I can't really see (unless somebody would like to point it out) the real differences between voting online and voting in person. The same risks of ballot-rigging or corruption are present. The only thing they would need to consider is that your vote is never linked to your personal identity, eg: presenting your voter identity (via a PIN number etc...) gives you the right to increment whichever counter you choose. Your actual vote should never be stored against your identity.
Personally, I would like to see this here in the UK as well. It has already been suggested here that voting by SMS might be on the cards for UK citizens, to encourage the 18-25's to be less apathetic. I can't see that being workable though, because it would involve the phone networks who can't necessarily be trusted.
Those machines are also not there for the IT staff to use for some kind of power trip. Those machines are there to provide value to the company, which they presumably do when the users are working on them, not you. If the customizations they do make them work more effectively (translation: more motivated), that is good for the company. Certainly if they install viruses and stuff that creates trouble you need to take action, but the whining about text and background images is pathetic.
Whatever... have you every worked in IT? It's not us IT guys that want it all the same, it's the management who want to enforce a standard look and feel. Yeah by all means have photos and stuff, but don't go overboard. If you work better with pink walls, does that give you the right to take a paintbrush to your cubicle. After all, if it help you work, it's good for the company right? And those prospective corporate clients will love your decorating skills. Suuure.
Another thing you missed is that having a standard desktop build gives us support guys a good baseline against which to judge the cause of a particular problem. No need to guess whether or not it's that dumb screensaver that's causing the problem. Makes life far easier.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not being a total network facist. If you optometrist says you need certain colour schemes because you're dyslexic, we'll accommodate that. But just your fads and whims? Nope. Sorry.
The guy that made a point about company cars? Yeah, move the seat, set your radio presets, leave your phone charger plugged in, but I think it probably looked better in silver like all the rest of the fleet!
Am I the only one who suspects that this well never really get off the ground because of the fact that nobody seems to be able to conform to standards any more? It seems like a good idea in principle, but I'm sure that one of the players named above, or some other company will muddy the waters with some proprietary standard to enable them to leverage their intellectual property and put an end to the show for everybody else.
...but you have to keep in mind that Bluetooth and WiFi were developed for entirely different purposes; Bluetooth was never intended as a wireless computer networking method, just as cable replacement (as in your gfx card to your monitor, your mainboard to your printer, your scanner to your printer).
What? Since when could you connect your monitor to your pc with bluetooth. I always thought of it as a little more like wireless USB.
Can anybody else find any mention of this science competition he's supposed to have won?
Surely a national science compo would be well publicised on the Internet. I can't find anything about it. Also, the fact that the guy's footprint on the Internet is, ummmm, zero, makes me suspicious.
Although there's no technology in my bedroom besides the alarm clock and the cordless phone charging base, there's still a certain amount of fan noise which comes from the kit in the loft room.
Whilst trying to quieten things down, I found that it's not the fan noise which is disturbing. In fact, they sell white noise generators to help people with insomnia, and white noise easily fades into the background.
What made the biggest difference was damping the vibration. I did this by placing strips of thick, firm-ish packing foam under the feet of everything.
The difference was amazing. With the 'humming' component removed the sound fades into the background like a dream.
I suppose the next phase would be to construct an enclosure with sound damping material and baffled air vents.
Err, what exactly does this mean, can anyone tell me? I really, really doubt that opening a mail in, say, pine will send back any message without action on my part.
So, is this something which triggers MS Outlook? Or is this just some BS that spammer told the poor journalist?
It's just an image link in HTML formatted email to trigger an HTTP get request, eg: http://someserver/image.pl?spamee_id=HKJHS89872
...because, realistically, nobody's interested in handheld videophones or watching movies on their mobile phones.
It's obvious that doing the last mile wireless is going to be cheaper than via copper. What baffles me though, is why making calls on my mobile is so much more expensive than a landline when the implementation/maintenance of wireless networks is so much cheaper than copper or fibre. It costs far less to stick a mast up than to start digging the road up.
Acorn A7000's had a 35 watt (yes, that's thirty five watts) PSU with no fan. Being an ARM processor, they didn't even have a heatsink on the CPU. And you can run Linux on them. (And yes, you could make a beowul.... )
forget rotating disk drives. Get a mobo with RAID and a bunch of totally solid state flash hard drives [sandisk.com]. they're electrically identical to laptop hard drives, so a $25 adaptor will allow them to be used in place of any old IDE hard drive in your RAID, but you'll have to change the "I" in the acronym from "Inexpensive" to "Independent", if you know what I mean.
