who did a great job), which combined with the rest of the talks we had made a great conference.]
Only pay for his trip, eh? Let's see:
Plane tickets: $350
T-Shirts: $400 - $100 for the t-shirts we actually sold
Other: ~$150
PLUS at least two people wasting 10 hours combined just on ESR arrangements.
What did we get? Not a damn thing. I'm still out $400.
Thanks a lot ESR.
oops. perhaps i should have actually read through that old bebook before posting.
/ intro.html
/ The%20Storage%20Kit/index.html
anyway, this page has a short description of the API side of it at least:
http://www.68k.org/mirror/BeBook_DR7/StorageKit
in any case, the current BeFS still has some DBesque traits, in that anything in the FS can have attributes, and the filesystem supports queries for those attributes. check the new stuff out here:
http://www-classic.be.com/documentation/be_book
I don't remember all the specifics, but from what I do remember, the filesystem was really more of an DBMS rather than just a bunch of named inodes. The BeBoxes used to have a way, in firmware, to rebuild the indices of the database which would get corrupted every once in a while (this was actually a very quick operation).
/ index.html
This was all rewritten, I believe, before any public (non DR) releases got to the general public...
Sorry I can't remember much off the top of my head, but it's been a while since I wrote an app for a Be release before the FS rewrite.
Here's some more info:
http://www.68k.org/mirror/BeBook_DR7/StorageKit
I'd hate to try to use a PDA for any non-trivial computation.
Isn't this how the characters of the movie "Explorers" achieved space travel?
[its been a long time]
If you want to use your cuecat under BeOS, you can use CueBe.
\end{plug}That's nothing --
My roomate in HS had his computer confiscated simply because someone called up the university, accused my roomate of running software the caller owned (some "talker" software), and threatened to sue. He never even offered to produce evidence that his claims were valid, yet the university acted anyway.
After having delt with college computing facilities as a student and having worked at one, as well as hearing from friends who have done the same, I can speak with some authority. If the claims even appear to be valid and unless the computing center feels like risking relations with the other departments by putting the whole school in a situation where legal proceedings could be brought, they will likely do whatever the complainers say.
ok. even still, they could possibly contain enough data to refer to an index into a URL table and another number which could mean anything to the advertisor...
"Paper Referrer Stats"
Sure you can just type in the URL.
However, with the barcodes, it is possible that they are embedding other information in that barcode besides just a convienent way to get to additional information on the product.
This probably doesn't apply to the Radio Shack catalog, but for advertising, they could include information identifying which magazine/newspaper, even exactly which issue, the user is scanning.
This would give Wired and Fortune a darn good reason for footing the bill (see other comments about these two magazines' scanners) for the cost of the scanners. They could show their advertisers how effective advertising in their magazine is. Of course, this doesn't give exact numbers, but they would be able to say "at least" some number of hits to their site were because of this.
I have no evidence of this being in the barcodes (I have neither barcode scanner nor catalog/ad at this time), but it is a possibility...