CAD--Computer Aided Drafting, such as AutoCAD, SolidWorks, Mechanical Desktop, etc. is the sort of specialty software I think WOULD be OSS. (1)It is a technical product--a few of the engineers who would use it would also have the skills to code it. (2)It is fairly simple to steal components from rendering programs and other existing programs that are already F/OSS. (3)It could be extended for use by FEM programs that academics & others who have more time and freedom to develop F/OSS would absolutely love to have.
GNUCash is great, but has a lot of dependencies & some aren't used to double-entry. We need a simpler Money/Quicken clone. Checkbook Tracker made a fast start on something like this, but we don't really have a Money-killer the way we have an Office-killer.
Open CASCADE is a 3D CAD. It started out as high end CAD software, didn't keep up, was bought, and turned open source. Please not it is made available under a special license that, while resembling the LGPL, has (AFAIK) not been approved or even submitted for OSS certification.
ALSA in modern kernels really has improved things a lot over that time, though. In my boxes, I didn't have any headaches at all. If you have a well-known card, there is probably at least a work-around. Channels with the wrong PCM names are easily fixed. Sending a report on the exact make & model of your card and the problems you're having may improve the.asoundrc used for your card in the future.
Sound still isn't perfect, but it is a lot better than it used to be.
I agree that no states were called prematurely--I sawno flips. However, I think Fox did call it first. I think Fox called it well before 7 & had thought that NBC called it before then as well, but am less sure--I know I was awake when Fox called it. The wikipedia agrees that Fox called it first.
If you read Slashdot, it should be pretty clear that not all the l33t crackers out there are Republicans. If there was so much hacking going on, why were all these liberal crackers out there working to give Kerry votes? Or maybe they were! Maybe they just didn't give him enough. I'd also expect the Libertarian to pick up a huge number of votes if cracking was involved.
Well, if you think crackers stole the election, I don't see that it is a foregone conclusion that those crackers were liberals--there are conservatives crackers too. You can't project onto fringe individuals the political leanings of their supposed peers. If multiple crackers were involved, you can't say who cheated more. Crackers might not have even been partisan & may have only changed numbers because they could. Finally, they wouldn't even have to be from the pool of geeks that post here. They could have been sponsored by some (domestic or international) body that liked Bush.
This all being said, I agree with you: I don't think wide-spread electronic fraud stole the election. I do, however, see very severe problems & think that people across the political spectrum have a right to be concerned about elections in this country.
H.R.2239 and S.1980, discussed further here [verifiedvoting.org], will amend the Help America Vote Act (an act designed to ensure consistent voting systems that meet certain standards be available to ALL voters in ALL jurisdictions), such that there is "a voter-verified permanent record or hardcopy" attached with each and every ballot cast by every voter.
The EFF has made it easy to send an email, fax, or letter to your senators, encouraging them cosponsor the Senate bill.
Bev is a leftist, but she's been concerned with blackbox voting for a long time. I think she'd say something if Kerry won: it would be in her self-interest! (She might still be partisan & say something like "See--you should have listened to us," but why wouldn't she alledge fraud if fraud was likely to exist and if it would helper her livelihood?)
Still, the top two evoting companies are owned by strong right-wingers. I don't know if they'd have as much ammunition if "mistakes" had favored their boy.
In the most recent posting on comp.risks, the lead article is a compelling summary of the issues surrounding evoting & contains a link to an extensive document that summarizes many problems from the past decades.
I somehow doubt we will be seeing any stories about how a voting machine accidentally gave Kerry more votes.
There were stories on the risks of e-voting before election day. There should be more stories in the future--it is an important topic! The fact that the reported incidents would mistakingly gave Bush a few more votes isn't really that important. If there were incidents of it going the other way, it would be important to knowthat too. If Kerry had won, I'd expect we be hearing a fewmore stories: it is more compelling that the loser--regardless of party--was cheated by fate. I'm not exaclty a huge democrat and I don't want to see the results overturned, but I do hope that stories like these do get more coverage so that the problems will be fixed.
Not really--the map is still quite red! It would be neat to see this done in a cartogram style, where the size of each county/state is scaled to the population.
Doesn't it make more sense to get these from "the source"? No problems with bad labels here. Video Game Demos (those things are getting huge!). Sourceforge clearly labels the downloads and organizes them in a way that BT doesn't.
