$399 per year for nothing more than a compiler puts it at roughly at the same price as the entire Microsoft Visual Studio... seeing that you get about 2-3 years out of the typical VS release.
I'm not sure what the term "dynamic language" means anyway...
PHP's far from the first language to have an interpreter and get a compiler, far from the first language to accept extentions, and far from the first language to be cross-platform... none of these are new concepts.
But, unless you plan on using some of the new features in PHP5, you might as well stick with PHP4... no need to take an unneeded risk on new software. Let somebody else do the bug discovery...:)
The problem is that it's a survey that's supposed to have statistical error, not a vote. I'm not denying that the is a randomness process in our electoral system, especially with the interpretation of punch card ballots, but I'm saying that in the theoretical universe such statistical error should have been eliminated.
We, in theory, should be able to have a record of the vote that when counted and recounted and recounted interprets every vote the way the voter intended so that when there is a recount, it confirms the original counts exactly. That's what Diebold's machines theoretically are supposed to be helping us with...
If they end up taking us further from this goal, then just why are we paying them tax money again?
If there's a landslide coming... then in whose favor is it going to be?
The "red states" that voted for Bush last time and the "blue states" that voted for Gore last time don't seem to have changed colors... it's only the few swing states that had close elections last time where anything seems up for grabs. It's those states where the vote counting is going to be the most important if we don't want a repeat of the Florida 2000 show.
The problem is that ATMs are a device used by the banking industry, and that's an industry that is based on trust. More or less, if customers start telling their banks that they feel funny trusting a machine marked "Diebold" because they got tied up in an election-rigging scandal... they're dead.
Part of the reason why there was such a big deal over the counting of the Florida votes last year was because Florida's electoral votes were enough to give either candidate the victory in the overall election.
In many past presidential elections, isolated incidents of corruption or other flaws weren't as important because the overall result was a clear landside for one candidate or the other. Even if the irregularities in a state got so bad it tipped their electoral votes in the wrong candidate's direction, that state worth of votes usually isn't enough to tip the entire national election.
This year, with the nation split so tightly, and last time's close call fresh in everybody's mind, the tolerance for such flaws is going to be lower than it's ever been. The smallest election scandal is going to get magnified now.
Catching Diebold's products actually being in violation of the law may be a technical matter that might result in lawyers talking for days, but should that burden ever be meant, the penalty is huge, especially in California.
Diebold promised their equipment would be up to spec. If it's found that it's not, then that's just plain simple basic fraud. In CA, the whistleblower law we're talking about makes the company have to refund 100% of the money the state gave it, and 30% goes to the citizens who started the case. More or less, Diebold will have lost all of the revenue it got from CA, plus all of the losses incured due to the fact that they already tried to deliver a product that they now aren't getting paid for...
This is the kind of thing that sends a company pretty close to bankruptcy... good thing Diebold has its ATM product line to fall back on.
The concept is classic in the computer software industry... sales sells a vaporware product that hasn't been built yet, and then the R&D people have to take shortcuts in order to get a product shipped by the date it was promised.
Governments don't take well to such practices. When dealing with a state government, you must cross every t and dot every i in the system. Any bugs, flaws or failures is simply delivering a product that wasn't to spec.
Diebold appears to have their hands caught in the cookie jar here. They've already been caught installing a "patch" on machines that were supposed to be "sealed" and in their final ready-for-voting state. Bev Harris has been the collector in chief of all of Diebold's other mistakes that they've tried to cover up... seeing what they have ready to present at trial should be fun.
shell:[program-name] is supposed to be a URI syntax for running any given program on the computer. Of course, this is a slightly dangerous thing to have available for any given document to trigger unannounced, but it is a rather useful feature to have if somebody wants to tell everybody on a company network how to run a program that was just installed.
Mozilla software is given away free, so anything you give them is purely voluntary and would be fully deductable. It's only when there's a quid-pro-quo exchange that there's an issue.
Barcodes themselves can be as long as the user wants them to be. We're just talking about a change in the addressing scheme that is the UPC code to have another digit. Anybody who assumed UPCs were no bigger than 12 characters now has a Y2K-ish overflow issue.
