I wish. We've had many, MANY reports of lost votes from these machines and have heard little or nothing about voiding elections. If elections were re-run, this wouldn't be much of an issue.
The entire drive behind voting machines (except for greed by the companies, and plans of fraud by others) is sloth. No votes to count means no counting votes, no hassles, everything's easy. The biggest promoters are the heads of election boards.
If you smash a machine you'd better be damn sure it has ZERO votes in it, because those votes'll be GONE, and you'll have disenfranchized people. Further, (to assume that any disenfranchizement is ethically acceptable, which it ain't) you'd be doing it at your polling place, where mostly like-minded peope would be. So you're disenfranchizing the people you most want to see be able to vote.
Therefor, if you're gonna smash 'em, smash the machines the day before the elections, so Diebold can't bring in replacements. Smash them in large numbers. Smash them when they're still located centrally, and haven't yet been disbursed to the polling places. But understand that it would certainly be a felony, and that to do so could cost you years of your life.
Play with crack sometime, if you haven't already. How many rules do you have to go through to cover all likely L33T'ing up of a dictionary? Five? Maybe Ten?
Compare that to adding ONE stinking punctuation character into the middle of a word. That's (number of punctuation marks available * positions) = at least 250.
So adding a single punctuation mark in a word means a dictionary attack needs about 7,500,000 tries, whereas L33ting it up means the dictionary attack needs 300,000 tries.
Stoping l33ting. It's infantile, hard for users to remember, and not helpful for security.
You know what works many times better? MISPELLING A WORD.
Since we seem to be saying "No, you have to use a PCI card, USB solutions stink" let's shift just a little and talk about PCI solutions.
There's not much point in going non-HDTV, at this point, and I'd like to wait until the last minute to buy -- as I expect them to improve. But buying them before they are forced to include DRM seems paramount.
What are you other folks thinking? Do you expect them to improve? Do you expect DRM to appear before the July 2005 cutoff?
Ouch! I think this isn't a pointless metric at all. I want to play a ame, finish it, and then get on with my life. This means this darn thing'll take three times as long as Vice City did.
Games like this give a sense of accomplishment when you finish. When I heard "This could be the beginning of a beautiful partnership. You're a backstabbing ambulance chaser and I'm a psychotic killer." -- or whatever that last line was -- I had this happy moment. I was actually irritated, a little, when I found that after the credits there was a little more stuff to experience. Phone calls about Mercedez, for starters. How do I know when I've finished? At some poiont there will be no stimuli left, nothing left to hunt get, and I'll never know for sure. I could be driving around kneecapping people for hours without any payoff.
I want these things to be DONE at some point. 150 hours?!?!?!
Ok, so what you're doing, let's just take a wild guess here, is clamping a cat's head so that it cannot move. Then you're removing the back of the cat's skull, so that you can get at its occipital lobes. Then you show it pretty pictures. The classic fun would be to measure neuron firings invasively with insanely thin electrodes.
(To quote Dr. Hugh Wilson, "Well, what else can you do with a cat?")
While I sometimes agree with Hugh, I don't quite get what you're looking for with the camera. Why cooling?
Maybe you'd give us a few lines about what you're doing? What's the method, and what are you looking for? Inquiring minds want to know.
(As for cooling, just use whatever system you're using to make ratsicles, along with a Jefi (see July 17's/.) and some propylene glycol. Or would that be too cold?)
Great. Now we know that computers in cars won't work for a another few years.
Couldn't Novel or IBM or anybody with access to competant programmers and management where the idea would be to ACTUALLY TALK to other cars in a secure fashion do this, instead of a suicidally competetive company who'll make a closed system, make sure nothing works with it, patent everything, and introduce huge bugs in a system without any security, such that we won't be able to have these computers control anything important in our cars (all the way down to the power locks) for fear of them LITERALLY killing us.
Damnit. The real problem isn't that Microsoft is a monopoly, or absurdly litigatious, or hypercompetitive, or out of touch with real computing or the problems of real users, or even that they're liars -- the real problem is that these all act together to make them INCOMPETENT.
And this stuff has such promise, too. Now we're screwed, and will have to fight them for years to get good systems in.
Why any hardware company would be foolish enough to implement such a thing, until absolutely forced to, is unclear to me.
