Re:Complete this sentence:
on
CNet on WinFS
·
· Score: 1
True, as well as HL2, but they've both been pushed off to next year. It's still very unusual that year-old hardware is doing so well. Sure, you can upgrade your 9700 to a 9800 XT and your P4 2.8GHZ to a P4 3.2GHz E or whatever, but what does that gain you? Your Quake 3 FPS jump from 340 to 380? While a 40 FPS increase used to be nothing to sneeze at, it's not as meaningful when it only represents a 12% increase. There are no tangible benefits. No games go from being nearly-unplayable to enjoyable.
Exactly. I think that is what scares a lot of businesses/corporations. They have no idea who "owns" the internet, so they have no one to make out a check to. They have no way to gain a foothold by undermining their competition (selective IP blackouts?) Businesses like control. They like to know how a system works, so they can find ways to maximize their advantages. With random "egg-heads" in control, they'd have to rely on good products and excellent customer service on which to compete. We can't have that, can we?
As I understand it, after every major election, all the votes are hand-counted and tabulated anyway, albeit, several days/weeks/months later. These are the "official" results.
We will still get the near-instant gratification of real-time results via electronic voting, but instead of the results being dumped to/dev/null after a winner is announced, we will still have voter-verified hardcopies available for close-calls, recounts, suspicions of fraud, etc. And these hardcopies will have been machine-produced, so there should not be any complaints of "pregnant chads" et al. Redundancy is necessary for such a relatively important process.
Paper and mechanical ballots still have some potential for confusion, but we should be able to reduce it some more with electronic voting. If you have a touch-screen with a list of candidates for a single race, then after a choice is made, change to a screen that says "You have chosen CANDIDATE X for POSITION Y - Is this correct? [YES/NO]," then I think something like that may help out.
Seriously, anonymity is nice and yes, a requirement. But what motivation could anyone have for reverse engineering a voting machine and finding out who voted for whom? What would they do with info? Blackmail? Extortion? Are they going to hold the votes ransom for "1 Hundred Billion Dollars?"
Maybe I'm not nefarious enough, but I can't see the point behind any such act.
But..but.. How do you make that system XML and.Net compliant?
Seriously, we Americans have erroneously jump on the "Upgrade everything!" bandwagon lately. Some things just work the way they are, simple. Can they be upgraded or made more efficient? Maybe. But only with a lot of research and common sense, not by blindly throwing half-assed hardware/software at it and seeing what sticks.
Wouldn't it be easy for each voting booth to also print a completed paper ballot after each vote, so that the voter could verify the results? Then the electronic total could always be double-checked by using the stack of paper ballots (using a simple Scantron-type reader?)
We get the benefits (speed, etc) of electronic voting, along with the tangibility of real ballots (that are easy to read, since they are machine produced) and still maintain anonymity.
Mandate these machines be used in *every* election, as is!
Seriously, is *anyone* seriously looking at using these machines on a large scale? Are we geeks the only ones who hear/care about these problems? I keep expected the situation to "resolve itself," but that may not happen!
Now I'm going to argue with you some. Granted, I am by no means a statistician (nor can I probably spell it correctly.) You seem to be arguing that what if each of those "tall people" has another exceptional quality that lead to their success. Well, that's what a *random* sample is for.
If you randomly sample 100 tall people and 100 short people and find that 99 of the tall people make >$200K/year and 98 of the short people make $25K/year, you can't make the argument that each of the tall people has something else special, while each of the short people had a debilitating condition. You could if you picked your tall people from a list of top CEOs and your short people from death-row, but then that wouldn't be a random sample, now would it?
It's randomness that makes conclusions valid. But true randomness is never easy. That's really the "holy grail*" of statistics - getting a truly random sample.
* I swear I've seen those 2 words at least 8 times today!
I mod all 'Offtopic' 'Redundant' 'Flamebait' and 'Troll' as unfair. Read the goddamn guidelines.
Totally OT, but I just re-read the guidelines and I still don't see any sound basis for this statement. Is it the line that says "Concentrate more on promoting than on demoting.?" Because if that's the case, I should sue my old college. I was "concentrating" on a CS degree, but I still had to take those distracting English courses!
Bah, you're not just going to cave in and admit that your original comment was silly, are you?
You said: "If one has to buy Windoze or another proprietary OS to use it, whatever is offered is not free.:'("
My point is, why stop there? If you are going to arbitrarily pick the OS as something "non-free" that you have to buy to run it, why can't you just keep going to the other "non-free" things it requires: hardware, electricity, bandwidth/media, time, etc. Also, since you have to have been born and living up until now in order to use it, throw in hospital fees, food, water, clothing, shelter, etc.
