For example, I used to enjoy debates on newsgroups, but last I checked (several years ago), they were just full of trash. The topics I was interested in had been largely abandoned by those that were actually knowledgable in the fields due in great part to this.
Another example is Yahoo message boards. Here we see what the lack of pretty much any moderation entails. Spam infested, crapflood infested, it's pretty difficult to get any meaningful discussion there.
Very true. Another example is Slashdot.
Even few years ago everything was different.
Completely different.
It has changed since then.
Furthermore, it seems to keep changing still.
It's hard to predict how it will look like in the future.
I think what will happen is that there will be heavier moderation and more stringent entrance requirements for various online forums. The Internet will still function, it just won't be as open as it once was.
I totally agree with you on the stringent entrance requirements.
Actually, I am still in favour of my old proposal to
introduce an IQ test in the registration process in on-line fora
such as Slashdot
and at the very least give some karma penalty for
people with low IQ which could be adjusted in the
Comment Options
much like the Small Comment Penalty. With the Small IQ Penalty
everyone would set a threshold below which posts would get
their scores decreased by a given modifier,
maybe even using a percentile threshold
like with the New User Modifier,
so one would be able to read posts only written by e.g.
the most intelligent 2% of Slashdot population.
With an automated test it might work quite well.
The needed infrastructure is already available.
Of course taking the test would be optional,
at least for some time,
and anyone who has not taken the test would get an average 100 points
(which would encourage people to take the test
out of embarrassment).
I think it is a really good idea.
No need to. The backup is on-line. here's the link.
And here's another one.
And
twomore.
As you can see, the Internet is nicely backed up
and the backup copies are avaiable on-line,
so there is nothing to worry about.
In two years when it's gone
we'll just have to download the backup
copy from one of the abovementioned links.
And here we are on October 20th hearing about it. I wonder if the people that were included in that database (that should have been kept on a completely secluded network IMHO) were contacted September 28th or if they had to wait until three bureaucratic agencies had done their own investigations...
Of course not.
Since the data including their phone numbers
was stolen,
how could they have been contacted?
I want a picture of this "inventor" guy so I can snatch a magazine out of his hands at an airport or crank up a boombox next to his table at a restaurant, thus freeing him to sit in silence and think about his navel.
Just another example of someone who knows what's good for me better than I do and feels the need to impose his beliefs on me.
Wait a minute, I thought that was the problem that this is supposed to solve...
Imposing one's beliefs upon others is
the cause of--and solution to--all life's problems.
You can keep "High Performance MySQL". I'm holding out for "Incredible Data Integrity Management with MySQL".:-D
High Performance and Incredible Data Integrity?
You are comparing apples and oranges.
Make up your mind. It's either
"High Performance with MySQL" or
"Incredible Data Integrity with PostgreSQL."
You can't have your cake and eat it too.
If you need real ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability) then by all means have it,
but realize that it isn't free.
Please read about the
relational model and
ACID.
Read about the
set theory
and
predicate calculus, about
tuple calculus
and
relational algebra.
This is complicated stuff which
it is not cheap algorithmically.
Most of people don't need ACID
and should not be penalized by the algorithms
that implement it.
Those who need it will have to pay with performance,
because there is only this much you can do in one cycle.
A pure ACID relational model is not for everyone,
some people will only need a persistent object store
instead of a relational database.
The most important thing to realize is that databases
are not magic. They implement complicated algorithms
in code that have to be run by the CPU and by definition
cannot be a one-size-fits-all solution.
So please don't oversimplify it by saying
"I want everything with no paying for anything, and also a pony."
Use the right tool for the right job.
so, a full-page add with the names of all the donors. how do they expect to have anything on that page but people's names? maybe that's what they have in mind, but i would hope for something a little better than
"...all these people use firefox! switch!"
In my opinion they should post
lots of portraits of Slashdotters who
have already switched so
the general public could see
that the most cool people already use it,
think "ipse dixit?" and instantly want to
jump on the bandwagon as well,
because of their emotional appeal.
This is an appeal to popularity,
argumentum ad verecundiam
and ad populum at the same time.
Granted, it is a genetic fallacy,
appeal to misleading authority and
ignoratio elenchi,
but strangely enough it really works well
in marketing
directed to profanum vulgus,
it's always been.
We will only have to present it in the form of
an argument by consensus.
There should be cool and "3173" people on one side,
all using Firebird, Mozilla, and Galeon,
and boring people on the other side,
wearing suits and using Internet Explorer, Opera, Netscape,
and other proprietary software.
This is a great idea.
Can I get any advice? Is Ruby really "more powerful than Perl and more object oriented than Python" - is this what I'm looking for, or should I put it off and learn Python first?
No, it is not more powerful than Perl. But than again, nothing is.
The points is not what is more powerful per se,
but rather which is more powerful in your hands
and which one best fits your own brain.
At this point it is extremely important to mention
Parrot:
"The amazing project [...] to really unite Perl and Python one day (not to mention Tcl, Scheme, Forth and Ruby, to name just a few)."
Perl, Python and Ruby, while not the only ones, are certainly the most important languages for the Parrot development. Parrot will not be considered ready until all of them are fully supported, and at this point Parrot will be their main target Virtual Machine, running each of them and allowing them to interoperate.