If they think that this means they can charge every software vendor to develop for it, they're right -- in theory. In practice, there are open systems to develop for, and that's where development efforts will go.
If this feels nice in your hand, there'll be others with the form-factor and without DRM,
and those will actually have developers.
Unlike this thing, which will remain a glorified Walkman.
If there are performance issues, and it represents a possible loss of face for Microsoft, wouldn't a better acronym be "Services Now Available For Unix"?
I don't know much about meetup.com, but I know the Arabic group I've been to uses it to organize, as do many other arabic groups. They're evangelists for Arabic (not Islam, usually) and you can find them at http://arabic.meetup.com
For Us: Soul of the New Machine
Everyone who thinks that a career in tech is going to be fun, good and right for them needs to read this. It won't stop you from doing it, any more than any of the other books can get you doing it, since tech comes from inside and must come out, period. But you'll understand why your life will be a tragedy from day one in the workforce, instead doing it for years while thinking it's just you.
I'm about to buy a large central NFS fileserver for my office. While GFS won't be in place for me earlier enough to stop that purchase, I'm thinking the a GFS-like product would be a huge boon for offices if:
You can make all those crappy PC hard drives look like one big, redundant, reliable, non-slow (fast is too much to hope for), network drive.
Imagine -- you get rid of Microsoft and stop paying licensing and, at the same time, get company-wide access to a massive filesystem which can take multiple failures without loosing data. One which uses all those 50-200 gig hard drives in each of those PCs which are already sunk costs. (I've got 10s of terabytes, distributed among those desktops.)
That would be Coporate Nirvana.
But would GFS do that, or would that require a differnet file system -- has this been done?
I see a LOT of resumes. Short is great, if you've got a lot of job experience which targets the job you're applying for.
So if you can do short, great.
BUT YOU CAN'T, BUCKO. You've got no experience. So you need that interview, 'cause we think you're a rank amateur. You'd better show in that resume that you didn't just do the basic class crap we see all the time.
Talk about projects in complete sentences and make interesting points about them.
Screeners ARE busy people. They won't read your resume. Or Mine. Or anyone else's. They search for keywords. Put in a short skills section with keywords. Use different forms of the same skill names (eg. VB, Visual Basic, Microsoft Visual Basic librarywhatever environment, etc. (and by the way, if it's a java or C job, downplay the friggin' VB)) so that the search is more likely to hit.
That was stage one: "Get past the screener, to someone who knows something about computing."
Then you've got an entirely different stage. The stage where you have to get the interview. Your resume has been passed to someone who will maybe read it. You have to talk to them like a human being, and tell them what you know, honestly, and yet in a way which shows you ACTUALLY KNOW STUFF.
You cannot do that in SHORT. You do that in sections.
Some people will skip such a resume. Well, you weren't gonna get the interview with them, anyhow, because without job experience, as a candidate, you suck.
So take your time. Write several sentences for each skill or experience you want to accentuate. Say it in your experience section, say it in your cover letter, etc. Don't be boring, but don't expect people to believe that since you took a class in VB that you know anything at all about it. SHOW IT.
Include a link to a web space which shows your work, if it's good.
Include a few sentences in the cover letter which show that you've looked to see what the company you're applying to does. Use its name. Say you're interested in something to do with it.
And don't listen to anything you've read about resumes for jobs right out of college or high-school. They assume you have no skills and they know nothing about the computing workplace. They're school-teachers, for goodness sake. They have associates degrees, many in education, and damned few of them worked in a MIS shop. Ignore them.
Gramattical or not "Linux is a leprosy" is gonna get bandied about. It's a great sound bite. The guy's good. No, wait, not 'good' -- 'talented', as he seems to have dropped his morals somewhere. He's very smart, a very convicing writer, and he knows what he's saying is a lie, and he's OK with that. The guy's a snake, and he's dangerous.
A fragmented response isn't as convincing as his duplicitous prose. If someone who is a very good writer in the community could weave together the rebuttals, and someone with some cash flow (FSF or someone?) could make a packet with that and the original rebuttals, it would be a good idea to send that out to the movers and shakers who are gonna be handed this "study".