Not likely... it'll take there being products that have the 13 digit bar code on them in order to cause a problem, and all products that are currently allocated a 12 digit code can keep theirs. I'd assume most grocery stores will have their computers in line before they let a 13-digited product onto their shelves.
Also on our radar screens should be the fact that the US PSTN numbering scheme keeps getting more lines and is coming closer to the point that the (xxx)-yyy-zzzz numbering format is about to hit the wall. The rule that declared the center digit of an area code had to be 0 or 1 fell years ago. If an extra digit ever gets added anywhere, a lot of PBX systems are going to not like the new numbers.
IPv4 is also in trouble in this area, and IPv6 is waiting in the wings to take over. However, NAT seems to be good enough in stretching out single IP addresses to multiple computers so I don't know if we'll ever be forced to convert over.
12-digit bar codes aren't quite going to be retired, but US and Canadian retailers will be expected to be able to tolerate 13-digit codes as of January 2005. This sounds a lot like the Y2K situation... anybody whose database and/or software assumed it was a 12-digit field is now going to have to account for an extra digit and that's going to mean patches and code rewrites all around.
It's good news for the geeks... more work for us to do.
Only big winners would be able to take advantage of that. Gambling Losses are only deductable when there's Gambling Income from winning to offset. (At which point, you're claiming that you didn't just win the million by buying one lotto ticket, because you bought tickets all year...)
The key difference is that a non-profit doesn't have "owners" and therefore there's nowhere to send a dividend. When a non-profit makes more income than it's spending, they either have to spend more on whatever they do, or put the money in the bank for a rainy day.
The IRS 501(c)(3) standard takes that definition a bit further to require that the non-profit must be doing something for the public good, rather than just giving money to the people who set it up. Here's the IRS.gov page on the matter.
Not usually. If you get something in return for what you paid, then you didn't make a donation. However, if the ammount you paid is dramatically more than the value of what you got in return, you can deduct the overage.
What kills Windows is the inability to have a full motion graphics window go transparent. Normal windows can be transparent, but ones showing video cannot be.
Next time you use your favorite video conference program (or even any other application that plays full-motion video) on Windows, hit the [print screen] key and then open up Paint and paste the image you put on the clipboard. Notice that the rest of the screen caputres just fine, but you get a solid block instead of the video image. That's because the video is added into the screen after most of the other graphics routines, and too late to capture or do anything else fun with it.
The Window using D3D can fade in and out... but try dragging a transparent window from another process on top of it and suddenly things won't be so pretty.
Windows has had the ability to draw transparent windows since 2000. However, there's a limit to how far they can go.
Particularlly, you can't do any blending against windows that are being drawn with DirectX/DirectDraw which is the way that any program that wants to approach full-motion video or 3D graphics has to do things. And that's what prevents Windows from handling this application.
Mac's OSX is a lot cleaner in this department because in their universe there are no exceptions to the rules... everything passes through Quartz, so there's a chance to capture and play with anything on the screen. DirectX and DirectDraw are painted onto the screen after all mortal windows are drawn in Windows, and that's why there's no chance to add an overlay to them.
One of my favorite pieces of technology I've ever gotten a chance to play with is the SmartBoard Interactive Whiteboard It's a whiteboard that's touch-sensative. Basically, combine it with your favorite projection monitor and you've got a 60 inch touchscreen monitor. Just like any other touch screen, anywhere you tap the board is treated like a mouseclick in whatever application you're using. As an added bonus, "magic crayons" (really nothing more than plastic styluses) are at the bottom of the board. When the board detects one of the pens removed from its holder, it treats all touches as requests to draw on the screen.
It's a great presentation tool to liven up a powerpoint and avoid the need to have to walk accross the room to get the next frame. Furthermore, playing solitare with foot-high cards is quite fun.:)
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$399 per year for nothing more than a compiler puts it at roughly at the same price as the entire Microsoft Visual Studio... seeing that you get about 2-3 years out of the typical VS release.
I'm not sure what the term "dynamic language" means anyway...
PHP's far from the first language to have an interpreter and get a compiler, far from the first language to accept extentions, and far from the first language to be cross-platform... none of these are new concepts.