At this point it won't matter which of those languages you personally use, because whatever you choose you will still have access to all of the libraries and module, class and object, of each of them.
Few years ago I will tell you: "go for Perl because of CPAN."
Now my advice woule be: "go for whatever you please, for in few years it won't really matter. We will be able to work on the same project, write the same application. I will write my part in Perl 6, you will write yours in Ruby, someone will write in Python and another one in Scheme. We will all subclass our classes,
invoke our methods,
use our objects,
and we will produce a single,
monolithic Parrot application anyway."
Just imagine picking up some fresh, young and cutting-edge language
designed weeks ago--or even designing your own language--and
having every module from CPAN available at once,
working just fine using your new language syntax.
This is the future Perl, Python and Ruby.
Interoperation instead of competition.
It's a pity that, at the peak of the Linux desktop hype in the late 1990s, when evangelists predicted the near death of Microsoft, KDE and Gnome were rushed out of the door, and GNUstep development remained obscure.
What is it?
GNUstep Live CD contains a lot of software for GNUstep, a free implementation of the OPENSTEP framework (which was also the base as Cocoa in Mac OS X). Display Postscript is one of its powerful features. It includes an excellent application called Gorm for RAD (Apple Software Design Guidelines). More about the Objective-C Language.
In development and not yet on the CD (3DKit, AgentFarms, Burn / CDPlayer, Duncan, Emacs on GNUstep, Encod, Expense, GTAMS, GRASStep GIS, GShisen, GNUstepWeb (WebObjects 4.x), GNUstepWrapper, ILogin, Installer, InnerSpace, LaTeX Service, Localize, MusicKit, MyWiki / MyLibrary, ModPlugPlay, Paje, Pixen, Popup, Position, Rhydot / Skfxdemo, RSS Reader, WebKit / SimpleWWW, Tryst)
The currently used window manager is Window Maker.
Rescue System (lde, gpart, parted, grub, raidtools, portmap, nfs-common, QTParted)
3d Software Blender, Wings3d, Games NetHack, Jump n Bump and SuperTux, LaTeX, TeXmacs, Emacs, GIMP2
Tools (screen, irssi-text, ngrep, tcpdump, openssl, ssh, imagemagick, netpbm, nail, iptraf, mc, gnupg, ibackup, cowsay, hdparm, feh, tetradraw)
The Debian GNU/Hurd K6 mini.iso for easy installation in/cdrom/hurd
C Compiler and development environment
Webbrowsers (dillo, links2), TV Software (xawtv, alevt)
Some music (www.chiptune.com, www.maktone.tk)
This is a very interesting project, though of course not as popular as Knoppix.
It was the first time that distributed free software development defected from its proven practice of implementing standardized, proven APIs and technology (like POSIX) and created major APIs of its own.
[...]
Imagine the massive development efforts on KDE and Gnome, including the massive rewrites of their codebases, would instead had gone into GNUstep, so that the GNU/Linux and *BSD desktop would be OS X/Cocao source compatibile today [and companies developing for OS X port their software to Linux basically with one more compiler run]...
Imagine the efforts on Knoppix would instead had gone into GNUstep Live CD... Imagine the development efforts on Linux would instead had gone into The Hurd... Just imagine... The entire computing world as we know it would be completely different. But what do we expect? People have no idea that GNU even exists, let alone the kernel development! Just few days ago Slashdot
posted a story about the Seattle Times interview with Linus Torvalds with this opening paragraph:
"Linus Torvalds [pronounced LEE-nus] started a revolution of sorts in the computer industry when he created the Linux operating system and decided to share it with fellow programmer
Today, the OpenStep API celebrates its 10th anniversary. What started out as a joint adventure of NeXT and SUN to define an application development standard that would run on all machines, making "write once compile everywhere" a reality, is still unfolding within the vivid and active community of GNUstep, old NeXT and Apple lovers.
The magic 10 appears in GNUstep's current 1.10.x release and in Apple's MacOS X "Cocoa" release. Programmers worldwide can develop their programs on Mac OS, Linux, the BSDs, Solaris, and with a couple of hurdles -- even on Windows. This solid and well-defined standard is reaching out to the world of software development, slowly but surely.
Program your applications in days or weeks, rather than years or never. Use the advanced API of a development framework that hasn't needed significant modification for 10 years, because it rocks, is stable and just works.
Is Windowmaker dead? (No, I'm not a troll.)
The website hasn't been updated since February, I've gotten no CVS updates since July, there's been no official releases since 0.80.2, there's no working mailing list archives on the site, and my emails go unanswered.
First of all,
Window Maker
is quite a mature project in my opinion.
Right now as we speak
I am using even an older version 0.80.0-4 in
Debian GNU/Linux
(the stable
Debian 3.0 "woody"
which itself was released in July, 2002)
and quite frankly I have never thought that I even needed any update.
It's lightweight and rock-solid.
Usually I have about 20 active workspaces
with at least ten of them completely filled with tens of windows each,
and it have never crashed since I started using it.
And I've been using Window Maker
exclusively on all of my desktops
for at least five or six years (and in fact
those were even older versions in
Debian 2.2 "potato"
and Debian 2.1 "slink").
