I'm not sure if we're talking about the same thing. When I talk about "Ease of deployment" I'm talking about putting an exe on a fileserver and creating a shortcut (actually, that's a bit crude compared to the optimum - with the right infrastructure, the shortcut isn't necessary)
You may actually be installing software onto each PC (bad idea). In order to acheive deployment from network drives, with the.net framework 1.1, you must first install the 1.1 framework. Then, because the program you want to deploy is running on the network, you need to deal with the security. On 1.1, you can simply disable it with caspol -s off. That doesn't work in 2.0
It was at that point that I figured that I ought to ask my Microsoftie bretheren, how it ought be done. ASP I was told.
I would like for you to tell me what the ultimate deployment strategy is. Then, you can tell me how inferior a web page is in terms of deployment.
I challenge you to go to Microsoft's site right now and install Silverlight. You won't have a problem finding it. Install Silverlight for yourself (okay, Windows only) and then ask yourself whether you've ever seen a more painless installation (short of what I've described above).
XAML will replace HTML (as well as Flash, PDF, Postscript, etc.)
Under the guise of security, Microsoft has quietly been making Windows applications difficult to deploy within corporations, and have been luring corporate developers towards ASP DotNet. With the release of The latest DotNet development tools and Expression Blend, the strategy is nearing fulfillment.
It has been a master stroke, I must admit. I've long thought that HTML was a poor foundation for what we're trying to do on the web these days. I spent all of yesterday putting the pieces together and am well impressed. And afraid.
Microsoft's strategy appears to be to drive internal corporate developent, then B2B, along with governments (Library of Congress), etc. and by eventually it will surely gain ubiquity. It will raise the bar for internet applications. Anybody switching between Expression Blend and, say, Dreamweaver will quickly see the folly of stretching pixels to make boxes. Vector graphics makes much more sense for the web. Along with a rich set of controls.
Why would you need OOXML, when you've got XPS (a subset of XAML)? It can replace ))XML, PDF and Postscript.
Of course, this is all an open standard right? And Microsoft has released the specs and is working with Mono on Moonlight, right? Well, yes, just when they're launching all of their tools that utilize it.
I imagine that's what will happen with each future version of the standard.
If the laws written by those with money and power are meant to benefit that same class then they must also, by necessity, benefit those who are making them wealthy and powerful. I was poor and non-powerful once, and still spent some of my Earned Income Credit on Doritos. Food Stamps too.
I'm actually warming up to the idea of corporate sponsorship of political candidates. "The Stephen Colbert Presidential Candidacy, brought to you by Doritos". Yeah, that has a nice ring. Political candidates have to seek approval, at most, once every couple of years. But Americans are voting with their dollars several times every day. They vote for who will be rich and powerful several times a day based not on what's philosphically agreeable to them, but on what they actually want - with a direct negative impact to their bank account. Political votes are free and voluntary. Capitalist votes (with dollars) are also voluntary, but not free. That's the beauty of capitalism - when a transaction is finalized, both parties say "Thank You" - because I wanted the Doritos more than I wanted the dollar, and they wanted the dollar more than they wanted the Doritos.
Mutually agreeable is a good thing, no?
So why not let those whom we've already voted into power have a large impact on elections?
Oh, c'mon! I really want this to work! This could be one of the coolest bar tricks ever. "Waiter? A shot glass and an egg, please...."...."Okay, hold on guys, could just be another couple o' minutes.... maybe I need to turn the Nokia ten degrees...."
Public key encryption and the like have given us some powerful tools with regard to security. However, I think too often people (sysadmins) are given to view those standards as a minimum requirement. Usually, out of practicality, the best schemes are compromised by not taking reality into account. Whether we're talking about passwords or private keys, the likelihood of me, as a user, introducing a severe security flaw into the system is in direct proportion to the inconvenience of the secrity policies.
If I have one password, I'll keep it secret. If I have to remember 20 passwords, be sure that they'll all be on a piece of paper somewhere around my desk. If I'm to be the sole keeper of a private key, let it be known that I won't keep it secret (I like to go on vacation every now and then).
Although nearly perfect tools for security do exist, they're more often than not not perfect in the real world. The legal standard of reasonableness is much lower than the technical standard. Somewhere within these comments someone lamented that because an email system blocked a file with an unknown extension, that that person had to fly to another country with a CD. Someone responded that they could've just mailed it. Yeah, like Snail Mail is secure.
Do you enter an ATM PIN at the drugstore? Does anything shield the view of that from the person behind you in line? Has anybody taken anything with your social security number out of your mailbox in the last month? You can't know, can you?