Not always. Some distros wouldn't want to spend the money and bandwidth to do all the hosting themselves. Some source distros do provide binary CDs, but don't host them on the mirrors. BT is a fine way to get these via the network.
Nearly any legal content that you can get via BT makes sense to get via BT if you endup ULing anything at all--that reduces strain on the source. It also makes more sense if the file is wanted from geographically diverse areas, but for which the source has a server in a single location.
I am also an IMAP junky & have this and other questions. Can anyone comment more on Thunderbird as an IMAP client? I have been guiltily using Mulberry and Pine--Thunderbird's IMAP supprort had continually been improving, but it wasn't there. Evolution was OK, but too big & I need something cross-platform. Mutt's a nice client, but IMAP still wasn't there & didn't seem to be getting there. It also wasn't available natively on all platforms. Though I now run Linux exclusively on my desktop and would consider a Linux-specific product, I'd prefer a MUA that had native ports to OS X and win32.
You're right and I knew that. I figured that out when you made the first comment on addressable memory. The Altix is the machine with the largest amount of RAM that is globally addressable across all processors. That wasn't clear to me from reading the press release, but other reports were much more informative. My comment was really to say there is more than one way to skin a cat. Yes--it is an achievement to build a single 2048 processor beast. But I wanted to point out that fine super computers with a lot of RAM and a lot of processors were built without Itanium2s. I would have offered an AMD or PowerPC cluster with comparable RAM & outstanding performance, but I don't really know of any.
but in the long term Linux is still more expensive because of the higher cost support fees demanded by non-Windows consultants.
I'd like to disregard the assumption about the proportion of costs eaten up by independent consultants vs. sales & support through contracts (which can essentially be part of that sales figure). Instead, I'd say that this shouldn't always be the case.
In the long-long term, Linux support costs should decrease. Simple supply-vs-demand. There are more shops learning to support Linux (increased supply) & this competition decreases the cost. Organizations who see this will hopefully switch, creating more demand for consulting, which will also encourage others to go into Linux consultanting.
Let me guess, it should be using the Opteron, right?
I didn't say that!
Well apart from the fact that the Opteron can't even *physically address* 1/10th of the memory in this thing,
To be pedantic: the maximum physically addressable RAM of the Opterons is 1/8th of what the Itanium can address. Obviously I'm not advocating trying to use 8 AMD chips for each Intel chip! But neither are they maxing out the RAM that the machine can address. And RAM isn't everything. The UltraSPARCs can address TBs of RAM and have a larger cache. Few use those.
The "Big Mac" managed to perform quite well, despite the fact that the PowerPCs have the same RAM limitation as the AMD chips and a smaller cache.
So, would you like a second chance? OK... should it be using Opterons? No? Good.
And I give you a second chance to read my message. Did I advocate a specific chip other than the Itanium? No--I just expressed interest in why they chose it. And you can have another chance to do math in public. Even if I did think they should have chosen the Opteron, would the Opteron have been a poor choice. Who knows. I don't know what their demands are. But clusters aren't always limited by memory and cache restrictions.
Slashdot Mirror
CAD--Computer Aided Drafting, such as AutoCAD, SolidWorks, Mechanical Desktop, etc. is the sort of specialty software I think WOULD be OSS. (1)It is a technical product--a few of the engineers who would use it would also have the skills to code it. (2)It is fairly simple to steal components from rendering programs and other existing programs that are already F/OSS. (3)It could be extended for use by FEM programs that academics & others who have more time and freedom to develop F/OSS would absolutely love to have.
GNUCash is great, but has a lot of dependencies & some aren't used to double-entry. We need a simpler Money/Quicken clone. Checkbook Tracker made a fast start on something like this, but we don't really have a Money-killer the way we have an Office-killer.
Open CASCADE is a 3D CAD. It started out as high end CAD software, didn't keep up, was bought, and turned open source. Please not it is made available under a special license that, while resembling the LGPL, has (AFAIK) not been approved or even submitted for OSS certification.
ALSA in modern kernels really has improved things a lot over that time, though. In my boxes, I didn't have any headaches at all. If you have a well-known card, there is probably at least a work-around. Channels with the wrong PCM names are easily fixed. Sending a report on the exact make & model of your card and the problems you're having may improve the .asoundrc used for your card in the future.