I remember that switching from "potato" to "woody" I noticed
few minor changes, mostly in Preferences Utility, if I remember correctly, but to be honest I'm not sure since I don't use it.
Few years ago I was playing with
Window Maker Themes
but I observed
that I am more productive without anime title bars and
hentai background distracting me all the time,
so after I got bored changing themes every day couple of years ago,
I keep using
one of the standard Styles, not Themes,
and have blue solid backround and blue everything
with very soft gradient but anything more fancy is just distracting
becasue it makes me focus my attention outside
of xterms instead of inside of them where it belongs, so it's quite pointless.
Of course when I use Knoppix I always start it with knoppix desktop=wmaker, or
at least always when I don't start it with knoppix 2,
and using it I saw that icons are prettier and everything else seems
the same.
And quite frankly,
I don't even want it to ever change,
since I like it the way it is now.
On the other hand I don't really care if it changes
as long as I'll be able to use the old version in future Debians,
and I know I will.
I think all of you can already see my point.
Window Maker is not dead, not because it is in active development,
it doesn't even have to, but because it is immortal
and cannot be killed at all, ever.
As you see I will gladly keep using it even if
no one develops it or even if I am the last and only user.
I seriously couldn't care less what window managers other people use.
It's not like I use it as a pick-up line or whatever.
I'm seriously interested in knowing. I'm a big Windowmaker fan, but I'm worried about its' apparent lack of development. Does anyone, anyone at all, know what the heck is going on?
I am a big fan of Window Maker either
but I completely don't care about its development,
just like I don't care much about the development of rxvt.
Window Maker is exactly what I need and I'm quite sure I will
keep using it even twenty years from now even if it doesn't change
at all. I don't want it to change.
I just want it to keep working.
And I don't want it to be another KDE or Gnome.
I don't even need other people using it,
I don't need other people at all.
I've been around computers a long time and i've never heard of it. What major application can anyone mention that has been developed on it? A 10th anniversary of something that barely anyone has ever used (in the big scheme of things) is really not any great thing to celebrate... I like the idea of it, but i'm not sure it's as wonderful of a hit as this news article is trying to make it seem.... Or am i off the mark here?
Apparently.
In the future, when you so desperately want to learn about something,
you can use Wikipædia,
a free on-line encyclopædia:
OpenStep
is an open object-oriented API specification for an
object-oriented operating system that uses any modern operating system
as its core, principly developed by NeXT. It is important to recognize
that while OpenStep is an API specification, OPENSTEP (all
capitalized) is a specific implementation of this OpenStep developed
by NeXT. While originally built on a Mach-based Unix (such as the core
of NeXTSTEP), versions of OPENSTEP were available for Solaris and
Windows NT as well. Furthermore the OPENSTEP libraries (the libraries
that shipped with the OPENSTEP operating system) are in fact a
superset of the original OpenStep specification.
The OpenStep API was created as the result of a 1993 collaboration
between NeXT Computer and Sun Microsystems, allowing this cut-down
version of NeXT's NeXTSTEP operating system object layers to be run on
Sun's Solaris operating system (more specifically, Solaris on
SPARC-based hardware). Most of the OpenStep effort was to strip away
those portions of NeXTSTEP that depended on Mach or NeXT-specific
hardware being present. This resulted in a smaller system that
consisted primarily of Display PostScript, the Objective-C runtime and
compilers, and the majority of the NeXTSTEP Objective-C libraries. Not
included was the basic operating system, or the display system.
The first draft of the API was published by NeXT in summer 1994. Later
that year they released an OpenStep compliant version of their
flagship operating system NeXTSTEP running on several of their
supported platforms and rebranded it OPENSTEP. OPENSTEP remained
NeXT's primary operating system product until they were purchased by
Apple Computer in 1997. OPENSTEP was then combined with technologies
from the existing Mac OS to produce Mac OS X.
Sun never seemed terribly interested in the product, likely a result
of the NIH syndrome. In fact it's somewhat unclear why they were ever
interested, although it appears it was an attempt to "get in" on the
object-oriented operating system market before Microsoft released its
plans for the object-oriented Cairo OS (which never happened).
Nevertheless they started their port to Solaris some time in 1994, and
released it in 1996. When Sun started work on Java just after this
point, Solaris OpenStep was never seen again.
NeXTSTEP
is the original object-oriented, multitasking operating
system that NeXT Computer, Inc. developed to run on its proprietary
NeXT computers (informally known as "black boxes"). NeXTSTEP 1.0 was
released on 18 September 1989 after several previews starting in 1986,
and the last release 3.3 in early 1995, by which time it ran not only
on Motorola 68000 series processors (specifically the original black
boxes), but also generic IBM compatible x86/Intel, Sun SPARC, and HP
PA-RISC). About the time of the 3.2 release NeXT teamed up with Sun
Microsystems to develop OpenStep, a cross-platform standard and
implementation (for Sun Solaris, Microsoft Windows, and NeXT's version
of the Mach kernel) based on NEXTSTEP 3.2.
The format of the name had many camel case variants, initially being
NextStep, then NeXTstep, then NeXTSTEP, and became NEXTSTEP (all
It's a fair question.