It'll take both a well written, sound-bite-laden document and some distribution money to dampen this hissing noise.
A lot of them didn't TRY to make it out of the gate, because they knew they were fundementally flawed.
Man, that was frustrating.
Because, for instance, the high school team which withdrew before the gate might have done as well as one of the well-funded company teams, since most of them went down and went down fast.
It would have been great to see them ALL publicly fail to make all the mistakes obvious and learn-from-able.
I thought that was a waste, and assume that some of the people who decided to withdraw felt the same way when they saw all the others fail.
This is a frustrating situation. Of course we have the right to boycott. But asking for a boycott on Slashdot generates huge numbers of click-throughs, and makes the microsoft ads appear like a great idea to the management of Linux Today.
And of course Microsoft should be able to say what they want, and say it wherever they want to and can. John Stuart Mill in "On Liberty" says that speech _against_ something makes it stronger, and he's right. We need Microsoft to cook up lies about us so that we actively defend them, and that makes us smarter, faster, better.
But, in this case, it's destructive, because Microsoft has uneven access to the media and uneven credibility. The PHB's believe them, not us.
I remember a wall in a stairwell leading to the library, when I was in collge. It was painted white, and graffiti began to accumulate. Some of it was nasty: anti-black, anti-female, anti-jew, and anti-white-males. All of it would get scratched out/obliterated pretty quickly -- All except that against white males. Presumably because white males don't CARE. They have power and credability and don't give a heck about what others say. I (a white male) found that stuff funny.
So the question has a twisted side: do we exert our power of boycott (or others) to squelch Microsoft, or do we assume the position of the Powerful, and let 'em say what they want, when they want, and just make OURSELVES more heard and more believed?
That would be the bigger solution. And someday, Microsoft will be the marginalized group, and they'll be trying to silence us. But that's not today.
So we scratch out the stuff that bugs us, in fear others will believe it, or because it just plain offends us. And since we're weak, and they strong (media spending-wise, at least) maybe that's the best thing for us for now?
Sticks in my craw either way.
I'd like to err on the side of being big, though....And if those bastards say ONE thing that's actionable as fraud, try to sue them till their posteriors bleed.
I see a lot of people here badmouthing select and middle-click. Let me RUN to its defense.
The ^C ^V paradigm irritates the crap out of me. I LOVE middle-click paste.
I only have a problem with it when things (like TORA, for instance) don't use it properly.
^C ^V is one of the reasons (along with the crappy foreground window model) that I feel horribly encumbered and inefficient in Windows.
While I understand the urge to select and replace, but if you really want it, add a modifier key like control to your select action, and arrange for that NOT to replace the primary selection.
The fault isn't with middle-button paste, here. It's with forcing a Macintosh-ism onto a nice, clean X paradigm.
This subscription wackiness comes up every so often. And it fails.
Now just as the Free Software community is making obvious headway, a ostrich-like voice, muffled by the sand of the hole it's been stuffed in, says "Things are not going in the direction everyone can see. No sir! Things are getting more like they used to be than they are even today!" -- Ah, Bill...
Jonathan Schwartz, on the other hand, is flailing around. His hardware business is in trouble, and instead of fixing the problems, he thinks a complete abdication is in order. Apple tried this under Sculley.
The seals had little to nothing to do ith your dwindling cod population. Overfishing had everything to do with it. Now kill the damn seals, take their pelts and eat them -- I have no problem with that.
But making a scapegoat of something -- lying to others and yourselves, not listening to the obvious truth and blaming your sins on Elvis, space-beings, Canada, rock-music or seals? Now that's abhorrent.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish. We've had many, MANY reports of lost votes from these machines and have heard little or nothing about voiding elections. If elections were re-run, this wouldn't be much of an issue.
The entire drive behind voting machines (except for greed by the companies, and plans of fraud by others) is sloth. No votes to count means no counting votes, no hassles, everything's easy. The biggest promoters are the heads of election boards.
If you smash a machine you'd better be damn sure it has ZERO votes in it, because those votes'll be GONE, and you'll have disenfranchized people. Further, (to assume that any disenfranchizement is ethically acceptable, which it ain't) you'd be doing it at your polling place, where mostly like-minded peope would be. So you're disenfranchizing the people you most want to see be able to vote.