But, unless you plan on using some of the new features in PHP5, you might as well stick with PHP4... no need to take an unneeded risk on new software. Let somebody else do the bug discovery... :)
The problem is that it's a survey that's supposed to have statistical error, not a vote. I'm not denying that the is a randomness process in our electoral system, especially with the interpretation of punch card ballots, but I'm saying that in the theoretical universe such statistical error should have been eliminated.
We, in theory, should be able to have a record of the vote that when counted and recounted and recounted interprets every vote the way the voter intended so that when there is a recount, it confirms the original counts exactly. That's what Diebold's machines theoretically are supposed to be helping us with...
If they end up taking us further from this goal, then just why are we paying them tax money again?
If there's a landslide coming... then in whose favor is it going to be?
The "red states" that voted for Bush last time and the "blue states" that voted for Gore last time don't seem to have changed colors... it's only the few swing states that had close elections last time where anything seems up for grabs. It's those states where the vote counting is going to be the most important if we don't want a repeat of the Florida 2000 show.
The problem is that ATMs are a device used by the banking industry, and that's an industry that is based on trust. More or less, if customers start telling their banks that they feel funny trusting a machine marked "Diebold" because they got tied up in an election-rigging scandal... they're dead.
Part of the reason why there was such a big deal over the counting of the Florida votes last year was because Florida's electoral votes were enough to give either candidate the victory in the overall election.
In many past presidential elections, isolated incidents of corruption or other flaws weren't as important because the overall result was a clear landside for one candidate or the other. Even if the irregularities in a state got so bad it tipped their electoral votes in the wrong candidate's direction, that state worth of votes usually isn't enough to tip the entire national election.
This year, with the nation split so tightly, and last time's close call fresh in everybody's mind, the tolerance for such flaws is going to be lower than it's ever been. The smallest election scandal is going to get magnified now.
Catching Diebold's products actually being in violation of the law may be a technical matter that might result in lawyers talking for days, but should that burden ever be meant, the penalty is huge, especially in California.
Diebold promised their equipment would be up to spec. If it's found that it's not, then that's just plain simple basic fraud. In CA, the whistleblower law we're talking about makes the company have to refund 100% of the money the state gave it, and 30% goes to the citizens who started the case. More or less, Diebold will have lost all of the revenue it got from CA, plus all of the losses incured due to the fact that they already tried to deliver a product that they now aren't getting paid for...
This is the kind of thing that sends a company pretty close to bankruptcy... good thing Diebold has its ATM product line to fall back on.
The concept is classic in the computer software industry... sales sells a vaporware product that hasn't been built yet, and then the R&D people have to take shortcuts in order to get a product shipped by the date it was promised.
Governments don't take well to such practices. When dealing with a state government, you must cross every t and dot every i in the system. Any bugs, flaws or failures is simply delivering a product that wasn't to spec.
Diebold appears to have their hands caught in the cookie jar here. They've already been caught installing a "patch" on machines that were supposed to be "sealed" and in their final ready-for-voting state. Bev Harris has been the collector in chief of all of Diebold's other mistakes that they've tried to cover up... seeing what they have ready to present at trial should be fun.
Well, what Microsoft users have shown time and time again is even when the patch does come out, it's often not applied on many machines.
It's not as much a bug but a dumb feature.
shell:[program-name] is supposed to be a URI syntax for running any given program on the computer. Of course, this is a slightly dangerous thing to have available for any given document to trigger unannounced, but it is a rather useful feature to have if somebody wants to tell everybody on a company network how to run a program that was just installed.
Nope. That's not what it means. Your donation doesn't directly give you access to Mozilla since freeloaders can use it too...
Mozilla software is given away free, so anything you give them is purely voluntary and would be fully deductable. It's only when there's a quid-pro-quo exchange that there's an issue.
Barcodes themselves can be as long as the user wants them to be. We're just talking about a change in the addressing scheme that is the UPC code to have another digit. Anybody who assumed UPCs were no bigger than 12 characters now has a Y2K-ish overflow issue.