The advantages include making secret ballots possible for blind people,
This is very important indeed, but first of all I'm not quite sure how are the touch-screen machines supposed to help making secret ballots possible for blind people, and second of all blind people don't need computers to cast a vote.
Probably the cheapest and simplest idea would be to
provide wooden plates with holes in them cut in the places
where the mark should go, to put over a ballot.
Don't tell me that the current e-voting machines are easier
to operate secretely and alone by blind people.
Even putting candidate names in Braille alphabet on every ballot in print, which would be ideal, would be cheaper than an e-voting machine with Braille terminal or headphones and speech synthesis in every polling station, while at the same time it would much easier and would give a blind person a much better confidence how it works, and thus would be better from the point of view of casting a vote.
easy updating of ballot choices when candidates withdraw or die,
It is not hard to mark a candidate as no longer valid when everything is done manually by at least few people looking at every ballot given to every voter.
and the elimination of ambiguous votes.
It eliminates ambiguous votes
because after the election they are only a number in a database,
a fairly unambiguous one, even if not correct.
Yes, it means that after the election there are no votes
which are uncertain.
But how many ambiguous votes there usually are
using pen and paper? Putting a mark
next to your candidate is not a rocket science.
There's a hope of avoiding the trauma of Florida where the entire election depended on divining whether a dimpled chad was a vote or not, and where heavily Jewish districts turned in votes for Pat Buchanan.
But a dimpled chad is an artifact of mechanical voting,
not pen and paper. After you put a mark on your ballot
you can veirfy how does it look like and
whether you didn't make a mistake
before you cast it in a box,
and possibly request a new ballot if you did.
And most importantly, there are more people who can
understand how does a paper ballot work than those who
can understand how does an e-voting machine work,
even if it is open source and completely documented.
Seriously,
I cannot imagine a simpler process of casting a vote
than using pen and paper.
Less nobly, the suppliers of pen and paper are not treating election officials to expensive parties.
Now, that is a good point.
Your next questions are likely to be "Are those alleged advantages worth the expense and risk?", and "Will e-voting really work any better than paper?". Those are even better questions. Computer security professionals tend to answer them "No".
Indeed.
I cannot, however, understand one thing.
Even if said computer security professionals tended to
answer "yes," even if everything was
open source, publicly available and audited,
with every piece of system written
redundantly in five copies
by five independant teams led by Donald Knuth, Norman Hardy, Bruce Schneier, Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds,
stopping the election when any one of those redundant modules
gives an answer different then others,
everything worked on mainframes,
communicating using quantum cryptography fiber links, etc.,
I would still expect the general public to refuse using
e-voting, because they simply cannot understand the underlying
technology as much as they can understand how does the paper
work in the interaction with a pen.
People would never agree to have a paper election with
secret counting done by some company
because they wouldn't trust it,
and yet they agree to have much less transparency
with e-voting.
I seriously cannot understand it.
For those who don't know what I mean,
MMIX is a 64-bit RISC CPU designed by Donald Knuth:
MMIX is a machine that operates primarily on 64-bit words. It has 256 general-purpose 64-bit registers that each can hold either fixed-point or floating-point numbers. Most instructions have the 4-byte form 'OP X Y Z', where each of OP, X, Y, and Z is a single 8-bit byte. For example, if OP is the code for ADD the meaning is "X=Y+Z"; i.e., "Set register X to the contents of register Y plus the contents of register Z." The 256 possible OP codes fall into a dozen or so easily remembered categories.
The designers of important real-world processor chips (e.g., MIPS and ALPHA) have helped me with the design of MMIX. So I'm excited about the prospects.
So am I, Mr. Knuth. So am I.
("Donald Ervin Knuth is a renowned computer scientist and Professor Emeritus at Stanford University.
Knuth is best known as the author of the multi-volume The Art of Computer Programming, one of the most highly respected references in the computer science field. He practically created the field of rigorous analysis of algorithms, and made many seminal contributions to several branches of theoretical computer science. He is the creator of the TeX typesetting system and of the Metafont font design system, and pioneered the concept of literate programming."--Wikipædia.)
But at least with Diebold's electronic system even if no one knows who really won the election, at least there won't be any of those nasty residual questions. The machine says who won, and that's it.
While I sadly realise that you are right,
I think it sounds a lot like the reality described in
Franchise by Isaac Asimov.
I don't know if it is available anywhere on-line
but it is certainly worth buying and reading
because this little half a century old story
disturbingly keeps getting less and less unimaginable.
I believe it is better to read it while it is still
science fiction
for the entertaining value
if nothing else.
"as secure as they could be made" is not good enough. Not nearly good enough.
"more secure than paper ballots" would be a start. *ONLY* a start, mind you, as it doesn't begin to justify the additional expense, but it'd be a start.
Very well said.
I usually don't post "mod parent up" comments but
this is really +5, Insightful.
We know software that's as bulletproof as our democracy deserves can be written - it runs on mainframes day in and day out for years and years. Then the only reasons why the election hardware/software is so buggy is incompetence or malice, and either way we shouldn't be using it.
Apparently the business is more important than democracy.
And this is the country which is supposedly the model of democracy.
Sad. Very sad.
Discussions like this one are really depressing
so I won't repeat anything which I've already said.