Criminy! It looks as if this "free Maya" thing is going to cost the average person thousands upon thousands of dollars to use! Might as well just buy the retail version and save some money! =P
Or, you could simply look at it the *correct* way, and realize that there is a no-cost version of the software, that is *free* in relation to the price of the retail version.
If one has to buy Windoze or another proprietary OS to use it, whatever is offered is not free.:'(
??
So if the local gas station start giving away free gas, we should all complain thats it's *not* free, as you really need a combustion engine to use make use of it?
Perhaps you expect Alias to show up at your house one day with the source code, sneak in you house (so as not to wake you) and build/install it on your Linux PC for you? Wait, I mean *bring* a *new* PC for you (it's not free if you have to *buy* hardware) to use.
Lame.
Re:Complete this sentence:
on
CNet on WinFS
·
· Score: 1
Very true. Hardware and software developers have a very symbiotic relationship. It use to be games that drove PC hardware sales, but that's started to change recently. High-end equipment from over a year ago is *still* fast enough to run the latest Windows OS as well as the most demanding games out today. (An AMD XP 2000 w/Radeon 9700 is still overkill for 75% of new games.)
Someone has to pick up the slack and MS seems to have grabbed it with both hands (they already had the right hand on it.)
Of course! It's so simple! Let the goverment mandate that shows like "Everybody Loves Raymond", "Seinfeld", and Soaps be permanently banned from being produced and/or aired! So what if that alienates 96% of the viewing public and sets a horrendous precedent of Big Brother visibly controlling exactly what we see and hear; as long as "garcia (6573)" is happy with his TV, who cares! =P
Yeah, I guess I should have qualified my response with the fact that I am a white male from a "real" lower-middle-class family (as opposed to Jack Valenti's "$150k/year middle class) in the south. It shouldn't, but I'm sure it has had some effect on things. I went to public college on academic scholarships, got a decent job, etc.
Anyway, I'm not saying that the system is perfect or even close, but yeah, it is about the best out there today. It could use a lot of improvement, but let's not knock it for that.
Ever heard of "From Rags to Riches" stories? Not all of them are made up or trumped up on the evening news. Societies/economies based on human's own motivation and drive are not bad.
Your key phrase was "almost impossible." Many a fortune has been made on beating those odds. Don't be such a cynic. Not everyone gives up so easily.
A lot of good points there. Most Linux people would probably be suprised to know the number of PC users who would base their entire hardware/OS/software purchase on the basis of "Will it run my copy of "101 Shareware Games for Windows" that I got for $4.96 at Wal-Mart last year?" Do you know how many people out there are running Windows ME, simply because they purchased a new PC at the wrong time?
Now, as for free software for Windows, my entire PC is based on free software, except for WindowsXP and Photoshop. I run Firebird, Thunderbird, Irfan View, AVG, Filezilla, Open Office, AdAware, Kerio, CDex, Audacity, Winamp, Dev-C++ w/MinGW, Trillian etc. I can't remember the last time I actually paid for Windows software (and I only use a very minimum of warez.) I even have a nice CD that I use to install all these apps and more on new Windows PCs I build for family/friends.
Average PC users really have no need for Linux right now. I love Linux and want it to thrive, but I think that only way for it to advance on the desktop is for MS to keep screwing up and pissing people off.
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Mandrake has, by far, always been my favorite distro. Its setup has always been rather painless (although I usually go through it about 3 times, to get everything how I want it from the start), and the configuration utilities have always been the least confusing (compared to RedHat and Slack) to me. I don't boot Linux too often anymore, just once in a while when a substantially new distro comes out so I can see the progress made. I think I might buy this one, once I get to read a review.
Funny, for once, as it may be the closest to the truth we've seen so far. Will we be over-run by clusters of PDAs? Probably not. But ninja robots... *powered* by clusters of PDAs? Yikes!
Bah. Not all of work in our Uncle's basement. The blaster virus affected the net-connected PCs (about 800), not any of the small, private labs. They actually had the situation somewhat under control that same day, until people started bringing in laptops. Not all shops distribute patches the day they are released. Ever hear of regression testing? I thought so.
Slashdot Mirror
Answers to your questions: HERE
True, as well as HL2, but they've both been pushed off to next year. It's still very unusual that year-old hardware is doing so well. Sure, you can upgrade your 9700 to a 9800 XT and your P4 2.8GHZ to a P4 3.2GHz E or whatever, but what does that gain you? Your Quake 3 FPS jump from 340 to 380? While a 40 FPS increase used to be nothing to sneeze at, it's not as meaningful when it only represents a 12% increase. There are no tangible benefits. No games go from being nearly-unplayable to enjoyable.