Sound still isn't perfect, but it is a lot better than it used to be.
I actually thought it was clever how the story on an obfuscated coding contest was, iteself, obfuscated.
The other top tools.
I agree that no states were called prematurely--I sawno flips. However, I think Fox did call it first. I think Fox called it well before 7 & had thought that NBC called it before then as well, but am less sure--I know I was awake when Fox called it. The wikipedia agrees that Fox called it first.
Here is the source of that story. Here is a followup that debunks a lot of it.
Yes. Here is a list of a few notables since the 80s. Of course, fraud and mistakes in voting predate eVoting.
This all being said, I agree with you: I don't think wide-spread electronic fraud stole the election. I do, however, see very severe problems & think that people across the political spectrum have a right to be concerned about elections in this country.
I was about to make this map (a cartogram in shades of purple, but fortunately someone saved me the work.
Bev is a leftist, but she's been concerned with blackbox voting for a long time. I think she'd say something if Kerry won: it would be in her self-interest! (She might still be partisan & say something like "See--you should have listened to us," but why wouldn't she alledge fraud if fraud was likely to exist and if it would helper her livelihood?)
Still, the top two evoting companies are owned by strong right-wingers. I don't know if they'd have as much ammunition if "mistakes" had favored their boy.
In the most recent posting on comp.risks, the lead article is a compelling summary of the issues surrounding evoting & contains a link to an extensive document that summarizes many problems from the past decades.
someone--anyone--
Not really--the map is still quite red! It would be neat to see this done in a cartogram style, where the size of each county/state is scaled to the population.
Nearly any legal content that you can get via BT makes sense to get via BT if you endup ULing anything at all--that reduces strain on the source. It also makes more sense if the file is wanted from geographically diverse areas, but for which the source has a server in a single location.
Live concert recordings with explicit permission from the copyright holders.
I am also an IMAP junky & have this and other questions. Can anyone comment more on Thunderbird as an IMAP client? I have been guiltily using Mulberry and Pine--Thunderbird's IMAP supprort had continually been improving, but it wasn't there. Evolution was OK, but too big & I need something cross-platform. Mutt's a nice client, but IMAP still wasn't there & didn't seem to be getting there. It also wasn't available natively on all platforms. Though I now run Linux exclusively on my desktop and would consider a Linux-specific product, I'd prefer a MUA that had native ports to OS X and win32.
You're right and I knew that. I figured that out when you made the first comment on addressable memory. The Altix is the machine with the largest amount of RAM that is globally addressable across all processors. That wasn't clear to me from reading the press release, but other reports were much more informative. My comment was really to say there is more than one way to skin a cat. Yes--it is an achievement to build a single 2048 processor beast. But I wanted to point out that fine super computers with a lot of RAM and a lot of processors were built without Itanium2s. I would have offered an AMD or PowerPC cluster with comparable RAM & outstanding performance, but I don't really know of any.
In the long-long term, Linux support costs should decrease. Simple supply-vs-demand. There are more shops learning to support Linux (increased supply) & this competition decreases the cost. Organizations who see this will hopefully switch, creating more demand for consulting, which will also encourage others to go into Linux consultanting.
Yup--I was completely wrong. Thanks for the crash course & smackdown. You've made it clear enough why they chose what they did.
Still, other systems do address large amounts of RAM. The ASCI-Q at Los Alamos has 33 TB (!) on alphas.
To be pedantic: the maximum physically addressable RAM of the Opterons is 1/8th of what the Itanium can address. Obviously I'm not advocating trying to use 8 AMD chips for each Intel chip! But neither are they maxing out the RAM that the machine can address. And RAM isn't everything. The UltraSPARCs can address TBs of RAM and have a larger cache. Few use those.
The "Big Mac" managed to perform quite well, despite the fact that the PowerPCs have the same RAM limitation as the AMD chips and a smaller cache.
And I give you a second chance to read my message. Did I advocate a specific chip other than the Itanium? No--I just expressed interest in why they chose it. And you can have another chance to do math in public. Even if I did think they should have chosen the Opteron, would the Opteron have been a poor choice. Who knows. I don't know what their demands are. But clusters aren't always limited by memory and cache restrictions.