Please see myotherposts
in this discussion.
Efficient?
By which you mean faster? Cheaper?
Is it cheaper and faster?
Even if it is, does it justify the lack of reliability?
Does it justify the lack of transparency?
Could anything justify it?
We are talking about democracy.
The transparency and reliability of democratic
election is something infinitely
more important than any
kind of efficiency could ever be,
for without transparent and reliable election
there can be no democracy.
Besides, what exactly is inefficient
in using pen and paper?
Please read
my other post before you reply.
Why anyone sane would use e-voting in the first place is just beyond me. I just cannot understand why people are so obsessed with e-everything. Could anyone please tell me what is wrong with pen and paper? I have been asking this question since this stupid idea of e-voting was first introduced and I have got absolutely no serious answers. This is not a rhetorical question. I would really like to know.
Before anyone says that e-voting is needed because
the United States presidential elections are too big to process and count manually using pen and paper,
please don't forget about the recent
2004 European Parliament election, when
343,657,800 people were eligible to vote,
the second-largest democratic electorate in the world after India.
It was the biggest transnational direct election in history and ten new member states elected MEPs for the very first time.
With total turnout 45.5% it means 156,364,299 people have voted,
48% more than in the 2000 US presidential election.
What I mean is that we all talk about e-voting essentially taking it for granted. But has anyone ever answered what is wrong with pen and paper? Is e-voting better because it is high tech? Because it is supposedly faster? Is it? Even if it is, does it justify much less transparency and security? Could anything justify any unreliability in the very process of election, the most essential fundament of democracy?
Was there anything wrong in June 13, 2004, when 156 million people voting with pen and paper elected 732 Members of the European Parliament to represents 450 million citizens? I quote those numbers to menonstrate that simple pen and paper can scale enormously. I don't think that Americans are less skilled than Europeans and cannot count paper ballots in an election on much lower scale such as the US presidential election.
These are all very important questions to answer before we start to talk about improvements to the e-voting status quo. The first question we need to ask is not "how" but "why."
Why anyone sane would use e-voting in the first place is just beyond me. I just cannot understand why people are so obsessed with e-everything. Could anyone please tell me what is wrong with pen and paper? I have been asking this question since this stupid idea of e-voting was first introduced and I have got absolutely no serious answers. This is not a rhetorical question. I would really like to know.
"The first day, all that was left online were two videos, one of which was subsequently removed because of PearPC-specific strings in the boot process shown in the video..."
Heh. If they can't even cover their tracks THIS BAD, no wonder they got catched
Oh, come on! The guy has changed the name from Pear to Cherry, hasn't he? Who would've thought that was not enough and anyone would ever interconnect those two projects?
gim.com
gchat.com
gmessage.com
gtalk.com
All *not* registered by google (unless they're doing some sort of proxy registration to hide their name.) I'll be watching gbrowser.com anyway which *is* owned by them.
Google, G-mail, G-browser, G-news, G-groups;
G-one, G-other;
G-this, G-that;
G-basically-anything.
One really has to wonder how long before Google gets sued by Ernst Gräfenberg for trademark infringement.
DVB you say? Shame that's not going to be compatible with the ATSC standard here in the states.
DVB = Digital Video Broadcast
ATSC = Advanced Television Systems Committee
I was sure that was a typo and we were talking about DVD and NTSC. Seriously. I guess I must read too much of mispelled texts and my brain is trying to correct all the typos subconciously without my consent and knowledge. Thanks for the hint.
Very good article. It is great that we are not living in Middle Ages any more and someone who uses Debian GNU/Linux can choose an architecture between
IA-32,
Motorola 68k,
Sun SPARC,
Alpha,
Motorola/IBM PowerPC,
ARM,
MIPS,
HP PA-RISC,
IA-64 and
S/390, and in fact
muchmore
when using a BSD kernel instead of Linux,
so I would expect from such a comprehensible review
that it would include more than only one architecture,
basically comparing apples to apples.
Are they planning to add more architectures to their comparison?
I really hope so because other than that it is a great review.
By the way, do you know what CPU architecture I am really looking forward to? MMIX. I hope one day I will able to buy one.
Slashdot Mirror
Frankly, I have no idea what are you talking about, but it surely sounds more impressive than developing for Gnu over Penguin.
Very true. Another example is Slashdot. Even few years ago everything was different. Completely different. It has changed since then. Furthermore, it seems to keep changing still. It's hard to predict how it will look like in the future.
I totally agree with you on the stringent entrance requirements. Actually, I am still in favour of my old proposal to introduce an IQ test in the registration process in on-line fora such as Slashdot and at the very least give some karma penalty for people with low IQ which could be adjusted in the Comment Options much like the Small Comment Penalty. With the Small IQ Penalty everyone would set a threshold below which posts would get their scores decreased by a given modifier, maybe even using a percentile threshold like with the New User Modifier, so one would be able to read posts only written by e.g. the most intelligent 2% of Slashdot population. With an automated test it might work quite well. The needed infrastructure is already available. Of course taking the test would be optional, at least for some time, and anyone who has not taken the test would get an average 100 points (which would encourage people to take the test out of embarrassment). I think it is a really good idea.
