Unions fundamentally don't work when dealing with a highly heterogeneous, creativity-driven workplace. They are designed for labor forces with little to no specialization and little to no creativity.
You do know that postgradudate students and academics all over the worlds are unionized, right?
E.g., I am a member of the Academic Staff Association (ASA) here in Ireland, and am quite happy about this fact.
If any of you are interested in using the practices that Praxis preaches but you are working in Java, I suggest researching the Java Modeling Language (JML).
JML is a formal specification language for writing contracts for your Java programs. (It has nothing to do with UML or XML, other than sharing two letters.)
There are a number of quality research tools that understand JML including a compiler (jmlc), a documentation generator (jmldoc), a unit test generator (jmlunit), and an extended static checker (ESC/Java2), a kind of automated theorem prover, like FindBugs on steroids).
These tools and technology let you do design by contract and contract-based unit testing in Java 1.4 and are used by many universities and companies to help them build quality software. See the ESC/Java2 FAQ for more information.
Disclaimer: I am part of the research community that develops JML and the co-author and maintainer of ESC/Java2.
Bill spoke at my graduation in 2002 at Caltech as well. I had been a huge fan of his for years, so I could not have been happier that the undergrads invited him to speak. He was a really nice guy and we had a good time at the party afterwards. I am very happy to see Bill back!
Wow, I have not heard such a well-crafted-but-wholly incorrect highly-rated response on Slashdot in, oh, what, a day or two.
I suggest you learn about clockless VLSI (AVLSI) prior to commenting on it. Check out the website of either the group at Caltech or Manchester.
I think you will find that asynchronous VLSI is actually *easier* to verify, less liable to problems with noise and power, is more scalable, higher performance, and more flexible than today's dominant VLSI technologies.
From what I have witnessed, most American research groups are unwilling to tackle this problem with pragmatic, practical, high quality solutions. In other words, no one on that side of the pond is writing a high quality, fully documented, specified, tested and verified Open Source electronic or Internet voting software system.
Most American researchers and activists, from my point of view, like to complain a lot, but not "put their money where their vote is."
The systems I have seen so far, like the one you cite, are far from ideal. Most are written by a bunch of enthusiasts with little to no experience in developing robust, extremely high quality, complex software systems, and very few of them have any experience at all in voting systems. I.e., they are a bunch of hacked together Perl or Python that barely runs, let alone is the foundation of a future high-quality open source voting system.
This is (partially) why my research group here at UCD is working on these systems. See my prior comment in this article for more details.
Re:Swiss Internet voting built on two-factor authe
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Buggy Voting Machines
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· Score: 1
Actually, you are incorrect. The world's first national vote took place in the Netherlands in June for the national and European Elections via the use of the KOA voting system developed for the Dutch government.
This system has since been open sourced under the GPL license and my new research group here at University College Dublin is working on completing, documenting, evaluating, and formally specifying the system.
I led the evaluation of this system's external network security for the Dutch government while at the SoS Group at Radbound University Nijmegen.
I was also the co-author of the vote tally application for the European Elections in Holland. That application was written in less than eight weeks using formal methods to ensure that the software of extremely high quality and indeed every vote was counted. This system was written in Java with JML annotations and was partially statically checked (verified) with ESC/Java2.
Actually, the first full-blown asynchronous microprocessor was developed at Caltech. See http://www.async.caltech.edu/ for more details. The company Fulcrum Microsystems spun out of this group (and my living room) to commercialize related technology.
Actually, Quake3 works just fine over a network. I have run it to demonstrate OpenGL over X11 for non-UNIX-aware new students at my university several times.
And don't forget the sequel no one seems to have seen, "Logan's Sanctuary". Oh, you didn't know they made a sequel? That's exactly the type of ignorance I'm talking about.
Note that only the U.S. is advocating that digital passports contain unencrypted data about their owners that can be read from a distance. All other countries are supporting the idea that owner's data is encrypted on the passport by a key encoded in a barcode on the password, thus can only be accessed physically by a customs official.