Not likely... it'll take there being products that have the 13 digit bar code on them in order to cause a problem, and all products that are currently allocated a 12 digit code can keep theirs. I'd assume most grocery stores will have their computers in line before they let a 13-digited product onto their shelves.
Also on our radar screens should be the fact that the US PSTN numbering scheme keeps getting more lines and is coming closer to the point that the (xxx)-yyy-zzzz numbering format is about to hit the wall. The rule that declared the center digit of an area code had to be 0 or 1 fell years ago. If an extra digit ever gets added anywhere, a lot of PBX systems are going to not like the new numbers.
IPv4 is also in trouble in this area, and IPv6 is waiting in the wings to take over. However, NAT seems to be good enough in stretching out single IP addresses to multiple computers so I don't know if we'll ever be forced to convert over.
12-digit bar codes aren't quite going to be retired, but US and Canadian retailers will be expected to be able to tolerate 13-digit codes as of January 2005. This sounds a lot like the Y2K situation... anybody whose database and/or software assumed it was a 12-digit field is now going to have to account for an extra digit and that's going to mean patches and code rewrites all around.
It's good news for the geeks... more work for us to do.
Only big winners would be able to take advantage of that. Gambling Losses are only deductable when there's Gambling Income from winning to offset. (At which point, you're claiming that you didn't just win the million by buying one lotto ticket, because you bought tickets all year...)
The key difference is that a non-profit doesn't have "owners" and therefore there's nowhere to send a dividend. When a non-profit makes more income than it's spending, they either have to spend more on whatever they do, or put the money in the bank for a rainy day.
The IRS 501(c)(3) standard takes that definition a bit further to require that the non-profit must be doing something for the public good, rather than just giving money to the people who set it up. Here's the IRS.gov page on the matter.
Not usually. If you get something in return for what you paid, then you didn't make a donation. However, if the ammount you paid is dramatically more than the value of what you got in return, you can deduct the overage.
So, how overpriced was the shirt?
Roll calling a few of our other favorite groups...
Free Software Foundation: Yep, say they're tax-deductable.
Electronic Frontier Foundation: Yep, they say they have 501(c)(3) compliance.
FreeBSD Foundation: Yep, section 2.5.1 on this page says they're tax-deductable too.
Seems like it'll take some work to find an OSS-supporting group that can't accept tax deductable donations.
What kills Windows is the inability to have a full motion graphics window go transparent. Normal windows can be transparent, but ones showing video cannot be.
Next time you use your favorite video conference program (or even any other application that plays full-motion video) on Windows, hit the [print screen] key and then open up Paint and paste the image you put on the clipboard. Notice that the rest of the screen caputres just fine, but you get a solid block instead of the video image. That's because the video is added into the screen after most of the other graphics routines, and too late to capture or do anything else fun with it.
The Window using D3D can fade in and out... but try dragging a transparent window from another process on top of it and suddenly things won't be so pretty.
Windows has had the ability to draw transparent windows since 2000. However, there's a limit to how far they can go.
Particularlly, you can't do any blending against windows that are being drawn with DirectX/DirectDraw which is the way that any program that wants to approach full-motion video or 3D graphics has to do things. And that's what prevents Windows from handling this application.
Mac's OSX is a lot cleaner in this department because in their universe there are no exceptions to the rules... everything passes through Quartz, so there's a chance to capture and play with anything on the screen. DirectX and DirectDraw are painted onto the screen after all mortal windows are drawn in Windows, and that's why there's no chance to add an overlay to them.
One of my favorite pieces of technology I've ever gotten a chance to play with is the SmartBoard Interactive Whiteboard It's a whiteboard that's touch-sensative. Basically, combine it with your favorite projection monitor and you've got a 60 inch touchscreen monitor. Just like any other touch screen, anywhere you tap the board is treated like a mouseclick in whatever application you're using. As an added bonus, "magic crayons" (really nothing more than plastic styluses) are at the bottom of the board. When the board detects one of the pens removed from its holder, it treats all touches as requests to draw on the screen.
:)
It's a great presentation tool to liven up a powerpoint and avoid the need to have to walk accross the room to get the next frame. Furthermore, playing solitare with foot-high cards is quite fun.