These sorts of things are not new. But overly draconian security policies can actually make things worse.
I like the intent of the.xxx TLD, but I think there's a better solution. Technically, it may be a challenge, but conceptually I think it's the best choice.
Just allow people to create public white/blacklists. But instead of an administrator approving or disapproving content, an applicant to a whitelist would agree to the terms of the list and be automatically accepted. But if they subsequently violate the terms of the list (for instance, posting a picture of a naked penguin) they'd leave themselves open to civil litigation. As a domain registrant, you'd choose any number of whitelist agreements and would have to face the list owner over any violation.
When signing up with an ISP (or setting up or subscribing to a DNS), you would indicate whether you want no restrictions, or a combination of white/blacklists. The many lists could evolve into consortium/hierachies whereby perhaps just choosing one of a handful of options (one might be "Everything but goatse") would usually be enough to define what you want.
It's not about you feeling that you know what the computer is really doing. If you think that you should be able to envision the assembly language that results from a distributed query that serves a web app then you are clearly a dinosaur. What it *is* about is getting a computer to do things that regular people want done. This is an area in which you admittedly have little experience.
To paraphrase an earlier post, are you totally comfortable with what happens when you use your credit card? Do you still use it?
Programming does not exist for programming's sake. Environments like Delphi and VS.net exist to produce solutions to problems. They're not teaching tools, they're not ego inflators, and they're not political tools.
And if you ever decide to actually program something truely useful, you might discover that what you dismiss as 'flash and bluster' actually helps people to use computers. For twenty years I've been fighting the notion that people aren't smart enough to work with computers. The reality is that computers are still not bright enough to work with people.
In dealing with a contractual issue, I heard/learned that the party writing the contract is under a higher burden of proof because, presumably, they had the most understanding of the arrangement and if they failed to put something in the contract, well...screw 'em.
You might want to put the burden back on the other guy. He may know this. Although, IMHO, if they don't care, and you're a sysadmin seeking to keep IP rights over shell scripts, it's probably not important.
Back in the day, there was once a lot of talk about how programmers would someday be obsolete. I figured the ultimate goal would be to be the one programmer that eliminated all others. But programmers have proved resilient by changing the rules every few years.
First it was the third generation language which allowed us to code in things resembling words. Then the fourth generation languages which integrated database access with the language. Then came the GUI with a new set of challenges all it's own. When that came close to being solved, then came the web and "markup languages" which made GUI programming again require a language. But dropping the 4GL concept now introduced the widespread adoption of SQL which means that I have RAD code in Delphi generating both HTML, SQL and, in some cases XML. And for job security, I can use MS Visual Studio to program in more languages than you know.;)
I think the end game will involve a graphically rich version of integrated circuits - much in the manner of flowcharts. Perhaps in an RPC model, or maybe open "source". Think black boxes, like IC's but more accessible and that don't smoke when you provide the wrong inputs. Let me connect them by clicking and dragging. Let me encapsulate them into larger black boxes.
I'll agree that this may be a pre-existing condition in the classic sense. But....
"When dealing with millions of people being insured..."
The problem is, that's not always the case (and, in fact, may not usually be). With our current system, you just can't sweep this under the statistical rug. I work for a small Third Party Administrator that does health plan design and administration for companies ranging from 100 to a few thousand employees. We are employee-owned, employ about 150 and are self-insured like our clients. Things like pre-existing conditions affect us and our clients immensely.
And if you think a fully insured plan is different, you're wrong. They all ask for past claims experience before quoting a rate. Companies with healthier employees pay less.
Now, the actual article, if I understand correctly (I haven't RTFA), is about worker's compensation. It's similar, but not the same. WC is paid because ostensibly, the company caused an injury to the aggrieved patry. But if it turns out to be genetic, that goes out the window.
Still, it could benefit from a common solution: National Reinsurance. Let the company pay up to a certain limit. And then when catastrophic things occur, let's take that money out of the national pool so that the small company (and, potentially employee owners) are not unduely burdened by a single individual.
Having found the correct article, I'll be interested to see if this ever sees the light of day. I did spend a bit of time working on Tandem Non-Stop systems (since acquired by Compaq, and hence, by HP).
Working on Tandems was kind of like visiting another planet and seeing how an alien race might do operating systems. Hardware-wise, everything is redundant - from the CPUs, to the power supplies, to the system bus. Supposedly, a failure in any one component couldn't bring the system down. Everything was designed to survive a failure. Creating a fault tolerant system was supposed to be easy - except that all the software had to be designed to respond appropriately to a failure event.