I am afraid that you are mistaken. There have been several intermediate languages designed with language neutrality in mind, most of which are much older than two years.
My two favorites are the high-level representation form available in ANDF (over a decade old), and the typed functional approach of modern meta-complier frameworks like the Mohave system at Caltech.
In any case, I do also hope that Sun and related parties get experts on this precise topic involved so that the huge amount of research available in the field will not go to waste.
Researchers at Caltech and other institutions have been looking at this for about three years. See "Sparse Matrix Solvers on the GPU: Conjugate Gradients and Multigrid" by Bolz, Farmer, Grinspun and Schroder (SIGGRAPH 2003), for example. The paper, illustrations, and movies are available from Dr. Grinspun's homepage. The primary problems with the approach at the time this work was done was the limited bandwidth of texture-related operations in OpenGL based upon improper assumptions in pipeline optimization.
....as my girlfriends says of her Tangerine iBook running OS X, "I don't care if Quartz is not accelerated, OS X is still so wonderful I want to hump it!".
Hey, whatever makes her happy....
Also available as a licensable framework.
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Part of DALi's technology from nearly three years ago approached the problem of creating lifelike ALife entities in much the same fashion.
See http://www.dalilab.com/ for more information and a technology demo.
Another example of lack of information amongst the programming elite...
You can prove the correctness of any program without a single test case if you have a full semantics for the program as well as your specification language (since you have to say what the program is supposed to do, of course).
My research group focuses entirely on this problem for JML-annotated Java programs, primarily those from the smart card industry. We do real programs given to us by industry, not toy examples like those found in most textbooks (or example code from unit test suites).
Oh really? You should tell that to the thousands of computer scientists in this little field we call "formal methods".
My research group proves the total correctness of Java programs, primarily those that reside on smart cards. We no longer do "toy" examples any more---we do real-world programs from industry.
> Previously, posix threads could only have a couple > hundred threads going concurently on ANY hardware. > It just couldn't scale past that.
This is patently false, unless you mean "...posix threads (on Linux)...".
In my experience, I have written applications using posix threads on dual processor SPARC boxes with 10,000s threads with extremely high throughput. You need only reduce the stack size per thread on Solaris and you can squeeze as many threads as you have memory for, with no impact on performance. In fact, we find that Solaris performs *better* on our apps with 10,000s of threads than 100s. Linux simply cannot compare.
I'm looking forward to evaluating RH 9 and these new NPTLs, but I have to wait until Java works with that, as the above application I mention is written in *Java*.
That's one of the key principles of DALi (Distributed Artificial Life).
Secure distributed simulation is the only future possible for MMORPGs, especially if they are to become truely "massive". The current DALi architecture scales to millions of interacting individuals, far beyond anything else commercially available.
Actually, it already exists. Check out Gnus, the Emacs NetNews/Email tool. It has a Slashdot backed that lets you read/. as a newsgroup. Gnus works great with IMAP as well, even over SSL.
Loyola Law School and Caltech put on a joint program last year to investigate just this matter. Participants included Linus Torvalds, Terry McMahon (attorney to Microsoft), Ed Felton (Professor at Princeton and expert witness for the DOJ), Diarmuid O'Scannlain (US Circuit Judge for the 9th district), and many other dignitaries.
This case in question was the following: a large, commercial corporation ("Closed Corp") sued a large group of mostly anonymous Open Source developers and users ("Open Sesame") for building and advocating a GUI that purportedly violated patents of said corporation (i.e. MSFT sues KDE).
Actual briefs were researched and published and a mock court trial took place in October of 1999. The surprises in the verdict included jurisdiction over named defendants, regardless of country of origin.