Therefor, if you're gonna smash 'em, smash the machines the day before the elections, so Diebold can't bring in replacements. Smash them in large numbers. Smash them when they're still located centrally, and haven't yet been disbursed to the polling places. But understand that it would certainly be a felony, and that to do so could cost you years of your life.
Yes, that's classic. I see that a lot.
And it's terrible.
Play with crack sometime, if you haven't already. How many rules do you have to go through to cover all likely L33T'ing up of a dictionary? Five? Maybe Ten?
Compare that to adding ONE stinking punctuation character into the middle of a word. That's (number of punctuation marks available * positions) = at least 250.
So adding a single punctuation mark in a word means a dictionary attack needs about 7,500,000 tries, whereas L33ting it up means the dictionary attack needs 300,000 tries.
Stoping l33ting. It's infantile, hard for users to remember, and not helpful for security.
You know what works many times better? MISPELLING A WORD.
Since we seem to be saying "No, you have to use a PCI card, USB solutions stink" let's shift just a little and talk about PCI solutions.
There's not much point in going non-HDTV, at this point, and I'd like to wait until the last minute to buy -- as I expect them to improve. But buying them before they are forced to include DRM seems paramount.
What are you other folks thinking? Do you expect them to improve? Do you expect DRM to appear before the July 2005 cutoff?
No, it means our neighbors are BORING. They don't have much sex, and they're not interested in leaving the house.
Maybe we should throw a party and invite them.
Ouch! I think this isn't a pointless metric at all. I want to play a ame, finish it, and then get on with my life. This means this darn thing'll take three times as long as Vice City did.
Games like this give a sense of accomplishment when you finish. When I heard "This could be the beginning of a beautiful partnership. You're a backstabbing ambulance chaser and I'm a psychotic killer." -- or whatever that last line was -- I had this happy moment. I was actually irritated, a little, when I found that after the credits there was a little more stuff to experience. Phone calls about Mercedez, for starters. How do I know when I've finished? At some poiont there will be no stimuli left, nothing left to hunt get, and I'll never know for sure. I could be driving around kneecapping people for hours without any payoff.
I want these things to be DONE at some point. 150 hours?!?!?!
Jeez.
I'll ask a second time, and I suppose I'll get modded down again, as apparently, Slashdot just doesn't want to know.
WHY DO YOU NEED TO COOL THE CAMERA?
Ok, so what you're doing, let's just take a wild guess here, is clamping a cat's head so that it cannot move. Then you're removing the back of the cat's skull, so that you can get at its occipital lobes. Then you show it pretty pictures. The classic fun would be to measure neuron firings invasively with insanely thin electrodes.
/.) and some propylene glycol. Or would that be too cold?)
(To quote Dr. Hugh Wilson, "Well, what else can you do with a cat?")
While I sometimes agree with Hugh, I don't quite get what you're looking for with the camera. Why cooling?
Maybe you'd give us a few lines about what you're doing? What's the method, and what are you looking for? Inquiring minds want to know.
(As for cooling, just use whatever system you're using to make ratsicles, along with a Jefi (see July 17's
Our local cowboy might want to change that link.
Great. Now we know that computers in cars won't work for a another few years.
Couldn't Novel or IBM or anybody with access to competant programmers and management where the idea would be to ACTUALLY TALK to other cars in a secure fashion do this, instead of a suicidally competetive company who'll make a closed system, make sure nothing works with it, patent everything, and introduce huge bugs in a system without any security, such that we won't be able to have these computers control anything important in our cars (all the way down to the power locks) for fear of them LITERALLY killing us.
Damnit. The real problem isn't that Microsoft is a monopoly, or absurdly litigatious, or hypercompetitive, or out of touch with real computing or the problems of real users, or even that they're liars -- the real problem is that these all act together to make them INCOMPETENT.
And this stuff has such promise, too. Now we're screwed, and will have to fight them for years to get good systems in.
Your scepticism seems completely warranted.
Screw that.
Why any hardware company would be foolish enough to implement such a thing, until absolutely forced to, is unclear to me.
If they think that this means they can charge every software vendor to develop for it, they're right -- in theory. In practice, there are open systems to develop for, and that's where development efforts will go.