The system could definitely use an upgrade using Linux. It was limited to eight character file names (no filename extensions) and you could use directories and subdirectories - only. There was no such thing as a subdirectory of a subdirectory. Just two levels.
The operating system was built around a messaging system that was fast enough for ATM transactions, but was useless for batch type data crunching operations (unfortunate, since somebody at this shop had selected it to do exactly that task.)
If they're thinking about this on the same lines as the original vision of the NonStop operating system, the version of Linux that comes of this will be completely non-applicable to any hardware but HP's. Everything will need to be rewritten/tweaked. Starting with Linux will help their other deficiencies, but will result in a really weird Linux derivative.
But in the end, IMHO, the whole concept is flawed because, while interesting, it only addressed component failure and not disasters such as fires or tornados, etc. At the same time I was working on this system, I read a story about a mass transit system in Denmark automatically (and successfully) failing over to another system in another city as a result of a fire. That seemed far more robust. And those systems were running OpenVMS.
Great advice with the vital question: "What do you want to do when you grow up?" My brother added an Accounting degree and is a VP at a bank. I wouldn't want to do that so if I doubled up, it would probably be in graphic design and/or marketing. If you want to make (/let) other people do the work, get an MBA. Or, if you like robots & stuff, trying electrical or mechanical engineering.
The key is to answer the first question first. How happy you are doing your job will be a big part of your sucess.
Franklin did more than affect the United States. He affected the entire world in more than one way. In more than one field. And in many countries.
The scientist-philosopher-burgeoning industrialists of the late 18th century England looked towards Franklin's experiments with awe (much as he might've some of their's). It's actually pretty amazing how connected those guys were. This was a time when science, philosophy and business were inextricably linked.
As well as all this, Franklin was also an extremely popular diplomat in France. Depending upon your view of the importance of French assistance to the American Revolution, Franklin may have had an enduring impact on the global balance of power that exists today.
Comparing him to Marx is interesting. I think the main contrast is that while Marx was an outsider to the system, Franklin was a large part *of* the system.
Perhaps the revolutionary ideas of Marx may make him more written about, but I think the evolutionary contributions of Franklin will prove to be more enduring contributions.
I don't see where Stallman quotes Gates with any 'communist' statement. Please point out where I'm wrong (might've just missed it).
He does accuse, but doesn't offer the quote - in or out of context. A C-Net poster has offered a quote concerning music copyrights - but unless I've missed a few arguments, that's not the same as a software patent.
For reference, a typical sentence for breaking and entering with intent to steal is about two to four years...
Gee. Do you suppose there's a difference between breaking into someone's house and stealing their toaster vs. stealing ALL the credit card numbers at Lowes?
I read a book written by Air Force General Chuck Horner (Ret.) who commanded the air war over Desert Storm. Before retiring his last job was heading up SPACECOM, the military's space command. In describing that he remarked (paraphrasing) "There are many people who think that we shouldn't start putting weapons in space. Well, I've got news for them. There already there.
In any conflict with the US, our communications, global positioning and recon sattellites would be prime juicy targets.
In our precinct, you got a ballot, darkened in the circles (pretty much just like an SAT test) and walked it over to a scanner which sacnned it, validated it and dropped it in a box behind (it would spit it back out if it detected a problem).
I thought this worked extremely well. Several people could be filling out their ballots at the same time and the scanning only took about two seconds. So there were no lines, efficient usage of the hardware, the votes were validated and counted instantly, and there was a paper trail.
The reason Delphi didn't catch on enormously is partly to do with it not being a cross platorm language (object pascal I mean) butmostly for the same reasons smalltalk, scheme, EISA and so on didn't catch on. I wish I knew what that reason was.
I think the reason Delphi hasn't become mainstream is the same reason many other excellent products haven't. Microsoft cloned it with VB and kept just close enough behind that it was acceptable to choose the un-FUD'd development environment.
One of the thing I like the most about Borland's Delphi is that its Object Pascal allows you to be procedure or object oriented. It also has the best IDEs around, and allows you to do anything you want (web services, device drivers, console apps, database apps, office tools, servers, clients, etc, etc, etc). Truely a Swiss army knife.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure if we're talking about the same thing. When I talk about "Ease of deployment" I'm talking about putting an exe on a fileserver and creating a shortcut (actually, that's a bit crude compared to the optimum - with the right infrastructure, the shortcut isn't necessary) You may actually be installing software onto each PC (bad idea). In order to acheive deployment from network drives, with the .net framework 1.1, you must first install the 1.1 framework. Then, because the program you want to deploy is running on the network, you need to deal with the security. On 1.1, you can simply disable it with caspol -s off. That doesn't work in 2.0
It was at that point that I figured that I ought to ask my Microsoftie bretheren, how it ought be done. ASP I was told.