No need to. The backup is on-line. here's the link. And here's another one. And two more. As you can see, the Internet is nicely backed up and the backup copies are avaiable on-line, so there is nothing to worry about. In two years when it's gone we'll just have to download the backup copy from one of the abovementioned links.
Of course not. Since the data including their phone numbers was stolen, how could they have been contacted?
Imposing one's beliefs upon others is the cause of--and solution to--all life's problems.
High Performance and Incredible Data Integrity? You are comparing apples and oranges. Make up your mind. It's either "High Performance with MySQL" or "Incredible Data Integrity with PostgreSQL." You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you need real ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability) then by all means have it, but realize that it isn't free. Please read about the relational model and ACID. Read about the set theory and predicate calculus, about tuple calculus and relational algebra. This is complicated stuff which it is not cheap algorithmically. Most of people don't need ACID and should not be penalized by the algorithms that implement it. Those who need it will have to pay with performance, because there is only this much you can do in one cycle. A pure ACID relational model is not for everyone, some people will only need a persistent object store instead of a relational database. The most important thing to realize is that databases are not magic. They implement complicated algorithms in code that have to be run by the CPU and by definition cannot be a one-size-fits-all solution. So please don't oversimplify it by saying "I want everything with no paying for anything, and also a pony." Use the right tool for the right job.
In my opinion they should post lots of portraits of Slashdotters who have already switched so the general public could see that the most cool people already use it, think "ipse dixit?" and instantly want to jump on the bandwagon as well, because of their emotional appeal. This is an appeal to popularity, argumentum ad verecundiam and ad populum at the same time. Granted, it is a genetic fallacy, appeal to misleading authority and ignoratio elenchi, but strangely enough it really works well in marketing directed to profanum vulgus, it's always been. We will only have to present it in the form of an argument by consensus. There should be cool and "3173" people on one side, all using Firebird, Mozilla, and Galeon, and boring people on the other side, wearing suits and using Internet Explorer, Opera, Netscape, and other proprietary software. This is a great idea.
No, it is not more powerful than Perl. But than again, nothing is. The points is not what is more powerful per se, but rather which is more powerful in your hands and which one best fits your own brain. At this point it is extremely important to mention Parrot: "The amazing project [...] to really unite Perl and Python one day (not to mention Tcl, Scheme, Forth and Ruby, to name just a few)."
Perl, Python and Ruby, while not the only ones, are certainly the most important languages for the Parrot development. Parrot will not be considered ready until all of them are fully supported, and at this point Parrot will be their main target Virtual Machine, running each of them and allowing them to interoperate. At this point it won't matter which of those languages you personally use, because whatever you choose you will still have access to all of the libraries and module, class and object, of each of them.
Few years ago I will tell you: "go for Perl because of CPAN." Now my advice woule be: "go for whatever you please, for in few years it won't really matter. We will be able to work on the same project, write the same application. I will write my part in Perl 6, you will write yours in Ruby, someone will write in Python and another one in Scheme. We will all subclass our classes, invoke our methods, use our objects, and we will produce a single, monolithic Parrot application anyway."
Just imagine picking up some fresh, young and cutting-edge language designed weeks ago--or even designing your own language--and having every module from CPAN available at once, working just fine using your new language syntax. This is the future Perl, Python and Ruby. Interoperation instead of competition.
Very true...
It is interesting to note that the new GNUstep Live CD was announced on GNUstep Core News in June:
This is a very interesting project, though of course not as popular as Knoppix.
Imagine the efforts on Knoppix would instead had gone into GNUstep Live CD... Imagine the development efforts on Linux would instead had gone into The Hurd... Just imagine... The entire computing world as we know it would be completely different. But what do we expect? People have no idea that GNU even exists, let alone the kernel development! Just few days ago Slashdot posted a story about the Seattle Times interview with Linus Torvalds with this opening paragraph: "Linus Torvalds [pronounced LEE-nus] started a revolution of sorts in the computer industry when he created the Linux operating system and decided to share it with fellow programmer
This is the 10th anniversary of OpenStep announcement on the GNUstep website:
Well said...
First of all, Window Maker is quite a mature project in my opinion. Right now as we speak I am using even an older version 0.80.0-4 in Debian GNU/Linux (the stable Debian 3.0 "woody" which itself was released in July, 2002) and quite frankly I have never thought that I even needed any update. It's lightweight and rock-solid. Usually I have about 20 active workspaces with at least ten of them completely filled with tens of windows each, and it have never crashed since I started using it. And I've been using Window Maker exclusively on all of my desktops for at least five or six years (and in fact those were even older versions in Debian 2.2 "potato" and Debian 2.1 "slink"). I remember that switching from "potato" to "woody" I noticed few minor changes, mostly in Preferences Utility, if I remember correctly, but to be honest I'm not sure since I don't use it. Few years ago I was playing with Window Maker Themes but I observed that I am more productive without anime title bars and hentai background distracting me all the time, so after I got bored changing themes every day couple of years ago, I keep using one of the standard Styles, not Themes, and have blue solid backround and blue everything with very soft gradient but anything more fancy is just distracting becasue it makes me focus my attention outside of xterms instead of inside of them where it belongs, so it's quite pointless. Of course when I use Knoppix I always start it with knoppix desktop=wmaker, or at least always when I don't start it with knoppix 2, and using it I saw that icons are prettier and everything else seems the same. And quite frankly, I don't even want it to ever change, since I like it the way it is now. On the other hand I don't really care if it changes as long as I'll be able to use the old version in future Debians, and I know I will. I think all of you can already see my point. Window Maker is not dead, not because it is in active development, it doesn't even have to, but because it is immortal and cannot be killed at all, ever. As you see I will gladly keep using it even if no one develops it or even if I am the last and only user. I seriously couldn't care less what window managers other people use. It's not like I use it as a pick-up line or whatever.
