Arizona has used the same type of system, probably the same system, in fact.
When you're done making your selection, you take the ballot over to the machine that is similar to a bubblesheet reader, put it in, and it scans it and drops it into a sealed bin. If there's an error it doesn't make it that far, and it spits it back out, if I remember correctly.
They get the precincts' tabulation machines together and get the data off of them, and occasionally spot-check the paper ballots for accuracy, and you're good to go. If there's a problem, there are always the pieces of paper to look at.
"It seems more likely that IE7, included only in longhorn, will include new features (ActiveY?) that nothing else supports, making developers use them and cutting off Windows Longhorn regardless of browser choice."
You're forgetting one very important thing-- People and companies aren't rushing to adopt new Microsoft versions. At work we still have PCs running Windows 95 and 98 as our dominant platform, and we still have Macintoshes running 7.6.1. We update when we have to, not just on a whim. It's expensive, it breaks existing things, and it forces the users to be uncomfortable while they learn something new.
When I was fourteen and playing with Windows Chicago Beta I thought it was cool to upgrade the OS every few weeks. Now that I'm twenty-four and actually try to give myself some semblance of a life, I don't want to sit there reinstalling things anymore. I want them to just work. If my web browser can't view a page, I email the webmaster complaining about their page. I don't upgrade my OS, unless there is some overwhelmingly compelling reason to do so.
...I had just bought my brand new 1.6GB hard disk drive, and we were in the process of consolidating data off of my 800MB and 400MB drives onto the new one. Well, it was late after we got all of the equipment working and got the first partition copied (the 800 was two 400MB partitions), and I let my friend copy the others.
Well, he formatted the partitions on the new drive as he went, and he once somehow forgot to copy the data on one of the partitions after creating the new one on the 1.6GB drive. I ended up losing all of my porn (Very Very Important to a fifteen year old) and most of the games that I'd downloaded off of the local BBSes, like Doom shareware. So, I was kind of pissed off. It sucked a lot at the time.
I once had another weird one where the hard disk drive that the OS was installed on for my RAID box (2GB SCSI drive for OS, four 120GB IDE drives for RAID) blew a controller chip. It stank up the computer room something fierce! Anyway, I had a second drive of the same type and model, so I just swapped controller boards and it came back. Still running that way too, about two years later.
"This is a web browser used by close to 90% of internet users. You might say that the internet economy DEPENDS on IE, for better or worse. When you've got that kind of albatross hanging from the neck of a product you're purposely trying to deprecate, you had better make damned sure you properly QA the patch, which even with an army of testers could take weeks."
I was pissed off back in 1996 or 1997 when they started bundling IE with Windows 95 OSR2, and when they made the installer use it for the default shell in Windows 98. It was a crappy browser then, and it's a crappy browser now. It installs spyware, crashes, and locks people into proprietary "features" that try to give Microsoft more sway. Microsoft as a company doesn't cater to the community, it rapes the community for its own benefit and leaves people with things broken.
Fuck 'em if their product is vulnerable and their attempt to fix it live breaks nearly everyone's browsers. Let 'em deal with what happens then.
"Secondly, who wants to go challenge such a useless patent in court? I mean, principles aside, if someone did, we would be able..."
The problem is that the Patent Office takes the attitude of, "The courts will rule on it if it's a bad patent", while the courts take the attitude, "It's patented, therefore they must have a valid claim on it", so it's a catch 22 for anyone who has to challenge it. This means that it needs to be challenged now, while it's a new, fresh patent, and while the collective "we" can come up with examples of prior art that are confirmable before the application was placed. If we don't do this, in a few years once history has been somehwat obfuscated over time it'll be harder and harder to challenge, and the patent holder might actually win if the people against the patent don't have what they need to challenge it properly.
Until we change either 1) the patent office or 2) the courts, we'll continue to have to fight this. I'm personally in favor of changing the patent office, requiring a given posting on "to be approved" patents giving a timeframe like six months for the pending patent to be challenged. This would keep the USPTO from being overworked by actively having to research themselves, yet would give the community a way to fight against stupid and overly constraining patents, or to help prevent patents on "well, duh!" types of things.