I would like for you to tell me what the ultimate deployment strategy is. Then, you can tell me how inferior a web page is in terms of deployment.
I challenge you to go to Microsoft's site right now and install Silverlight. You won't have a problem finding it. Install Silverlight for yourself (okay, Windows only) and then ask yourself whether you've ever seen a more painless installation (short of what I've described above).
XAML will replace HTML (as well as Flash, PDF, Postscript, etc.)
Under the guise of security, Microsoft has quietly been making Windows applications difficult to deploy within corporations, and have been luring corporate developers towards ASP DotNet. With the release of The latest DotNet development tools and Expression Blend, the strategy is nearing fulfillment.
It has been a master stroke, I must admit. I've long thought that HTML was a poor foundation for what we're trying to do on the web these days. I spent all of yesterday putting the pieces together and am well impressed. And afraid.
Microsoft's strategy appears to be to drive internal corporate developent, then B2B, along with governments (Library of Congress), etc. and by eventually it will surely gain ubiquity. It will raise the bar for internet applications. Anybody switching between Expression Blend and, say, Dreamweaver will quickly see the folly of stretching pixels to make boxes. Vector graphics makes much more sense for the web. Along with a rich set of controls.
Why would you need OOXML, when you've got XPS (a subset of XAML)? It can replace ))XML, PDF and Postscript.
Of course, this is all an open standard right? And Microsoft has released the specs and is working with Mono on Moonlight, right? Well, yes, just when they're launching all of their tools that utilize it.
I imagine that's what will happen with each future version of the standard.
I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlord from the Ministry of Silly Walks.
If the laws written by those with money and power are meant to benefit that same class then they must also, by necessity, benefit those who are making them wealthy and powerful. I was poor and non-powerful once, and still spent some of my Earned Income Credit on Doritos. Food Stamps too.
I'm actually warming up to the idea of corporate sponsorship of political candidates. "The Stephen Colbert Presidential Candidacy, brought to you by Doritos". Yeah, that has a nice ring. Political candidates have to seek approval, at most, once every couple of years. But Americans are voting with their dollars several times every day. They vote for who will be rich and powerful several times a day based not on what's philosphically agreeable to them, but on what they actually want - with a direct negative impact to their bank account. Political votes are free and voluntary. Capitalist votes (with dollars) are also voluntary, but not free. That's the beauty of capitalism - when a transaction is finalized, both parties say "Thank You" - because I wanted the Doritos more than I wanted the dollar, and they wanted the dollar more than they wanted the Doritos.
Mutually agreeable is a good thing, no?
So why not let those whom we've already voted into power have a large impact on elections?
Oh, c'mon! I really want this to work! This could be one of the coolest bar tricks ever. "Waiter? A shot glass and an egg, please...." ...."Okay, hold on guys, could just be another couple o' minutes.... maybe I need to turn the Nokia ten degrees...."
Public key encryption and the like have given us some powerful tools with regard to security. However, I think too often people (sysadmins) are given to view those standards as a minimum requirement. Usually, out of practicality, the best schemes are compromised by not taking reality into account. Whether we're talking about passwords or private keys, the likelihood of me, as a user, introducing a severe security flaw into the system is in direct proportion to the inconvenience of the secrity policies.
If I have one password, I'll keep it secret. If I have to remember 20 passwords, be sure that they'll all be on a piece of paper somewhere around my desk. If I'm to be the sole keeper of a private key, let it be known that I won't keep it secret (I like to go on vacation every now and then).
Although nearly perfect tools for security do exist, they're more often than not not perfect in the real world. The legal standard of reasonableness is much lower than the technical standard. Somewhere within these comments someone lamented that because an email system blocked a file with an unknown extension, that that person had to fly to another country with a CD. Someone responded that they could've just mailed it. Yeah, like Snail Mail is secure.
Do you enter an ATM PIN at the drugstore? Does anything shield the view of that from the person behind you in line? Has anybody taken anything with your social security number out of your mailbox in the last month? You can't know, can you?
These sorts of things are not new. But overly draconian security policies can actually make things worse.
IMHO, the only thing worse than having your rock face collapse is having it posted all over the internet.
