I'm from Brazil too. Our voting is far from perfect. I believe a voting system should be entirely open. from all the processes to the hardware and software. I believe it's *the only way* it should be done in a democracy.
*Everyone* must have the right to audit the system. Not everyone will be capable of understanding it, but a citizen should have the assurance that he could.
that being said, I will also state that we are pretty content and confident in our system.
So I'll make my considerations on the US issue:
weve been using our system for some time.(about 6 years or something?) and there really was an adaptation period. There was a number of contingency plans in case thinks went poof. I remember that there was a backup pencil&paper setup ready to be set up in case the machine failed. There was also an auditing think in the first election that printed (yes, as in a piece of paper) your vote and inserted it in a ballot. you could actually *see* your candidates name in paper.
You guys have this kind of stuff?
The primality problem, closely related to most public-key algorithms,(since we have to decompose a big composite in two big primes),it is not even a NP problem.
theres a fact I learned in my time in the industry that im not sure have made to the book:
"There is no software free of bugs"
all we can do is try to bring down the number of bugs to a level that the usual features can be used in the usual situations without a failure.
suppose there are three bugs that will escape unit and integration testing in a piece of code, if a revision can find one of them, its one less bug for maintenance. That will still leave us with two bugs that may or may not be detected by the user.
but you just potentially cut down the maintenance cost/effort in about one third.
...and as far as Im concerned, its a question without a logical, objective answer.
Personally, I think a relationship between a manager and a programmer should be one of trust. When both are committed to the the job, you cant go wrong. When thats not the case, I would say that one should rely on his own feeling and experience to tell the difference.
then again, thats probably just the answer youd get from a consultant... a statement with no useful information at all. creepy.
If a code review, which takes several hours of my time and the time of my fellow developers, can catch 90% of the errors before the first test case is run, or I can catch 90% of the errors (not necessarily the same ones) using the test cases, it's a better use of resources to let the computer point the errors out to me.
finding the best "use of resources" is tricky.
A bug that took a programmer 8 hours to find in a code revision can be a waste of development time, but think of the time it takes to fix this bug in production software:
the user will try a workaround before calling support:4 hours.
first level support will try to reproduce the bug: 2 hours.
a programmer will find the buggy code and fix it, once he has a bugged scenario:4 hours.
a tester will generate a new software release to fix the bug and run all the tests to make sure nothing else is broken: lots of hours. (a "priceless" joke, anyone?)
IMHO the real management issue concerning deadlines is the way they are defined.
If the manager imposes an impossible deadline to the programmer, hes just a bad boss, PHB style. Of course, there are always real world time constraints to be met, but in this case the manager should define a possible goal along with the programmer, alternative solutions, scope agreements, etc.
On the other hand, if the programmer is incapable of defining a deadline himself to a well defined amount of work, than you just cant blame the manager.
When they find out that this technology can be used to transfer copyrighted material, and therefore showing up as a potential infringement, those pigeons are going to be in a whole lot of trouble.
After all, why on earth will somebody want to transfer 4 GB of data in such a unlawful and secret way?:)
you dirty pirates!
On the contrary, compression will be better!!
on
Can You Raed Tihs?
·
· Score: 1
If you really believe in this scrambled letters story and dont mind having a scrambled text, you could enhance compression algorithms by treating all permutations of the same words such as begat and baget as only one word, that can be normalized before compression, and then re-scrambled after decompression.
But the improvement will probably be very small, and as for me I think those scrambled texts are funny to read in small pieces... not in the amount that requires compression.
...The ideal of a "soul" is actually fable/fiction/pure speculation, and does not deserve to be included in a scientific debate.
Hmmm... I dont recall ever seeing a slashdot rule stating that all discussions should be conducted in a scientific fashion.
Gee, the fact we can't have an accurate logical description about something doesnt mean we shouldnt talk about it. In fact, I guess its the other way round. It is important not to run from this issues.
Yeah, we do what we do because it benefits us. The same as every other country, only we get flack for doing the same things everyone else does.
I agree with you. As the current response to the neo-liberal US policy is pretty much neo-liberal all over the world, I guess you can say that what the US do is the same as every other country.
However, what strikes me as unreasonable is the american IT response to this trend. I do believe that jobs will migrate to some extent to outside the US, but in time there will be a balance, perhaps with less pressure on high salaries. Thats what free market is all about, I guess.
What I can make sense of all this is that theres a big fear looming over us. pretty much a sense we will be forgotten by economy and the government.
Whenever we feel like this, we should remind ourselves of all the people in other countries who cant get a job good enough to feed their families let alone buy cool gadgets and pay a mortgage.
Whats the pursuit of Happiness anyway? I guess wed be better off expecting it as some kind of divine gift, instead. pursuing the dawn thing makes us too selfish, too greedy in the end.