I am a big fan of Window Maker either but I completely don't care about its development, just like I don't care much about the development of rxvt. Window Maker is exactly what I need and I'm quite sure I will keep using it even twenty years from now even if it doesn't change at all. I don't want it to change. I just want it to keep working. And I don't want it to be another KDE or Gnome. I don't even need other people using it, I don't need other people at all.
Apparently.
In the future, when you so desperately want to learn about something, you can use Wikipædia, a free on-line encyclopædia:
OpenStep is an open object-oriented API specification for an object-oriented operating system that uses any modern operating system as its core, principly developed by NeXT. It is important to recognize that while OpenStep is an API specification, OPENSTEP (all capitalized) is a specific implementation of this OpenStep developed by NeXT. While originally built on a Mach-based Unix (such as the core of NeXTSTEP), versions of OPENSTEP were available for Solaris and Windows NT as well. Furthermore the OPENSTEP libraries (the libraries that shipped with the OPENSTEP operating system) are in fact a superset of the original OpenStep specification. The OpenStep API was created as the result of a 1993 collaboration between NeXT Computer and Sun Microsystems, allowing this cut-down version of NeXT's NeXTSTEP operating system object layers to be run on Sun's Solaris operating system (more specifically, Solaris on SPARC-based hardware). Most of the OpenStep effort was to strip away those portions of NeXTSTEP that depended on Mach or NeXT-specific hardware being present. This resulted in a smaller system that consisted primarily of Display PostScript, the Objective-C runtime and compilers, and the majority of the NeXTSTEP Objective-C libraries. Not included was the basic operating system, or the display system. The first draft of the API was published by NeXT in summer 1994. Later that year they released an OpenStep compliant version of their flagship operating system NeXTSTEP running on several of their supported platforms and rebranded it OPENSTEP. OPENSTEP remained NeXT's primary operating system product until they were purchased by Apple Computer in 1997. OPENSTEP was then combined with technologies from the existing Mac OS to produce Mac OS X. Sun never seemed terribly interested in the product, likely a result of the NIH syndrome. In fact it's somewhat unclear why they were ever interested, although it appears it was an attempt to "get in" on the object-oriented operating system market before Microsoft released its plans for the object-oriented Cairo OS (which never happened). Nevertheless they started their port to Solaris some time in 1994, and released it in 1996. When Sun started work on Java just after this point, Solaris OpenStep was never seen again.
NeXTSTEP is the original object-oriented, multitasking operating system that NeXT Computer, Inc. developed to run on its proprietary NeXT computers (informally known as "black boxes"). NeXTSTEP 1.0 was released on 18 September 1989 after several previews starting in 1986, and the last release 3.3 in early 1995, by which time it ran not only on Motorola 68000 series processors (specifically the original black boxes), but also generic IBM compatible x86/Intel, Sun SPARC, and HP PA-RISC). About the time of the 3.2 release NeXT teamed up with Sun Microsystems to develop OpenStep, a cross-platform standard and implementation (for Sun Solaris, Microsoft Windows, and NeXT's version of the Mach kernel) based on NEXTSTEP 3.2. The format of the name had many camel case variants, initially being NextStep, then NeXTstep, then NeXTSTEP, and became NEXTSTEP (all
This is very important indeed, but first of all I'm not quite sure how are the touch-screen machines supposed to help making secret ballots possible for blind people, and second of all blind people don't need computers to cast a vote. Probably the cheapest and simplest idea would be to provide wooden plates with holes in them cut in the places where the mark should go, to put over a ballot. Don't tell me that the current e-voting machines are easier to operate secretely and alone by blind people. Even putting candidate names in Braille alphabet on every ballot in print, which would be ideal, would be cheaper than an e-voting machine with Braille terminal or headphones and speech synthesis in every polling station, while at the same time it would much easier and would give a blind person a much better confidence how it works, and thus would be better from the point of view of casting a vote.
It is not hard to mark a candidate as no longer valid when everything is done manually by at least few people looking at every ballot given to every voter.
It eliminates ambiguous votes because after the election they are only a number in a database, a fairly unambiguous one, even if not correct. Yes, it means that after the election there are no votes which are uncertain. But how many ambiguous votes there usually are using pen and paper? Putting a mark next to your candidate is not a rocket science.
But a dimpled chad is an artifact of mechanical voting, not pen and paper. After you put a mark on your ballot you can veirfy how does it look like and whether you didn't make a mistake before you cast it in a box, and possibly request a new ballot if you did. And most importantly, there are more people who can understand how does a paper ballot work than those who can understand how does an e-voting machine work, even if it is open source and completely documented. Seriously, I cannot imagine a simpler process of casting a vote than using pen and paper.