Did they use your idea? Or your text? Your idea is not copyrightable. Your text is. Patents govern ideas. Did you patent it?
I like the intent of the .xxx TLD, but I think there's a better solution. Technically, it may be a challenge, but conceptually I think it's the best choice.
Just allow people to create public white/blacklists. But instead of an administrator approving or disapproving content, an applicant to a whitelist would agree to the terms of the list and be automatically accepted. But if they subsequently violate the terms of the list (for instance, posting a picture of a naked penguin) they'd leave themselves open to civil litigation. As a domain registrant, you'd choose any number of whitelist agreements and would have to face the list owner over any violation.
When signing up with an ISP (or setting up or subscribing to a DNS), you would indicate whether you want no restrictions, or a combination of white/blacklists. The many lists could evolve into consortium/hierachies whereby perhaps just choosing one of a handful of options (one might be "Everything but goatse") would usually be enough to define what you want.
"The Register thinks the worst of just about everyone and everything."
But the vulture looks so friendly....It's not about you feeling that you know what the computer is really doing. If you think that you should be able to envision the assembly language that results from a distributed query that serves a web app then you are clearly a dinosaur. What it *is* about is getting a computer to do things that regular people want done. This is an area in which you admittedly have little experience.
To paraphrase an earlier post, are you totally comfortable with what happens when you use your credit card? Do you still use it?
Programming does not exist for programming's sake. Environments like Delphi and VS.net exist to produce solutions to problems. They're not teaching tools, they're not ego inflators, and they're not political tools.
And if you ever decide to actually program something truely useful, you might discover that what you dismiss as 'flash and bluster' actually helps people to use computers. For twenty years I've been fighting the notion that people aren't smart enough to work with computers. The reality is that computers are still not bright enough to work with people.
The GPL addresses patents, right? If Oracle has a patent for which InnoDB has prior art, could they suppress the application of the prior art?
Just a thought.
In dealing with a contractual issue, I heard/learned that the party writing the contract is under a higher burden of proof because, presumably, they had the most understanding of the arrangement and if they failed to put something in the contract, well...screw 'em.
You might want to put the burden back on the other guy. He may know this. Although, IMHO, if they don't care, and you're a sysadmin seeking to keep IP rights over shell scripts, it's probably not important.
Back in the day, there was once a lot of talk about how programmers would someday be obsolete. I figured the ultimate goal would be to be the one programmer that eliminated all others. But programmers have proved resilient by changing the rules every few years.
;)
First it was the third generation language which allowed us to code in things resembling words. Then the fourth generation languages which integrated database access with the language. Then came the GUI with a new set of challenges all it's own. When that came close to being solved, then came the web and "markup languages" which made GUI programming again require a language. But dropping the 4GL concept now introduced the widespread adoption of SQL which means that I have RAD code in Delphi generating both HTML, SQL and, in some cases XML. And for job security, I can use MS Visual Studio to program in more languages than you know.
I think the end game will involve a graphically rich version of integrated circuits - much in the manner of flowcharts. Perhaps in an RPC model, or maybe open "source". Think black boxes, like IC's but more accessible and that don't smoke when you provide the wrong inputs. Let me connect them by clicking and dragging. Let me encapsulate them into larger black boxes.
I'll agree that this may be a pre-existing condition in the classic sense. But....
"When dealing with millions of people being insured..."
The problem is, that's not always the case (and, in fact, may not usually be). With our current system, you just can't sweep this under the statistical rug. I work for a small Third Party Administrator that does health plan design and administration for companies ranging from 100 to a few thousand employees. We are employee-owned, employ about 150 and are self-insured like our clients. Things like pre-existing conditions affect us and our clients immensely.
And if you think a fully insured plan is different, you're wrong. They all ask for past claims experience before quoting a rate. Companies with healthier employees pay less.
Now, the actual article, if I understand correctly (I haven't RTFA), is about worker's compensation. It's similar, but not the same. WC is paid because ostensibly, the company caused an injury to the aggrieved patry. But if it turns out to be genetic, that goes out the window.
Still, it could benefit from a common solution: National Reinsurance. Let the company pay up to a certain limit. And then when catastrophic things occur, let's take that money out of the national pool so that the small company (and, potentially employee owners) are not unduely burdened by a single individual.
Thanks for the correct link.
Having found the correct article, I'll be interested to see if this ever sees the light of day. I did spend a bit of time working on Tandem Non-Stop systems (since acquired by Compaq, and hence, by HP).