Of course, we really just need to abolish software patents altogether, but that's another argument.
"I don't think the EPA takes this into account; they're looking at a bad extrapolation of data based on emissions and a short test--almost a perfect, no-wind, flat-land drive."
I don't see how they could get any better. All parts of the country are different. In Phoenix we have mostly flat terrain with mild inclines in places, but it's bloody hot with thin, smoggy air much of the year, which will affect power and emissions. In Indiana they have more hills, significantly more humid air, and lower temperatures, but inclement weather more frequently that'll affect efficiency and power. Same goes for everywhere else.
Take out the eccentricities of the terrain and you get EPA test mileage, which is ideal-conditions testing, truly relevant to nowhere in particular, but not biased toward anywhere in particular either.
I've thought of drafting a letter to them, something like the following:
Dear Beastie Boys:
Stop trying to debate technical matters regarding the software your new CD tries to run with people who know far, far more about the details than you do. From our perspective it's like trying to have a duel with an unarmed man. Relax, your regular mindless fans won't know the situation anyway, and probably won't even be aware of the damage that you are illegally causing to their PCs, assuming that there are any people left who were fifteen the last time you had a release who still care to listen to you.
Normally I wouldn't have cared either way about your new CD, but in light of recent developments, I'll keep an eye out for it on the Internet.
Yep. Other companies have released audio CDs with data portions, with stuff like music videos, games, info on the band, and the like on the data segment. The "soundtrack" just happens to be the bulk of the important content while the data portion is a "value added feature".
"Will the CD play on Linux? I am all for buying their CD, but I will NOT buy a CD I can't play at work or at home."
IIRC, it's just an autorun thing that installs the program from the data side of a mixed-mode CD. I'm not sure about the Macintosh side. I don't see why you couldn't read the audio side of the CD in Linux, and since the data side is irrelevant under Linux it shouldn't matter either way.
...if they based their entire legal attack on a single green line on a picture that while excellent in showing basic history doesn't go into detail and doesn't reference sources.
(I think that Levenez's work is quite good. I just always assume that a chart or graph is a simplified representation and never to be taken literally)
Because of cost. They're trying to use existing installations to do this, specifically avoiding running new wire. If they were going to install shielded cable, they may as well just put in coaxial or fiber.
As far as shielding power cables though, they don't do it because it's not effective, the shielding breaks down due to the elements, it's harder to diagnose a problem with the power grid, and probably a whole slew of other things.
"We had to make HF frequencies by hand! In the Snow! Uphill both ways!"
That should have read:
Back in my day, we had to make HF signals by building our own rigs, by HAND! We had to trek thirty miles uphill in the snow to the local Radio Shack or Sears store to buy the kit, and when they ditn't have all of the diodes, capacitors, and crystal kits we needed we had to trek back three weeks later when their shipment came in, carrying it all home in the snow! When we finally got everything, we had to solder it all together, with bad, carcinogenic lead-based solder, making sure EACH and EVERY SOLDER point was perfect. We had to wire them in to the power system and after the first components blew, trek back to the electronics store to buy more components and rent an oscilloscope to figure out what went wrong. Then fix the radio, retest, trek back to return the 'scope, and trek back home uphill in the snow to finally use the rig.
"And if very many hams do what you suggest the laws will be changed and those hams will lose their licenses and have to pay fines."
You forget that the FCC rules aren't run like regular laws. The FCC comes up with policies and procedures to follow, and the federal government's laws only state that if you want to participate, you go talk to the FCC and follow their judgements.
Remember too, that ham radio has been around for fifty years. Some very high profile people like Barry Goldwater have been ham radio operators. There might not be anyone of particular notoriety that stands out in the hobby right now, but there are well established lobbyist groups, a close-knit community, and usually willing to stand up for the priviledges granted to them. They won't just roll over.
The real fun will start as soon as a BPL installation jams an automated repeater, and that repeater's owner presses the FCC to fine the BPL owner, which under their rules they'd have to at least investigate.
"Lastly, it doesn't help hams when hams say they will just pump out a 1kw signal to drownout the BPL signal, that action will simply result in the group with the most votes winning, and that isn't the hams."