ItÂs no use to be small if it sounds like a dustbuster anyway.
It will blend in nicely on your living room so that people will arrive in your place like:
"You got a really cool place dude! but... whereÂs this awfull noise coming from?"
IÂd like to see a AMD-XP in a SFF running with passive cooling. that would be cool! and probably a lot cheaper, too.
how about the first world war? all it took to unleash hell over europe was the assasination of franz ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire.
Bottom line is, if you keep making more and better weapons all you need is an excuse to go and use them to your purposes. Or do you think alsacia-lorena was invaded to protect the world from terrorists such as prinzip? (the guy who shot ferdinand). I bet you believe theres nothing more to the invasion of iraq than the war on terrorism.
I am from Brazil, and I always thought that all that high school movies with the "nerd stereotype" were purely anedoctal.
It cant be that serious in the US as this article says! Although brazilian geeks in fact suffer somewhat from prejudice and ignorance, its not even close to the pain endured in the US...
hey you football playing geek abusers, GET A LIFE!
Okay, Okay.. I know. Probably the football playing geek abusers are not avid slashdot readers anyway...
So I suppose its buttons will be named "ctrl", "alt" and "del" for the sake of ergonomics, so people will know what to do if their watches lock or freeze.
Im pretty sure this is not new to most of you guys, but Moores law is not exactly a law, but rather a "self-fulfiling promise".
this moore guy predicted that the computing power would have a particular behavior through the years, and chip manufacturers actually used moores law as a guideline to their R&D and production schedule, so its not exactly a mistery if they eventually fail to meet it someday.
Wether or not XP is going to stick is a very interesting issue. However, There is a very important point that goes unnoticed: WHY all this talk about XP?
In the past few years, most software processes were generally loathed by the average geek, because there was "so much documents to generate, and so little code to write". The real extreme (no pun intended) geek would even consider business process analysts a "project overhead". All he really wanted to do was coding.
Then came those agile methodologies like XP, and all of a sudden there are loads of people preaching that this is it, that XP will save us. that using SCRUM improves your lifestyle. etc.
My point is: a lot of people tend to like XP NOT because they acknowledge it is efficient as a software process, NOT because they used it and their project was a ressounding success.
My point is: a lot of people tend to like XP because they, in a way, are seduced by its promise of working by a methodology where the focus is coding. seduced by the promise that they dont have to write "useless" documents and activities, and their project will thrive if only they follow those simple rules...
Im not saying that XP is garbage, on the contrary, I think it brings some VERY interesting ideas like pair programming, and its test-planning.
what I AM saying, is: if you are considering to use XP you should be very careful and try to look at it with reason, rather than passion.
you should ask yourself at least this two questions:
1) "The problems I faced in my experience would be eliminated if I had followed the rules of XP?"
2) "The practices of XP would be enough to make my project a sucess?"
whatever is your decision, I guess we could call this a good start.
Slashdot Mirror
that being said, I will also state that we are pretty content and confident in our system.
So I'll make my considerations on the US issue: weve been using our system for some time.(about 6 years or something?) and there really was an adaptation period. There was a number of contingency plans in case thinks went poof. I remember that there was a backup pencil&paper setup ready to be set up in case the machine failed. There was also an auditing think in the first election that printed (yes, as in a piece of paper) your vote and inserted it in a ballot. you could actually *see* your candidates name in paper. You guys have this kind of stuff?
The primality problem, closely related to most public-key algorithms,(since we have to decompose a big composite in two big primes),it is not even a NP problem.
"There is no software free of bugs"
all we can do is try to bring down the number of bugs to a level that the usual features can be used in the usual situations without a failure.
suppose there are three bugs that will escape unit and integration testing in a piece of code, if a revision can find one of them, its one less bug for maintenance. That will still leave us with two bugs that may or may not be detected by the user. but you just potentially cut down the maintenance cost/effort in about one third.
Personally, I think a relationship between a manager and a programmer should be one of trust. When both are committed to the the job, you cant go wrong. When thats not the case, I would say that one should rely on his own feeling and experience to tell the difference.
then again, thats probably just the answer youd get from a consultant... a statement with no useful information at all. creepy.
A bug that took a programmer 8 hours to find in a code revision can be a waste of development time, but think of the time it takes to fix this bug in production software:
the user will try a workaround before calling support:4 hours.
first level support will try to reproduce the bug: 2 hours.
a programmer will find the buggy code and fix it, once he has a bugged scenario:4 hours.
a tester will generate a new software release to fix the bug and run all the tests to make sure nothing else is broken: lots of hours. (a "priceless" joke, anyone?)