No, we should let people use Diebold machines to elect which tall people should control the intarweb. Two birds, one stone.
Exactly. I think that is what scares a lot of businesses/corporations. They have no idea who "owns" the internet, so they have no one to make out a check to. They have no way to gain a foothold by undermining their competition (selective IP blackouts?) Businesses like control. They like to know how a system works, so they can find ways to maximize their advantages. With random "egg-heads" in control, they'd have to rely on good products and excellent customer service on which to compete. We can't have that, can we?
[/cynical mode]
As I understand it, after every major election, all the votes are hand-counted and tabulated anyway, albeit, several days/weeks/months later. These are the "official" results.
/dev/null after a winner is announced, we will still have voter-verified hardcopies available for close-calls, recounts, suspicions of fraud, etc. And these hardcopies will have been machine-produced, so there should not be any complaints of "pregnant chads" et al. Redundancy is necessary for such a relatively important process.
We will still get the near-instant gratification of real-time results via electronic voting, but instead of the results being dumped to
Paper and mechanical ballots still have some potential for confusion, but we should be able to reduce it some more with electronic voting. If you have a touch-screen with a list of candidates for a single race, then after a choice is made, change to a screen that says "You have chosen CANDIDATE X for POSITION Y - Is this correct? [YES/NO]," then I think something like that may help out.
Ok, but who cares !?
Seriously, anonymity is nice and yes, a requirement. But what motivation could anyone have for reverse engineering a voting machine and finding out who voted for whom? What would they do with info? Blackmail? Extortion? Are they going to hold the votes ransom for "1 Hundred Billion Dollars?"
Maybe I'm not nefarious enough, but I can't see the point behind any such act.
But..but.. How do you make that system XML and .Net compliant?
Seriously, we Americans have erroneously jump on the "Upgrade everything!" bandwagon lately. Some things just work the way they are, simple. Can they be upgraded or made more efficient? Maybe. But only with a lot of research and common sense, not by blindly throwing half-assed hardware/software at it and seeing what sticks.
K-I-S-S indeed!
Wouldn't it be easy for each voting booth to also print a completed paper ballot after each vote, so that the voter could verify the results? Then the electronic total could always be double-checked by using the stack of paper ballots (using a simple Scantron-type reader?)
We get the benefits (speed, etc) of electronic voting, along with the tangibility of real ballots (that are easy to read, since they are machine produced) and still maintain anonymity.
What am I missing?
Mandate these machines be used in *every* election, as is!
Seriously, is *anyone* seriously looking at using these machines on a large scale? Are we geeks the only ones who hear/care about these problems? I keep expected the situation to "resolve itself," but that may not happen!
Now I'm going to argue with you some. Granted, I am by no means a statistician (nor can I probably spell it correctly.) You seem to be arguing that what if each of those "tall people" has another exceptional quality that lead to their success. Well, that's what a *random* sample is for.
If you randomly sample 100 tall people and 100 short people and find that 99 of the tall people make >$200K/year and 98 of the short people make $25K/year, you can't make the argument that each of the tall people has something else special, while each of the short people had a debilitating condition. You could if you picked your tall people from a list of top CEOs and your short people from death-row, but then that wouldn't be a random sample, now would it?
It's randomness that makes conclusions valid. But true randomness is never easy. That's really the "holy grail*" of statistics - getting a truly random sample.
* I swear I've seen those 2 words at least 8 times today!
Well, it does put the recent California election in a new light. =P
I mod all 'Offtopic' 'Redundant' 'Flamebait' and 'Troll' as unfair. Read the goddamn guidelines.
Totally OT, but I just re-read the guidelines and I still don't see any sound basis for this statement. Is it the line that says "Concentrate more on promoting than on demoting.?" Because if that's the case, I should sue my old college. I was "concentrating" on a CS degree, but I still had to take those distracting English courses!
Bah, you're not just going to cave in and admit that your original comment was silly, are you?
:'("
You said: "If one has to buy Windoze or another proprietary OS to use it, whatever is offered is not free.
My point is, why stop there? If you are going to arbitrarily pick the OS as something "non-free" that you have to buy to run it, why can't you just keep going to the other "non-free" things it requires: hardware, electricity, bandwidth/media, time, etc. Also, since you have to have been born and living up until now in order to use it, throw in hospital fees, food, water, clothing, shelter, etc.