Now, that is a good point.
Indeed. I cannot, however, understand one thing. Even if said computer security professionals tended to answer "yes," even if everything was open source, publicly available and audited, with every piece of system written redundantly in five copies by five independant teams led by Donald Knuth, Norman Hardy, Bruce Schneier, Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds, stopping the election when any one of those redundant modules gives an answer different then others, everything worked on mainframes, communicating using quantum cryptography fiber links, etc., I would still expect the general public to refuse using e-voting, because they simply cannot understand the underlying technology as much as they can understand how does the paper work in the interaction with a pen. People would never agree to have a paper election with secret counting done by some company because they wouldn't trust it, and yet they agree to have much less transparency with e-voting. I seriously cannot understand it.
For those who don't know what I mean, MMIX is a 64-bit RISC CPU designed by Donald Knuth:
So am I, Mr. Knuth. So am I.
("Donald Ervin Knuth is a renowned computer scientist and Professor Emeritus at Stanford University. Knuth is best known as the author of the multi-volume The Art of Computer Programming, one of the most highly respected references in the computer science field. He practically created the field of rigorous analysis of algorithms, and made many seminal contributions to several branches of theoretical computer science. He is the creator of the TeX typesetting system and of the Metafont font design system, and pioneered the concept of literate programming."--Wikipædia.)
While I sadly realise that you are right, I think it sounds a lot like the reality described in Franchise by Isaac Asimov. I don't know if it is available anywhere on-line but it is certainly worth buying and reading because this little half a century old story disturbingly keeps getting less and less unimaginable. I believe it is better to read it while it is still science fiction for the entertaining value if nothing else.
Very well said. I usually don't post "mod parent up" comments but this is really +5, Insightful.
Apparently the business is more important than democracy. And this is the country which is supposedly the model of democracy. Sad. Very sad. Discussions like this one are really depressing so I won't repeat anything which I've already said. Please see my other posts in this discussion.
Efficient? By which you mean faster? Cheaper? Is it cheaper and faster? Even if it is, does it justify the lack of reliability? Does it justify the lack of transparency? Could anything justify it?
We are talking about democracy. The transparency and reliability of democratic election is something infinitely more important than any kind of efficiency could ever be, for without transparent and reliable election there can be no democracy.
Besides, what exactly is inefficient in using pen and paper? Please read my other post before you reply.
Before anyone says that e-voting is needed because the United States presidential elections are too big to process and count manually using pen and paper, please don't forget about the recent 2004 European Parliament election, when 343,657,800 people were eligible to vote, the second-largest democratic electorate in the world after India. It was the biggest transnational direct election in history and ten new member states elected MEPs for the very first time. With total turnout 45.5% it means 156,364,299 people have voted, 48% more than in the 2000 US presidential election.
What I mean is that we all talk about e-voting essentially taking it for granted. But has anyone ever answered what is wrong with pen and paper? Is e-voting better because it is high tech? Because it is supposedly faster? Is it? Even if it is, does it justify much less transparency and security? Could anything justify any unreliability in the very process of election, the most essential fundament of democracy?
Was there anything wrong in June 13, 2004, when 156 million people voting with pen and paper elected 732 Members of the European Parliament to represents 450 million citizens? I quote those numbers to menonstrate that simple pen and paper can scale enormously. I don't think that Americans are less skilled than Europeans and cannot count paper ballots in an election on much lower scale such as the US presidential election.
These are all very important questions to answer before we start to talk about improvements to the e-voting status quo. The first question we need to ask is not "how" but "why."
Why anyone sane would use e-voting in the first place is just beyond me. I just cannot understand why people are so obsessed with e-everything. Could anyone please tell me what is wrong with pen and paper? I have been asking this question since this stupid idea of e-voting was first introduced and I have got absolutely no serious answers. This is not a rhetorical question. I would really like to know.
Oh, come on! The guy has changed the name from Pear to Cherry, hasn't he? Who would've thought that was not enough and anyone would ever interconnect those two projects?
This two programs are completely different. I think you are all comparing pears to cherries.
Google, G-mail, G-browser, G-news, G-groups; G-one, G-other; G-this, G-that; G-basically-anything. One really has to wonder how long before Google gets sued by Ernst Gräfenberg for trademark infringement.
I was sure that was a typo and we were talking about DVD and NTSC. Seriously. I guess I must read too much of mispelled texts and my brain is trying to correct all the typos subconciously without my consent and knowledge. Thanks for the hint.
Very good article. It is great that we are not living in Middle Ages any more and someone who uses Debian GNU/Linux can choose an architecture between IA-32, Motorola 68k, Sun SPARC, Alpha, Motorola/IBM PowerPC, ARM, MIPS, HP PA-RISC, IA-64 and S/390, and in fact much more when using a BSD kernel instead of Linux, so I would expect from such a comprehensible review that it would include more than only one architecture, basically comparing apples to apples. Are they planning to add more architectures to their comparison? I really hope so because other than that it is a great review. By the way, do you know what CPU architecture I am really looking forward to? MMIX. I hope one day I will able to buy one.
Does it mean that I have less than 30 microseconds to appeal?