If this feels nice in your hand, there'll be others with the form-factor and without DRM, and those will actually have developers.
Unlike this thing, which will remain a glorified Walkman.
If there are performance issues, and it represents a possible loss of face for Microsoft, wouldn't a better acronym be "Services Now Available For Unix"?
That way, it could be Microsoft's SNAFU.
I don't know much about meetup.com, but I know the Arabic group I've been to uses it to organize, as do many other arabic groups. They're evangelists for Arabic (not Islam, usually) and you can find them at http://arabic.meetup.com
Just read it.
For Us: Soul of the New Machine
Everyone who thinks that a career in tech is going to be fun, good and right for them needs to read this. It won't stop you from doing it, any more than any of the other books can get you doing it, since tech comes from inside and must come out, period. But you'll understand why your life will be a tragedy from day one in the workforce, instead doing it for years while thinking it's just you.
My company uses Java a lot.
I use a Linux desktop, as does one other developer. We produce code fast and well, using Emacs, javac and a Tomcat instance locally.
The other developers produce hideous code and it takes them a long time. They're developing on an IDE on Windows.
Then we deploy all this stuff on WinNT/Win2000.
When I need to acomplish something on Linux, I use Perl. When I'm doing something for the company, I use Java. So Java on Linux, you bet.
BTW: I've been playing with Java 1.5 -- while purists might hate the arg list change, I'm singing in my cube. Thank GOODNESS. Finally!
I'm about to buy a large central NFS fileserver for my office. While GFS won't be in place for me earlier enough to stop that purchase, I'm thinking the a GFS-like product would be a huge boon for offices if:
You can make all those crappy PC hard drives look like one big, redundant, reliable, non-slow (fast is too much to hope for), network drive.
Imagine -- you get rid of Microsoft and stop paying licensing and, at the same time, get company-wide access to a massive filesystem which can take multiple failures without loosing data. One which uses all those 50-200 gig hard drives in each of those PCs which are already sunk costs. (I've got 10s of terabytes, distributed among those desktops.)
That would be Coporate Nirvana.
But would GFS do that, or would that require a differnet file system -- has this been done?
I see a LOT of resumes. Short is great, if you've got a lot of job experience which targets the job you're applying for.
So if you can do short, great.
BUT YOU CAN'T, BUCKO. You've got no experience. So you need that interview, 'cause we think you're a rank amateur. You'd better show in that resume that you didn't just do the basic class crap we see all the time.
Talk about projects in complete sentences and make interesting points about them.
Screeners ARE busy people. They won't read your resume. Or Mine. Or anyone else's. They search for keywords. Put in a short skills section with keywords. Use different forms of the same skill names (eg. VB, Visual Basic, Microsoft Visual Basic librarywhatever environment, etc. (and by the way, if it's a java or C job, downplay the friggin' VB)) so that the search is more likely to hit.
That was stage one: "Get past the screener, to someone who knows something about computing."
Then you've got an entirely different stage. The stage where you have to get the interview. Your resume has been passed to someone who will maybe read it. You have to talk to them like a human being, and tell them what you know, honestly, and yet in a way which shows you ACTUALLY KNOW STUFF.
You cannot do that in SHORT. You do that in sections.
Some people will skip such a resume. Well, you weren't gonna get the interview with them, anyhow, because without job experience, as a candidate, you suck.
So take your time. Write several sentences for each skill or experience you want to accentuate. Say it in your experience section, say it in your cover letter, etc. Don't be boring, but don't expect people to believe that since you took a class in VB that you know anything at all about it. SHOW IT.
Include a link to a web space which shows your work, if it's good.
Include a few sentences in the cover letter which show that you've looked to see what the company you're applying to does. Use its name. Say you're interested in something to do with it.
And don't listen to anything you've read about resumes for jobs right out of college or high-school. They assume you have no skills and they know nothing about the computing workplace. They're school-teachers, for goodness sake. They have associates degrees, many in education, and damned few of them worked in a MIS shop. Ignore them.
Huge agreement.
Gramattical or not "Linux is a leprosy" is gonna get bandied about. It's a great sound bite. The guy's good. No, wait, not 'good' -- 'talented', as he seems to have dropped his morals somewhere. He's very smart, a very convicing writer, and he knows what he's saying is a lie, and he's OK with that. The guy's a snake, and he's dangerous.