You forget that amateur radio is the primary user on said frequencies. This means that if their broadcasting interferes with your Part-15 "This device shall make no interference, and this device shall receive interference, even if it causes undesired operation" broadband service, tough shit. This doesn't mean that ham radio operators are out to screw over the world, but many, many operators have very powerful rigs and won't really be very worried if you try to move into their territory on the spectrum.
I wonder if anyone has looked into how this'll affect business band radio, which is often on frequencies near amateur radio. That'll be an interesting one, since those users are specifically granted commercial licenses on those frequencies for communication purposes...
I'm A+ Certified in MS-DOS and Windows 3.1. The only reason that I bother to note this is that shows that I've been at this for awhile. That's definitely not a bad thing.
I was still paying close attention to consoles back in '93-'96, and I remember that Sony had Twisted Metal, Battle Arena Toshinden, Tekken, Ridge Racer, and a bunch of other fast pace games. Nintendo had... Mario 64.
Sony did beat Nintendo to the punch, but Nintendo's attempts to market its system sucked massive ass. They didn't have any rockin' games that I saw, and the games that I had for my Genesis seemed cooler. I was also just starting to get into PC gaming in a new way (Doom, Duke Nukem' 3d, Quake, Shadow Warrior) and if my PC felt better than the console that didn't bode well for my opinions of the console.
OpenLinux being an example of a badly assembled distribution had nothing to do with it...
At least Slackware, even with its problems has a long history and has an avid base of followers. Debian has ease post-install administration and maintains a good place with their different versions. Gentoo has a lot of fans of the "bleeding edge". RedHat and SuSE both have good corporate and community support for those who want something pretty right out of the box.
I didn't see Caldera OpenLinux having any of these, and there were forces resistant to fully accept the GPL as well. The only surprise is that they lasted long enough to turn into SCOX.
"The Java is Faster than C++ and C++ Sucks Unbiased Benchmark"
Uh, okay... Sure, unbiased you say...
Yes, I need to read it to find out how Java was used, how C++ was used, what compilers or interpreters or runtimes were involved, and what libraries and the like, but until one can write an OS kernel in it, Java is still not what I would personally look to for the future of software development.
Well, if you are running a relatively legitimate mail server, odds are that it's going to be an MX in someone's DNS entries for a domain. If there is no forward resolve for 'mail.whatever' or 'smtp.whatever' or 'mx.whatever' then odds are good that something is wrong.
If Comcast is allowing people to use their own mailservers, they just need to deny all by default and open your port 25 up if you call and ask, if they don't do more thorough checking like above.
"How do you tell whether your machine is zombie spammer? Is running spybot enough?"
Just monitor traffic coming into and out of your computer. There are utilities that will let you do that. If you see stuff coming and going that you aren't generating then something is definitely wrong.
I had a Pentium Pro 180 for my fileserver for long time. The only reason that I upgraded it was that I needed more PCI slots than the motherboard had when I added my RAID array, and so I found in my scrap heap an Intel 450 on a surprisingly high quality AT motherboard. It was one of those last AT boards ever built kind of things. Fit quite nicely in my 4U rack mount dual redundant hotswappable powersupplied case, as did the drives.
The only thing that I will say is that if you add more ram to that 400MHz P2 (assuming that you're running an OS that will address the ram) you can get megawhopping performance increases. I went from 256MB RAM to 1.5GB RAM on my 1.2GHz AMD Athlon Thunderbird and I was running circles around people with 2.0GHz processors. I upgraded it to an Athlon XP2400+ (2.055GHz post overclock) and was keeping up with everything that I ever encountered. Linux did a good job of caching drive into ram, so I didn't have to touch the disk for most normal procedures once the computer had been through them the first time that boot. Fortunately the board was able to go from the 1.2 to the 2.0 (with bus speed overclocking to get to 2.055) and I didn't have to replace anything except the chip. Not ever touching the disk for run-of-the-mill usage is really nice.
A friend's box that was colocated in my server cabinet was a Pentium 133 with 24MB ram, it was jut handlng a few HTTP requests and some DNS and email from time to time. Ran for 300 days before being shut down when I moved. No problems ever.