Working on Tandems was kind of like visiting another planet and seeing how an alien race might do operating systems. Hardware-wise, everything is redundant - from the CPUs, to the power supplies, to the system bus. Supposedly, a failure in any one component couldn't bring the system down. Everything was designed to survive a failure. Creating a fault tolerant system was supposed to be easy - except that all the software had to be designed to respond appropriately to a failure event.
The system could definitely use an upgrade using Linux. It was limited to eight character file names (no filename extensions) and you could use directories and subdirectories - only. There was no such thing as a subdirectory of a subdirectory. Just two levels.
The operating system was built around a messaging system that was fast enough for ATM transactions, but was useless for batch type data crunching operations (unfortunate, since somebody at this shop had selected it to do exactly that task.)
If they're thinking about this on the same lines as the original vision of the NonStop operating system, the version of Linux that comes of this will be completely non-applicable to any hardware but HP's. Everything will need to be rewritten/tweaked. Starting with Linux will help their other deficiencies, but will result in a really weird Linux derivative.
But in the end, IMHO, the whole concept is flawed because, while interesting, it only addressed component failure and not disasters such as fires or tornados, etc. At the same time I was working on this system, I read a story about a mass transit system in Denmark automatically (and successfully) failing over to another system in another city as a result of a fire. That seemed far more robust. And those systems were running OpenVMS.
It'd be Free as in Anarchy. Cool.
Great advice with the vital question: "What do you want to do when you grow up?" My brother added an Accounting degree and is a VP at a bank. I wouldn't want to do that so if I doubled up, it would probably be in graphic design and/or marketing. If you want to make (/let) other people do the work, get an MBA. Or, if you like robots & stuff, trying electrical or mechanical engineering.
The key is to answer the first question first. How happy you are doing your job will be a big part of your sucess.
Franklin did more than affect the United States. He affected the entire world in more than one way. In more than one field. And in many countries.
The scientist-philosopher-burgeoning industrialists of the late 18th century England looked towards Franklin's experiments with awe (much as he might've some of their's). It's actually pretty amazing how connected those guys were. This was a time when science, philosophy and business were inextricably linked.
As well as all this, Franklin was also an extremely popular diplomat in France. Depending upon your view of the importance of French assistance to the American Revolution, Franklin may have had an enduring impact on the global balance of power that exists today.
Comparing him to Marx is interesting. I think the main contrast is that while Marx was an outsider to the system, Franklin was a large part *of* the system.
Perhaps the revolutionary ideas of Marx may make him more written about, but I think the evolutionary contributions of Franklin will prove to be more enduring contributions.
I don't see where Stallman quotes Gates with any 'communist' statement. Please point out where I'm wrong (might've just missed it).
He does accuse, but doesn't offer the quote - in or out of context. A C-Net poster has offered a quote concerning music copyrights - but unless I've missed a few arguments, that's not the same as a software patent.
Gee. Do you suppose there's a difference between breaking into someone's house and stealing their toaster vs. stealing ALL the credit card numbers at Lowes?
I read a book written by Air Force General Chuck Horner (Ret.) who commanded the air war over Desert Storm. Before retiring his last job was heading up SPACECOM, the military's space command. In describing that he remarked (paraphrasing) "There are many people who think that we shouldn't start putting weapons in space. Well, I've got news for them. There already there.
In any conflict with the US, our communications, global positioning and recon sattellites would be prime juicy targets.
In our precinct, you got a ballot, darkened in the circles (pretty much just like an SAT test) and walked it over to a scanner which sacnned it, validated it and dropped it in a box behind (it would spit it back out if it detected a problem).
I thought this worked extremely well. Several people could be filling out their ballots at the same time and the scanning only took about two seconds. So there were no lines, efficient usage of the hardware, the votes were validated and counted instantly, and there was a paper trail.
I thought it worked extremely well.
The reason Delphi didn't catch on enormously is partly to do with it not being a cross platorm language (object pascal I mean) butmostly for the same reasons smalltalk, scheme, EISA and so on didn't catch on. I wish I knew what that reason was.
I think the reason Delphi hasn't become mainstream is the same reason many other excellent products haven't. Microsoft cloned it with VB and kept just close enough behind that it was acceptable to choose the un-FUD'd development environment.
One of the thing I like the most about Borland's Delphi is that its Object Pascal allows you to be procedure or object oriented. It also has the best IDEs around, and allows you to do anything you want (web services, device drivers, console apps, database apps, office tools, servers, clients, etc, etc, etc). Truely a Swiss army knife.