More information can be found at the program web site. Joseph R. Kiniry
http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~kiniry/
California Institute of Technology
Early experiments in this domain have been conducted. In October of last year a joint program was conducted between Loyola Law School and Caltech on exactly some of the issues surrounding the "collision" between Open Source Software and the current legal system. Participants included Linus Torvalds, Diarmuid O'Scannlain (Judge of the 9th circuit), Terry McMahon (representative for MSFT in the Sun/Java case), and Ed Felten (prof at Princeton and DOJ expert witness in MSFT anti-trust case). Anyone interested in the details of this case, the legal briefs (which have been published), etc. should see http://techlaw.lls.edu/
Joseph R. Kiniry
http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~kiniry/
California Institute of Technology
Slashdot Mirror
We are working on it. In fact, coincidentally, this week there is a major meeting going on in Germany about exactly this topic, among others.
See http://kathrin.dagstuhl.de/07311/
Cheers from Dagstuhl,
Joe Kiniry
You do know that postgradudate students and academics all over the worlds are unionized, right?
E.g., I am a member of the Academic Staff Association (ASA) here in Ireland, and am quite happy about this fact.
Joe
JML is a formal specification language for writing contracts for your Java programs. (It has nothing to do with UML or XML, other than sharing two letters.)
There are a number of quality research tools that understand JML including a compiler (jmlc), a documentation generator (jmldoc), a unit test generator (jmlunit), and an extended static checker (ESC/Java2), a kind of automated theorem prover, like FindBugs on steroids).
These tools and technology let you do design by contract and contract-based unit testing in Java 1.4 and are used by many universities and companies to help them build quality software. See the ESC/Java2 FAQ for more information.
Disclaimer: I am part of the research community that develops JML and the co-author and maintainer of ESC/Java2.
Joe
Personally, I prefer "strap-ons" to "plug-ins." :)
Bill spoke at my graduation in 2002 at Caltech as well. I had been a huge fan of his for years, so I could not have been happier that the undergrads invited him to speak. He was a really nice guy and we had a good time at the party afterwards. I am very happy to see Bill back!
Wow, I have not heard such a well-crafted-but-wholly incorrect highly-rated response on Slashdot in, oh, what, a day or two.
I suggest you learn about clockless VLSI (AVLSI) prior to commenting on it. Check out the website of either the group at Caltech or Manchester.
I think you will find that asynchronous VLSI is actually *easier* to verify, less liable to problems with noise and power, is more scalable, higher performance, and more flexible than today's dominant VLSI technologies.
Um, I think you forgot about Ireland. We are still waiting for iTunes here too!
Most American researchers and activists, from my point of view, like to complain a lot, but not "put their money where their vote is."
The systems I have seen so far, like the one you cite, are far from ideal. Most are written by a bunch of enthusiasts with little to no experience in developing robust, extremely high quality, complex software systems, and very few of them have any experience at all in voting systems. I.e., they are a bunch of hacked together Perl or Python that barely runs, let alone is the foundation of a future high-quality open source voting system.
This is (partially) why my research group here at UCD is working on these systems. See my prior comment in this article for more details.
This system has since been open sourced under the GPL license and my new research group here at University College Dublin is working on completing, documenting, evaluating, and formally specifying the system.
I led the evaluation of this system's external network security for the Dutch government while at the SoS Group at Radbound University Nijmegen.
I was also the co-author of the vote tally application for the European Elections in Holland. That application was written in less than eight weeks using formal methods to ensure that the software of extremely high quality and indeed every vote was counted. This system was written in Java with JML annotations and was partially statically checked (verified) with ESC/Java2.
See the paper "Electronic and Internet Voting in The Netherlands for more high-level information.
Actually, the first full-blown asynchronous microprocessor was developed at Caltech. See http://www.async.caltech.edu/ for more details. The company Fulcrum Microsystems spun out of this group (and my living room) to commercialize related technology.
Actually, Quake3 works just fine over a network. I have run it to demonstrate OpenGL over X11 for non-UNIX-aware new students at my university several times.
Oh, and it is also actually nine words...
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension at the IMDB
Joe (aka BB special ops Poes in Doos)
I hear the soundtrack by Reitzell, Manning, and Falkner is brilliant though... Logan's Sanctuary sountrack
Note that only the U.S. is advocating that digital passports contain unencrypted data about their owners that can be read from a distance. All other countries are supporting the idea that owner's data is encrypted on the passport by a key encoded in a barcode on the password, thus can only be accessed physically by a customs official.