Get the ram while you can, before it's harder and more expensive to find.
Slashdot Mirror
Arizona has used the same type of system, probably the same system, in fact.
When you're done making your selection, you take the ballot over to the machine that is similar to a bubblesheet reader, put it in, and it scans it and drops it into a sealed bin. If there's an error it doesn't make it that far, and it spits it back out, if I remember correctly.
They get the precincts' tabulation machines together and get the data off of them, and occasionally spot-check the paper ballots for accuracy, and you're good to go. If there's a problem, there are always the pieces of paper to look at.
"It seems more likely that IE7, included only in longhorn, will include new features (ActiveY?) that nothing else supports, making developers use them and cutting off Windows Longhorn regardless of browser choice."
You're forgetting one very important thing-- People and companies aren't rushing to adopt new Microsoft versions. At work we still have PCs running Windows 95 and 98 as our dominant platform, and we still have Macintoshes running 7.6.1. We update when we have to, not just on a whim. It's expensive, it breaks existing things, and it forces the users to be uncomfortable while they learn something new.
When I was fourteen and playing with Windows Chicago Beta I thought it was cool to upgrade the OS every few weeks. Now that I'm twenty-four and actually try to give myself some semblance of a life, I don't want to sit there reinstalling things anymore. I want them to just work. If my web browser can't view a page, I email the webmaster complaining about their page. I don't upgrade my OS, unless there is some overwhelmingly compelling reason to do so.
...I had just bought my brand new 1.6GB hard disk drive, and we were in the process of consolidating data off of my 800MB and 400MB drives onto the new one. Well, it was late after we got all of the equipment working and got the first partition copied (the 800 was two 400MB partitions), and I let my friend copy the others.
Well, he formatted the partitions on the new drive as he went, and he once somehow forgot to copy the data on one of the partitions after creating the new one on the 1.6GB drive. I ended up losing all of my porn (Very Very Important to a fifteen year old) and most of the games that I'd downloaded off of the local BBSes, like Doom shareware. So, I was kind of pissed off. It sucked a lot at the time.
I once had another weird one where the hard disk drive that the OS was installed on for my RAID box (2GB SCSI drive for OS, four 120GB IDE drives for RAID) blew a controller chip. It stank up the computer room something fierce! Anyway, I had a second drive of the same type and model, so I just swapped controller boards and it came back. Still running that way too, about two years later.
"This is a web browser used by close to 90% of internet users. You might say that the internet economy DEPENDS on IE, for better or worse. When you've got that kind of albatross hanging from the neck of a product you're purposely trying to deprecate, you had better make damned sure you properly QA the patch, which even with an army of testers could take weeks."
I was pissed off back in 1996 or 1997 when they started bundling IE with Windows 95 OSR2, and when they made the installer use it for the default shell in Windows 98. It was a crappy browser then, and it's a crappy browser now. It installs spyware, crashes, and locks people into proprietary "features" that try to give Microsoft more sway. Microsoft as a company doesn't cater to the community, it rapes the community for its own benefit and leaves people with things broken.
Fuck 'em if their product is vulnerable and their attempt to fix it live breaks nearly everyone's browsers. Let 'em deal with what happens then.
"Secondly, who wants to go challenge such a useless patent in court? I mean, principles aside, if someone did, we would be able..."
The problem is that the Patent Office takes the attitude of, "The courts will rule on it if it's a bad patent", while the courts take the attitude, "It's patented, therefore they must have a valid claim on it", so it's a catch 22 for anyone who has to challenge it. This means that it needs to be challenged now, while it's a new, fresh patent, and while the collective "we" can come up with examples of prior art that are confirmable before the application was placed. If we don't do this, in a few years once history has been somehwat obfuscated over time it'll be harder and harder to challenge, and the patent holder might actually win if the people against the patent don't have what they need to challenge it properly.
Until we change either 1) the patent office or 2) the courts, we'll continue to have to fight this. I'm personally in favor of changing the patent office, requiring a given posting on "to be approved" patents giving a timeframe like six months for the pending patent to be challenged. This would keep the USPTO from being overworked by actively having to research themselves, yet would give the community a way to fight against stupid and overly constraining patents, or to help prevent patents on "well, duh!" types of things.