A fragmented response isn't as convincing as his duplicitous prose. If someone who is a very good writer in the community could weave together the rebuttals, and someone with some cash flow (FSF or someone?) could make a packet with that and the original rebuttals, it would be a good idea to send that out to the movers and shakers who are gonna be handed this "study".
It'll take both a well written, sound-bite-laden document and some distribution money to dampen this hissing noise.
A lot of them didn't TRY to make it out of the gate, because they knew they were fundementally flawed.
Man, that was frustrating.
Because, for instance, the high school team which withdrew before the gate might have done as well as one of the well-funded company teams, since most of them went down and went down fast.
It would have been great to see them ALL publicly fail to make all the mistakes obvious and learn-from-able.
I thought that was a waste, and assume that some of the people who decided to withdraw felt the same way when they saw all the others fail.
But while I'm interested in the beginning of that paragraph, and the end, I'm not gonna read what's in the middle.
The return key is your friend.
This is a frustrating situation. Of course we have the right to boycott. But asking for a boycott on Slashdot generates huge numbers of click-throughs, and makes the microsoft ads appear like a great idea to the management of Linux Today.
...And if those bastards say ONE thing that's actionable as fraud, try to sue them till their posteriors bleed.
And of course Microsoft should be able to say what they want, and say it wherever they want to and can. John Stuart Mill in "On Liberty" says that speech _against_ something makes it stronger, and he's right. We need Microsoft to cook up lies about us so that we actively defend them, and that makes us smarter, faster, better.
But, in this case, it's destructive, because Microsoft has uneven access to the media and uneven credibility. The PHB's believe them, not us.
I remember a wall in a stairwell leading to the library, when I was in collge. It was painted white, and graffiti began to accumulate. Some of it was nasty: anti-black, anti-female, anti-jew, and anti-white-males. All of it would get scratched out/obliterated pretty quickly -- All except that against white males. Presumably because white males don't CARE. They have power and credability and don't give a heck about what others say. I (a white male) found that stuff funny.
So the question has a twisted side: do we exert our power of boycott (or others) to squelch Microsoft, or do we assume the position of the Powerful, and let 'em say what they want, when they want, and just make OURSELVES more heard and more believed?
That would be the bigger solution. And someday, Microsoft will be the marginalized group, and they'll be trying to silence us. But that's not today.
So we scratch out the stuff that bugs us, in fear others will believe it, or because it just plain offends us. And since we're weak, and they strong (media spending-wise, at least) maybe that's the best thing for us for now?
Sticks in my craw either way.
I'd like to err on the side of being big, though.
I see a lot of people here badmouthing select and middle-click. Let me RUN to its defense.
The ^C ^V paradigm irritates the crap out of me. I LOVE middle-click paste.
I only have a problem with it when things (like TORA, for instance) don't use it properly.
^C ^V is one of the reasons (along with the crappy foreground window model) that I feel horribly encumbered and inefficient in Windows.
While I understand the urge to select and replace, but if you really want it, add a modifier key like control to your select action, and arrange for that NOT to replace the primary selection.
The fault isn't with middle-button paste, here. It's with forcing a Macintosh-ism onto a nice, clean X paradigm.
Solving America's Energy Crisis, One Super-Size at a Time.
This subscription wackiness comes up every so often. And it fails.
Now just as the Free Software community is making obvious headway, a ostrich-like voice, muffled by the sand of the hole it's been stuffed in, says "Things are not going in the direction everyone can see. No sir! Things are getting more like they used to be than they are even today!" -- Ah, Bill...
Jonathan Schwartz, on the other hand, is flailing around. His hardware business is in trouble, and instead of fixing the problems, he thinks a complete abdication is in order. Apple tried this under Sculley.
Schwartz is apparently a dufuss.
The seals had little to nothing to do ith your dwindling cod population. Overfishing had everything to do with it. Now kill the damn seals, take their pelts and eat them -- I have no problem with that. But making a scapegoat of something -- lying to others and yourselves, not listening to the obvious truth and blaming your sins on Elvis, space-beings, Canada, rock-music or seals? Now that's abhorrent.