On the other hand if you think about the performance you'd get from the right kind of RAID where the individual "disks" have specs like these [sandisk.com]... suddenly everything else seems small.
Yeah... but flash drives have a limited number of write operations. They're find for digital cameras and the like, where they'll only get written on a few thousand times, but once you tried to run a full OS on them, you'd reach their limit and your data would start to disappear. They're great though on things like Linux/BSD router boxes where you can have the OS on a read-only disk.
Ummmmm... SCART is just a multiway connector which carries (optionally) Composite, Audio, S-Video, RGB and switching signals. You can't say that SCART beats S-Video because SCART is a type of connector, where is S-Video is the format of the video signal. If you've found that "SCART" is better than S-Video then you're probably watching the picture via the RGB signals, which are close enough to how the your VGA monitor gets its signal.
Most consumer kit only provides/accepts signals on the Composite and Audio pins, and maybe S-Video on recent kit. Some decent cable/satellite boxes and DVD players may be switchable to send RGB too. Your TV might ignore RGB inputs too, in which case it'd fall back to the composite signal on one of the other pins.
Also, they could HEAR the difference between two different TOSLINK cables? Gimme a break. Sounds like a sponsored ad for Monster cable, whom audiophiles know is a rip-off anyways.
Oh yeah... go to any high-end audio shop and they'll tell you that! As long as all the bits that go into the cable make it out the other end, there's no way it can make a difference. Good quality cables are important with analogue signals though. There's all sorts of factors which can make a very big difference. Of course this game is one of diminishing returns though. As a rule for audio components, throw away the black liquorice cables which came with the boxes and spend 10 quid on the important cables. If you spend any more you are wasting your time (unless you've spend more than 1000 quid on your CD player).
Not always users error, just crap parts
on
When Users Attack
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· Score: 1
A few years back, I worked as an in-store techie for a national chain of PC retailers in the UK. We had a fair few no-brain customers who couldn't handle owning a PC, including one woman who was loudly demanding that we replaced her keyboard for her because she had to bring her PC in for service twice before (for a re-image, because she'd cocked it up) and her f*ck-fingered son had mangled all the pins trying to screw it into the PS/2 socket!
Anyway, back to the real story.... we started producing an budget range of machines with, IIRC, a Cyrix 300Mhz 6x86 CPU. They were known internally as a model 86/87's and had a sticker on the back which read 203C87 IIRC. Everything was onboard on a really cheap and nasty far-eastern motherboard.
The first we heard was when a customer phoned up and told us that his PC had just made a loud bang. I asked him if he could boot it up, but he told me it was still running just fine. The next day he brought it in and said it wouldn't boot up the next time he tried. When I took the lid off, I noticed that a large electrolytic had exploded with enough force to actually blow a 1 1/2 inch section out of the motherboard and dent the case next to it!!! (Honestly! I have *no* idea how these machines carried on going!)
We had a fair few of these over the next few weeks. One time I had a machine on the bench for a different problem and I actually saw it happen! You've never heard anything like it, it was like a firework going off and made me throw my coffee over my shoulder! Jeeezzzz...!
I can see it's another case of the media industry blaming the innocent for their screw-ups. They need to be looking closer to home to see who leaked it.
I suppose they'll be wittering on about how it's lost them $1,000,000,000,000 in revenue too. I think the opposite. If anything it'll bring more people into the cinemas because people will have seen it at home and will want to see it on the big screen. There's no such thing as bad publicity. Same goes for CDs I think. If I get an MP3 track and I like it, I go buy the album. If I don't then I won't. Win-win situation. If only they could see it.....
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I would like to see this here in the UK as well. It has already been suggested here that voting by SMS might be on the cards for UK citizens, to encourage the 18-25's to be less apathetic. I can't see that being workable though, because it would involve the phone networks who can't necessarily be trusted.
Whatever... have you every worked in IT? It's not us IT guys that want it all the same, it's the management who want to enforce a standard look and feel. Yeah by all means have photos and stuff, but don't go overboard. If you work better with pink walls, does that give you the right to take a paintbrush to your cubicle. After all, if it help you work, it's good for the company right? And those prospective corporate clients will love your decorating skills. Suuure.
Another thing you missed is that having a standard desktop build gives us support guys a good baseline against which to judge the cause of a particular problem. No need to guess whether or not it's that dumb screensaver that's causing the problem. Makes life far easier.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not being a total network facist. If you optometrist says you need certain colour schemes because you're dyslexic, we'll accommodate that. But just your fads and whims? Nope. Sorry.