Of course, we really just need to abolish software patents altogether, but that's another argument.
"I don't think the EPA takes this into account; they're looking at a bad extrapolation of data based on emissions and a short test--almost a perfect, no-wind, flat-land drive."
I don't see how they could get any better. All parts of the country are different. In Phoenix we have mostly flat terrain with mild inclines in places, but it's bloody hot with thin, smoggy air much of the year, which will affect power and emissions. In Indiana they have more hills, significantly more humid air, and lower temperatures, but inclement weather more frequently that'll affect efficiency and power. Same goes for everywhere else.
Take out the eccentricities of the terrain and you get EPA test mileage, which is ideal-conditions testing, truly relevant to nowhere in particular, but not biased toward anywhere in particular either.
Yep. Other companies have released audio CDs with data portions, with stuff like music videos, games, info on the band, and the like on the data segment. The "soundtrack" just happens to be the bulk of the important content while the data portion is a "value added feature".
"Will the CD play on Linux? I am all for buying their CD, but I will NOT buy a CD I can't play at work or at home."
IIRC, it's just an autorun thing that installs the program from the data side of a mixed-mode CD. I'm not sure about the Macintosh side. I don't see why you couldn't read the audio side of the CD in Linux, and since the data side is irrelevant under Linux it shouldn't matter either way.
I stand accurately and politely corrected.
...if they based their entire legal attack on a single green line on a picture that while excellent in showing basic history doesn't go into detail and doesn't reference sources.
(I think that Levenez's work is quite good. I just always assume that a chart or graph is a simplified representation and never to be taken literally)
Because of cost. They're trying to use existing installations to do this, specifically avoiding running new wire. If they were going to install shielded cable, they may as well just put in coaxial or fiber.
As far as shielding power cables though, they don't do it because it's not effective, the shielding breaks down due to the elements, it's harder to diagnose a problem with the power grid, and probably a whole slew of other things.
"We had to make HF frequencies by hand! In the Snow! Uphill both ways!"
That should have read:
Back in my day, we had to make HF signals by building our own rigs, by HAND! We had to trek thirty miles uphill in the snow to the local Radio Shack or Sears store to buy the kit, and when they ditn't have all of the diodes, capacitors, and crystal kits we needed we had to trek back three weeks later when their shipment came in, carrying it all home in the snow! When we finally got everything, we had to solder it all together, with bad, carcinogenic lead-based solder, making sure EACH and EVERY SOLDER point was perfect. We had to wire them in to the power system and after the first components blew, trek back to the electronics store to buy more components and rent an oscilloscope to figure out what went wrong. Then fix the radio, retest, trek back to return the 'scope, and trek back home uphill in the snow to finally use the rig.
"And if very many hams do what you suggest the laws will be changed and those hams will lose their licenses and have to pay fines."
You forget that the FCC rules aren't run like regular laws. The FCC comes up with policies and procedures to follow, and the federal government's laws only state that if you want to participate, you go talk to the FCC and follow their judgements.
Remember too, that ham radio has been around for fifty years. Some very high profile people like Barry Goldwater have been ham radio operators. There might not be anyone of particular notoriety that stands out in the hobby right now, but there are well established lobbyist groups, a close-knit community, and usually willing to stand up for the priviledges granted to them. They won't just roll over.
The real fun will start as soon as a BPL installation jams an automated repeater, and that repeater's owner presses the FCC to fine the BPL owner, which under their rules they'd have to at least investigate.
"Lastly, it doesn't help hams when hams say they will just pump out a 1kw signal to drownout the BPL signal, that action will simply result in the group with the most votes winning, and that isn't the hams."
You forget that amateur radio is the primary user on said frequencies. This means that if their broadcasting interferes with your Part-15 "This device shall make no interference, and this device shall receive interference, even if it causes undesired operation" broadband service, tough shit. This doesn't mean that ham radio operators are out to screw over the world, but many, many operators have very powerful rigs and won't really be very worried if you try to move into their territory on the spectrum.