My two favorites are the high-level representation form available in ANDF (over a decade old), and the typed functional approach of modern meta-complier frameworks like the Mohave system at Caltech.
In any case, I do also hope that Sun and related parties get experts on this precise topic involved so that the huge amount of research available in the field will not go to waste.
Researchers at Caltech and other institutions have been looking at this for about three years. See "Sparse Matrix Solvers on the GPU: Conjugate Gradients and Multigrid" by Bolz, Farmer, Grinspun and Schroder (SIGGRAPH 2003), for example. The paper, illustrations, and movies are available from Dr. Grinspun's homepage. The primary problems with the approach at the time this work was done was the limited bandwidth of texture-related operations in OpenGL based upon improper assumptions in pipeline optimization.
....as my girlfriends says of her Tangerine iBook running OS X, "I don't care if Quartz is not accelerated, OS X is still so wonderful I want to hump it!".
Hey, whatever makes her happy....
Part of DALi's technology from nearly three years ago approached the problem of creating lifelike ALife entities in much the same fashion.
See http://www.dalilab.com/ for more information and a technology demo.
Another example of lack of information amongst the programming elite...
You can prove the correctness of any program without a single test case if you have a full semantics for the program as well as your specification language (since you have to say what the program is supposed to do, of course).
My research group focuses entirely on this problem for JML-annotated Java programs, primarily those from the smart card industry. We do real programs given to us by industry, not toy examples like those found in most textbooks (or example code from unit test suites).
> You can't prove that most software works.
Oh really? You should tell that to the thousands of computer scientists in this little field we call "formal methods".
My research group proves the total correctness of Java programs, primarily those that reside on smart cards. We no longer do "toy" examples any more---we do real-world programs from industry.
> Previously, posix threads could only have a couple
...".
> hundred threads going concurently on ANY hardware.
> It just couldn't scale past that.
This is patently false, unless you mean "...posix threads (on Linux)
In my experience, I have written applications using posix threads on dual processor SPARC boxes with 10,000s threads with extremely high throughput. You need only reduce the stack size per thread on Solaris and you can squeeze as many threads as you have memory for, with no impact on performance. In fact, we find that Solaris performs *better* on our apps with 10,000s of threads than 100s. Linux simply cannot compare.
I'm looking forward to evaluating RH 9 and these new NPTLs, but I have to wait until Java works with that, as the above application I mention is written in *Java*.
Secure distributed simulation is the only future possible for MMORPGs, especially if they are to become truely "massive". The current DALi architecture scales to millions of interacting individuals, far beyond anything else commercially available.
See http://www.dalilab.com/ and http://www.daliworld.net/ for more information.
Actually, it already exists. Check out Gnus, the Emacs NetNews/Email tool. It has a Slashdot backed that lets you read /. as a newsgroup. Gnus works great with IMAP as well, even over SSL.
This case in question was the following: a large, commercial corporation ("Closed Corp") sued a large group of mostly anonymous Open Source developers and users ("Open Sesame") for building and advocating a GUI that purportedly violated patents of said corporation (i.e. MSFT sues KDE).
Actual briefs were researched and published and a mock court trial took place in October of 1999. The surprises in the verdict included jurisdiction over named defendants, regardless of country of origin.
More information can be found at the program web site.
Joseph R. Kiniry
http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~kiniry/
California Institute of Technology
Early experiments in this domain have been conducted. In October of last year a joint program was conducted between Loyola Law School and Caltech on exactly some of the issues surrounding the "collision" between Open Source Software and the current legal system. Participants included Linus Torvalds, Diarmuid O'Scannlain (Judge of the 9th circuit), Terry McMahon (representative for MSFT in the Sun/Java case), and Ed Felten (prof at Princeton and DOJ expert witness in MSFT anti-trust case). Anyone interested in the details of this case, the legal briefs (which have been published), etc. should see http://techlaw.lls.edu/
Joseph R. Kiniry
http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~kiniry/
California Institute of Technology