The guy that made a point about company cars? Yeah, move the seat, set your radio presets, leave your phone charger plugged in, but I think it probably looked better in silver like all the rest of the fleet!
What? Since when could you connect your monitor to your pc with bluetooth. I always thought of it as a little more like wireless USB.
I think that one reason we like linux so much is that it'll run of computers costing less than $0.96!
Surely a national science compo would be well publicised on the Internet. I can't find anything about it. Also, the fact that the guy's footprint on the Internet is, ummmm, zero, makes me suspicious.
Whilst trying to quieten things down, I found that it's not the fan noise which is disturbing. In fact, they sell white noise generators to help people with insomnia, and white noise easily fades into the background.
What made the biggest difference was damping the vibration. I did this by placing strips of thick, firm-ish packing foam under the feet of everything.
The difference was amazing. With the 'humming' component removed the sound fades into the background like a dream.
I suppose the next phase would be to construct an enclosure with sound damping material and baffled air vents.
Err, what exactly does this mean, can anyone tell me? I really, really doubt that opening a mail in, say, pine will send back any message without action on my part.
So, is this something which triggers MS Outlook? Or is this just some BS that spammer told the poor journalist?
It's just an image link in HTML formatted email to trigger an HTTP get request, eg: http://someserver/image.pl?spamee_id=HKJHS89872
James
1. Open blank worksheet and hit F5.
2. Enter X97:L97 and hit enter.
3. Hit Tab.
4. Hold down Ctrl-Shift and click the toolbar's Chart Wizard button.
Watch out for the amusing credits scrolling along.
eh? What you talking about? I posted the link because the earlier posting had a mistake in it. Duh.
It's obvious that doing the last mile wireless is going to be cheaper than via copper. What baffles me though, is why making calls on my mobile is so much more expensive than a landline when the implementation/maintenance of wireless networks is so much cheaper than copper or fibre. It costs far less to stick a mast up than to start digging the road up.
James
On the other hand if you think about the performance you'd get from the right kind of RAID where the individual "disks" have specs like these [sandisk.com]... suddenly everything else seems small.
Yeah... but flash drives have a limited number of write operations. They're find for digital cameras and the like, where they'll only get written on a few thousand times, but once you tried to run a full OS on them, you'd reach their limit and your data would start to disappear. They're great though on things like Linux/BSD router boxes where you can have the OS on a read-only disk.
There are some nice pictures at: http://www.zdnet.co.jp/mobile/0210/04/n_sffo.html James
Look at the SCART pinouts for more details.
Most consumer kit only provides/accepts signals on the Composite and Audio pins, and maybe S-Video on recent kit. Some decent cable/satellite boxes and DVD players may be switchable to send RGB too. Your TV might ignore RGB inputs too, in which case it'd fall back to the composite signal on one of the other pins.
Oh yeah... go to any high-end audio shop and they'll tell you that! As long as all the bits that go into the cable make it out the other end, there's no way it can make a difference. Good quality cables are important with analogue signals though. There's all sorts of factors which can make a very big difference. Of course this game is one of diminishing returns though. As a rule for audio components, throw away the black liquorice cables which came with the boxes and spend 10 quid on the important cables. If you spend any more you are wasting your time (unless you've spend more than 1000 quid on your CD player).
Anyway, back to the real story.... we started producing an budget range of machines with, IIRC, a Cyrix 300Mhz 6x86 CPU. They were known internally as a model 86/87's and had a sticker on the back which read 203C87 IIRC. Everything was onboard on a really cheap and nasty far-eastern motherboard.
The first we heard was when a customer phoned up and told us that his PC had just made a loud bang. I asked him if he could boot it up, but he told me it was still running just fine. The next day he brought it in and said it wouldn't boot up the next time he tried. When I took the lid off, I noticed that a large electrolytic had exploded with enough force to actually blow a 1 1/2 inch section out of the motherboard and dent the case next to it!!! (Honestly! I have *no* idea how these machines carried on going!)
We had a fair few of these over the next few weeks. One time I had a machine on the bench for a different problem and I actually saw it happen! You've never heard anything like it, it was like a firework going off and made me throw my coffee over my shoulder! Jeeezzzz...!
I suppose they'll be wittering on about how it's lost them $1,000,000,000,000 in revenue too. I think the opposite. If anything it'll bring more people into the cinemas because people will have seen it at home and will want to see it on the big screen. There's no such thing as bad publicity. Same goes for CDs I think. If I get an MP3 track and I like it, I go buy the album. If I don't then I won't. Win-win situation. If only they could see it.....