I wonder if anyone has looked into how this'll affect business band radio, which is often on frequencies near amateur radio. That'll be an interesting one, since those users are specifically granted commercial licenses on those frequencies for communication purposes...
I'm A+ Certified in MS-DOS and Windows 3.1. The only reason that I bother to note this is that shows that I've been at this for awhile. That's definitely not a bad thing.
I was still paying close attention to consoles back in '93-'96, and I remember that Sony had Twisted Metal, Battle Arena Toshinden, Tekken, Ridge Racer, and a bunch of other fast pace games. Nintendo had ... Mario 64.
Sony did beat Nintendo to the punch, but Nintendo's attempts to market its system sucked massive ass. They didn't have any rockin' games that I saw, and the games that I had for my Genesis seemed cooler. I was also just starting to get into PC gaming in a new way (Doom, Duke Nukem' 3d, Quake, Shadow Warrior) and if my PC felt better than the console that didn't bode well for my opinions of the console.
OpenLinux being an example of a badly assembled distribution had nothing to do with it...
At least Slackware, even with its problems has a long history and has an avid base of followers. Debian has ease post-install administration and maintains a good place with their different versions. Gentoo has a lot of fans of the "bleeding edge". RedHat and SuSE both have good corporate and community support for those who want something pretty right out of the box.
I didn't see Caldera OpenLinux having any of these, and there were forces resistant to fully accept the GPL as well. The only surprise is that they lasted long enough to turn into SCOX.
"The Java is Faster than C++ and C++ Sucks Unbiased Benchmark"
Uh, okay... Sure, unbiased you say...
Yes, I need to read it to find out how Java was used, how C++ was used, what compilers or interpreters or runtimes were involved, and what libraries and the like, but until one can write an OS kernel in it, Java is still not what I would personally look to for the future of software development.
>>I wish my ISP would mirror porn locally too...
;)
>Ever heard of usenet?
Too dangerous. The odds are too good of getting an underage hermaphrodite bisexual bdsm-practicing beastiality freak with a cookware fetish...
...go away or I will replace you with a really small chihuahua...
Well, if you are running a relatively legitimate mail server, odds are that it's going to be an MX in someone's DNS entries for a domain. If there is no forward resolve for 'mail.whatever' or 'smtp.whatever' or 'mx.whatever' then odds are good that something is wrong. If Comcast is allowing people to use their own mailservers, they just need to deny all by default and open your port 25 up if you call and ask, if they don't do more thorough checking like above.
"How do you tell whether your machine is zombie spammer? Is running spybot enough?"
Just monitor traffic coming into and out of your computer. There are utilities that will let you do that. If you see stuff coming and going that you aren't generating then something is definitely wrong.
I had a Pentium Pro 180 for my fileserver for long time. The only reason that I upgraded it was that I needed more PCI slots than the motherboard had when I added my RAID array, and so I found in my scrap heap an Intel 450 on a surprisingly high quality AT motherboard. It was one of those last AT boards ever built kind of things. Fit quite nicely in my 4U rack mount dual redundant hotswappable powersupplied case, as did the drives.
The only thing that I will say is that if you add more ram to that 400MHz P2 (assuming that you're running an OS that will address the ram) you can get megawhopping performance increases. I went from 256MB RAM to 1.5GB RAM on my 1.2GHz AMD Athlon Thunderbird and I was running circles around people with 2.0GHz processors. I upgraded it to an Athlon XP2400+ (2.055GHz post overclock) and was keeping up with everything that I ever encountered. Linux did a good job of caching drive into ram, so I didn't have to touch the disk for most normal procedures once the computer had been through them the first time that boot. Fortunately the board was able to go from the 1.2 to the 2.0 (with bus speed overclocking to get to 2.055) and I didn't have to replace anything except the chip. Not ever touching the disk for run-of-the-mill usage is really nice.
A friend's box that was colocated in my server cabinet was a Pentium 133 with 24MB ram, it was jut handlng a few HTTP requests and some DNS and email from time to time. Ran for 300 days before being shut down when I moved. No problems ever. Get the ram while you can, before it's harder and more expensive to find.