Criminy! It looks as if this "free Maya" thing is going to cost the average person thousands upon thousands of dollars to use! Might as well just buy the retail version and save some money! =P
Or, you could simply look at it the *correct* way, and realize that there is a no-cost version of the software, that is *free* in relation to the price of the retail version.
And where do Robot Ninjas fit into this Hierarchy?
Without even reading anything more than the story blurb, I deduce that this book got a rating of... 8!
[checks rating]
Ding! Ding! Step right up folks, a winner every time. =P
If one has to buy Windoze or another proprietary OS to use it, whatever is offered is not free. :'(
??
So if the local gas station start giving away free gas, we should all complain thats it's *not* free, as you really need a combustion engine to use make use of it?
Perhaps you expect Alias to show up at your house one day with the source code, sneak in you house (so as not to wake you) and build/install it on your Linux PC for you? Wait, I mean *bring* a *new* PC for you (it's not free if you have to *buy* hardware) to use.
Lame.
Very true. Hardware and software developers have a very symbiotic relationship. It use to be games that drove PC hardware sales, but that's started to change recently. High-end equipment from over a year ago is *still* fast enough to run the latest Windows OS as well as the most demanding games out today. (An AMD XP 2000 w/Radeon 9700 is still overkill for 75% of new games.)
Someone has to pick up the slack and MS seems to have grabbed it with both hands (they already had the right hand on it.)
Of course! It's so simple! Let the goverment mandate that shows like "Everybody Loves Raymond", "Seinfeld", and Soaps be permanently banned from being produced and/or aired! So what if that alienates 96% of the viewing public and sets a horrendous precedent of Big Brother visibly controlling exactly what we see and hear; as long as "garcia (6573)" is happy with his TV, who cares! =P
Yeah, I guess I should have qualified my response with the fact that I am a white male from a "real" lower-middle-class family (as opposed to Jack Valenti's "$150k/year middle class) in the south. It shouldn't, but I'm sure it has had some effect on things. I went to public college on academic scholarships, got a decent job, etc.
Anyway, I'm not saying that the system is perfect or even close, but yeah, it is about the best out there today. It could use a lot of improvement, but let's not knock it for that.
AVG Anti-Virus
Nice, free anti-virus software with frequent updates, schedulability(sp?), etc.
Ever heard of "From Rags to Riches" stories? Not all of them are made up or trumped up on the evening news. Societies/economies based on human's own motivation and drive are not bad.
Your key phrase was "almost impossible." Many a fortune has been made on beating those odds. Don't be such a cynic. Not everyone gives up so easily.
A lot of good points there. Most Linux people would probably be suprised to know the number of PC users who would base their entire hardware/OS/software purchase on the basis of "Will it run my copy of "101 Shareware Games for Windows" that I got for $4.96 at Wal-Mart last year?" Do you know how many people out there are running Windows ME, simply because they purchased a new PC at the wrong time?
Now, as for free software for Windows, my entire PC is based on free software, except for WindowsXP and Photoshop. I run Firebird, Thunderbird, Irfan View, AVG, Filezilla, Open Office, AdAware, Kerio, CDex, Audacity, Winamp, Dev-C++ w/MinGW, Trillian etc. I can't remember the last time I actually paid for Windows software (and I only use a very minimum of warez.) I even have a nice CD that I use to install all these apps and more on new Windows PCs I build for family/friends.
Average PC users really have no need for Linux right now. I love Linux and want it to thrive, but I think that only way for it to advance on the desktop is for MS to keep screwing up and pissing people off.
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/home/uninet/public_html/open/includes/sql_layer.p hp on line 78
/home/uninet/public_html/open/includes/sql_layer.p hp on line 283
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Mandrake has, by far, always been my favorite distro. Its setup has always been rather painless (although I usually go through it about 3 times, to get everything how I want it from the start), and the configuration utilities have always been the least confusing (compared to RedHat and Slack) to me. I don't boot Linux too often anymore, just once in a while when a substantially new distro comes out so I can see the progress made. I think I might buy this one, once I get to read a review.
Funny, for once, as it may be the closest to the truth we've seen so far. Will we be over-run by clusters of PDAs? Probably not. But ninja robots... *powered* by clusters of PDAs? Yikes!
Bah. Not all of work in our Uncle's basement. The blaster virus affected the net-connected PCs (about 800), not any of the small, private labs. They actually had the situation somewhat under control that same day, until people started bringing in laptops. Not all shops distribute patches the day they are released. Ever hear of regression testing? I thought so.