If the manager imposes an impossible deadline to the programmer, hes just a bad boss, PHB style. Of course, there are always real world time constraints to be met, but in this case the manager should define a possible goal along with the programmer, alternative solutions, scope agreements, etc.
On the other hand, if the programmer is incapable of defining a deadline himself to a well defined amount of work, than you just cant blame the manager.
And you wouldnt want THAT. It would spoil the cool "old soldier" metaphor...
When they find out that this technology can be used to transfer copyrighted material, and therefore showing up as a potential infringement, those pigeons are going to be in a whole lot of trouble.
After all, why on earth will somebody want to transfer 4 GB of data in such a unlawful and secret way? :)
you dirty pirates!
But the improvement will probably be very small, and as for me I think those scrambled texts are funny to read in small pieces... not in the amount that requires compression.
Hmmm... I dont recall ever seeing a slashdot rule stating that all discussions should be conducted in a scientific fashion.
Gee, the fact we can't have an accurate logical description about something doesnt mean we shouldnt talk about it. In fact, I guess its the other way round. It is important not to run from this issues.
I agree with you. As the current response to the neo-liberal US policy is pretty much neo-liberal all over the world, I guess you can say that what the US do is the same as every other country.
However, what strikes me as unreasonable is the american IT response to this trend. I do believe that jobs will migrate to some extent to outside the US, but in time there will be a balance, perhaps with less pressure on high salaries. Thats what free market is all about, I guess.
What I can make sense of all this is that theres a big fear looming over us. pretty much a sense we will be forgotten by economy and the government. Whenever we feel like this, we should remind ourselves of all the people in other countries who cant get a job good enough to feed their families let alone buy cool gadgets and pay a mortgage.
Whats the pursuit of Happiness anyway? I guess wed be better off expecting it as some kind of divine gift, instead. pursuing the dawn thing makes us too selfish, too greedy in the end.
ItÂs no use to be small if it sounds like a dustbuster anyway.
It will blend in nicely on your living room so that people will arrive in your place like:
"You got a really cool place dude! but... whereÂs this awfull noise coming from?" IÂd like to see a AMD-XP in a SFF running with passive cooling. that would be cool! and probably a lot cheaper, too.
http://luke.francl.org/lessig-challenge/
It might be an interesting idea to apply this against the DMCA and eventually RIAA and MPAA, if you feel like it.
how about the first world war? all it took to unleash hell over europe was the assasination of franz ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire.
Bottom line is, if you keep making more and better weapons all you need is an excuse to go and use them to your purposes. Or do you think alsacia-lorena was invaded to protect the world from terrorists such as prinzip? (the guy who shot ferdinand). I bet you believe theres nothing more to the invasion of iraq than the war on terrorism.
Let me guess: participants would receive a -1,000,000 karma modifier. (most affected by your comments and your role in the universe)
It cant be that serious in the US as this article says! Although brazilian geeks in fact suffer somewhat from prejudice and ignorance, its not even close to the pain endured in the US...
hey you football playing geek abusers, GET A LIFE!
Okay, Okay.. I know. Probably the football playing geek abusers are not avid slashdot readers anyway...
So I suppose its buttons will be named "ctrl", "alt" and "del" for the sake of ergonomics, so people will know what to do if their watches lock or freeze.
this moore guy predicted that the computing power would have a particular behavior through the years, and chip manufacturers actually used moores law as a guideline to their R&D and production schedule, so its not exactly a mistery if they eventually fail to meet it someday.
Of course, this is the kind of post that makes moderators overjoyed.
Wether or not XP is going to stick is a very interesting issue. However, There is a very important point that goes unnoticed: WHY all this talk about XP?
In the past few years, most software processes were generally loathed by the average geek, because there was "so much documents to generate, and so little code to write". The real extreme (no pun intended) geek would even consider business process analysts a "project overhead". All he really wanted to do was coding.
Then came those agile methodologies like XP, and all of a sudden there are loads of people preaching that this is it, that XP will save us. that using SCRUM improves your lifestyle. etc.
My point is: a lot of people tend to like XP NOT because they acknowledge it is efficient as a software process, NOT because they used it and their project was a ressounding success.
My point is: a lot of people tend to like XP because they, in a way, are seduced by its promise of working by a methodology where the focus is coding. seduced by the promise that they dont have to write "useless" documents and activities, and their project will thrive if only they follow those simple rules...
Im not saying that XP is garbage, on the contrary, I think it brings some VERY interesting ideas like pair programming, and its test-planning.
what I AM saying, is: if you are considering to use XP you should be very careful and try to look at it with reason, rather than passion.
you should ask yourself at least this two questions:
1) "The problems I faced in my experience would be eliminated if I had followed the rules of XP?"
2) "The practices of XP would be enough to make my project a sucess?"
whatever is your decision, I guess we could call this a good start.