Hey man, where are all the massive geode caves, as depicted in The Core? Oh nevermind... (he could ask for anything and he asks for hot pockets and Zena *tapes*)
In other news, with the recent Slashdotting, Princeton shows they're super-smart, for not posting the recent core scans online, at 2megs a pop.
It is very cool to hear that a 30 year old theory can be turned into observation. Now if we could only do that with religion, there'd be fewer needless deaths in the world.
This is good because now Open Office will compete with Microsoft Office on *every* level.
While I personally can't see the need to pay for programs that are easier to use than my electric toothbrush or mom's VCR, I bet lots of less-than-dextrous-office-chimps have oodles of questions and concerns about the new office programs.
Where this really hits home is in those dreaded product direction meetings; now we can fight for OO by saying things like, "well it comes with Sun's free techsup and if we extra care, we can order it at a fraction of the cost of Microsoft product support!"
Buh Bye Billy Gates; I knew you shouldn't have pissed off most of your users.
The touch-screen voting is by far the worst possible way to do voting. Most common folks can't say "electronic voting" without biting their cheeks, and to say e-voting, is somewhat redundant because e-voting could be mistaken for election voting. When I worked E-day for Ontario's elections in October, I remember it was e-this, e-that... everywhere.
So call it e-voting and wonder why there is confusion.
"So the U.S. government threw $3.5 billion on the table to pay for modernizing voting throughout the land, which is to say making it more expensive and more complicated. That's a lot of money and it attracted a lot of interest. One company in particular, Diebold Systems, went so far as to buy a smaller company that made voting machines just to get into the market. Diebold thought that being in the automated teller business was a good starting point for changing the way America votes."
Why not? They handle lots of money every day, why not give them valuable votes to control too? Oh wait a minute. They are republicans, these Diebold folks, aren't they? Once you take E-day away from little old ladies, you lose all honesty in it, imho.
And little old ladies are really the reason why elections have worked in the past because they are far better at auditing things than any automated paper-trail could be. If you would mess with the machine to fix votes, you could mess with the audit paper to fix the audit. So maybe Cringley's point has some surface validity, but it's moot, IMHO.
He concludes that a paper trail would be necessary for voting machines. That's fine with me, and everything, but the one thing in this article that grabbed me was when he said: "...there is lots of money to be made whether the darned thing works or not, and not much of a penalty if it doesn't work. Two hundred and seventy-five billion is a lot of money to spend on software development, especially if 72 percent of that money will be either wasted completely or used to develop something that doesn't work intended."
This could be seen as the fatal flaw of humanity: we don't care if we fail. We all die anyway, so who cares? Live life, make money and make love and make war and have fun and that's about that. Who cares if we just spent more money on a project that totally failed, when most of the world is starving elsewhere? What does it matter to us?
Personally, I'd like to devise a way so that it *would* matter.
"Quite frankly, I found it mostly interesting in a Jerry Springer kind of way. White trash battling it out in public, throwing chairs at each other. SCO crying about IBM's other women.... Fairly entertaining"
My wife and I watch Jerry Springer, and just the other day I said it reminded me of SCO. Coincidence? I think not.
Slashdot Mirror
Google eat your heart out. I know you can't browse the stacks for me, even if you can do everything else! :)
Hey man, where are all the massive geode caves, as depicted in The Core? Oh nevermind... (he could ask for anything and he asks for hot pockets and Zena *tapes*)
In other news, with the recent Slashdotting, Princeton shows they're super-smart, for not posting the recent core scans online, at 2megs a pop.
It is very cool to hear that a 30 year old theory can be turned into observation. Now if we could only do that with religion, there'd be fewer needless deaths in the world.
... everything at home was free, and everything at work was twice expensive? My God I think I just figured out how to finance Utopia!
This is good because now Open Office will compete with Microsoft Office on *every* level.
While I personally can't see the need to pay for programs that are easier to use than my electric toothbrush or mom's VCR, I bet lots of less-than-dextrous-office-chimps have oodles of questions and concerns about the new office programs.
Where this really hits home is in those dreaded product direction meetings; now we can fight for OO by saying things like, "well it comes with Sun's free techsup and if we extra care, we can order it at a fraction of the cost of Microsoft product support!"
Buh Bye Billy Gates; I knew you shouldn't have pissed off most of your users.
We had a company meeting about outsourcing last week and I managed to get minutes ahead of time.
I quickly formed a new company and aged it.
Ahh you all should be so lucky to read as much Dilbert as me.
The touch-screen voting is by far the worst possible way to do voting. Most common folks can't say "electronic voting" without biting their cheeks, and to say e-voting, is somewhat redundant because e-voting could be mistaken for election voting. When I worked E-day for Ontario's elections in October, I remember it was e-this, e-that... everywhere.
So call it e-voting and wonder why there is confusion.
"So the U.S. government threw $3.5 billion on the table to pay for modernizing voting throughout the land, which is to say making it more expensive and more complicated. That's a lot of money and it attracted a lot of interest. One company in particular, Diebold Systems, went so far as to buy a smaller company that made voting machines just to get into the market. Diebold thought that being in the automated teller business was a good starting point for changing the way America votes."
Why not? They handle lots of money every day, why not give them valuable votes to control too? Oh wait a minute. They are republicans, these Diebold folks, aren't they? Once you take E-day away from little old ladies, you lose all honesty in it, imho.
And little old ladies are really the reason why elections have worked in the past because they are far better at auditing things than any automated paper-trail could be. If you would mess with the machine to fix votes, you could mess with the audit paper to fix the audit. So maybe Cringley's point has some surface validity, but it's moot, IMHO.
He concludes that a paper trail would be necessary for voting machines. That's fine with me, and everything, but the one thing in this article that grabbed me was when he said: "...there is lots of money to be made whether the darned thing works or not, and not much of a penalty if it doesn't work. Two hundred and seventy-five billion is a lot of money to spend on software development, especially if 72 percent of that money will be either wasted completely or used to develop something that doesn't work intended."
This could be seen as the fatal flaw of humanity: we don't care if we fail. We all die anyway, so who cares? Live life, make money and make love and make war and have fun and that's about that. Who cares if we just spent more money on a project that totally failed, when most of the world is starving elsewhere? What does it matter to us?
Personally, I'd like to devise a way so that it *would* matter.
"Quite frankly, I found it mostly interesting in a Jerry Springer kind of way. White trash battling it out in public, throwing chairs at each other. SCO crying about IBM's other women. ... Fairly entertaining"
My wife and I watch Jerry Springer, and just the other day I said it reminded me of SCO. Coincidence? I think not.