Everyone seems to be concerned about whether the voting machines are perfect. I think there's another, more important question: are they better than what we have now?
Given the fiasco of the 2000 US presidential elections, I'd guess that it's possible for the machines to be both buggy and better than the alternatives.
I think we should focus on getting something that works well. If we wait for it to be perfect, it's going to be an awfull long wait.
The MC680x0 releases after the '30s was delayed and the initial '40s were very dissappointing. At the time the 486 was becoming popular, the 68k architectures were being abandoned in favor of RISC chips (for example, Apple). By the time the '60 came out (they skipped '50 for some reason) it was hopeless.
Now, if you want to play what-if, I think the question is what would have happened if IBM had chosen the original 68k as the basis for the PC, instead if the 8088. Then Motorola would have had the cash to keep the 68k development going at a peppy pace. But that's just too bitter-sweet to think about... at least for those of use who lived through coding the 286/386 architectures.
This is not meant to be a replacement for a university, this is meant to provide a leg up for people who have access to almost nothing. In any case, most people start by reading the same things.
The reading list for a very sound K-12 education would probably fit in a few Megs (compressed). Even a fairly complete encylopedia (i.e. Brittanica) fits in a few Gigs.
I suspect that if they're really filling these disks, they're not being very choosy and they're giving people tons of stuff they don't want. I would propose giving more people stuff that's likely to actually interest them.
I see no information what their product is or their business plan. To whom will they sell this rapidly-developed and (by definition) untested piece of code? What is their revenue model?
It seems pretty sketchy to ask people to pony up money without much information about what they are buying and without a track record to show that the market for this thing (whatever it is) actually exists and is capable of supporting this company.
However, like far too many dotcoms, they'll probably find someone greedy enough...
When I look at how much useful information is crammed on something like the old Microsoft Encarta CD, or consider that the entire project Gutenberg mirror takes up only a few gigs, it makes me curious why they need 100G. That's a lot of info; more than anyone could read in a lifetime.
It seems like they could spread the wealth a lot more widely if they just burned a bunch of CDs and sent them out. They could even send updates more quickly and easily than sending more disks.
Before the obvious comment comes back saying "but CD-ROM drives don't exist everywhere" please remember that CD-ROM drives became the standard way of distributing bulk data a few years before ATA controllers that can grok disks larger than 32G appeared. So I'm guessing that a computer in some remote area is at least as likely to have a CD drive as a controller that can take a huge disk.
It is intriguing to think of how different the computer industry would be today if Intel had decided to emphasize the i860 instead of the 486.
Well, given the problems that people had getting general workloads to run on the i860, probably almost nowhere...
But this always raises the question of what the world might have looked like if intel had dropped the ball and forced the PC world to abandon the x86 world in favor of another architecture. Given the time frame, the other architecture would almost certainly have been RISC. Who would have won, and why? And how would the world look now if we had the descendents of the MC86000, Sparc, or MIPS R3000?
Such a pleasant dream for such a pleasant Saturday...
The requirements of the PhD certainly vary from one school to another, but the common core (at least among American Universities -- I am not familiar with our overseas counterparts) is a demonstration of the ability to perform original research and extend the frontiers of knowledge in a rigorous manner. This person may or may not have the ability to do this, but he has repeatedly shown his willingness to do the opposite -- to replace data with lies, and knowlege with fiction.
I recommend the Ant microprocessor (which pre-dates and has nothing to do with the Java Ant project). It's a small architecture and was designed specifically for teaching. It has everything you need, and nothing that you do not.
Hey, I never mentioned linux, but if you want to pursue this...
Linux started off with a fairly conservative goal: implement the UNIX syscall interface. I'm not saying this is easy, I'm just saying that it is not particularly innovative from a technical perspective. (The open source model and development methodology were a bit more innovative, but not unique.) And Linux succeeded for the same reason that MS succeeds -- it let other companies take the risk of figuring out what should and shouldn't be in the kernel, and leveraged the GNU suite of apps to create a complete, usable system. The time was right and there was very little risk.
At present, Linux is a bit more innovative; people use it as a platform for research, and that research (when it works out) finds its way back into the kernel. But again there is little risk-taking because nobody really wants there to be -- nobody wants to break the world. As a result, you can still use your first edition of "The UNIX Programming Environment" (circa Seventh Edition) as a useful reference to programming on Linux. I don't expect that to ever change.
Microsoft has never been big on technical innovation (although when it comes to licensing and marketing, they've come up with some new tricks). They've done a few new things here and there, but their time-tested strategy is to let other companies do the pioneering research and develop markets, and then either buy those companies and/or steamroller them and take the market. They don't take risks because they don't need to.
Free speech isn't intended to protect popular speech, but unpopular speech.
This is not an issue of free speech. This is an issue of adults exploiting children and then attempting to pass off the results as an expression of free speech. Don't kid yourself.
Imagine (since this is slashdot) that make a video of someone punching Bill Gates in the nose and then post the result on my web page. Would you want to see it? Maybe. Do I have the right to show it to you? No, not unless Bill Gates gave his consent (unlikely, by my guess). Is it legal for someone to punch Bill Gates in the nose and post the video on the theory that this will satisfy everyone else's urge to punch him in the nose? No, of course not.
It does say that they "exlude known large email servers" so presumably it would be hard to take out an ISP. But it sounds like you could DHCP-hop your way through a an address bank and make things pretty miserable for someone.
Now all you need to do is trick someone into sending you something that resembles a worm... (all it will take for some trickster to add a rule the worm signature files that says that all messages that contain
^Dear
).
It seems like a good idea, but it seems like the threshold is too low and there ought to be a human in the loop (i.e., if the system suddenly decides to block half the IP numbers in the universe, a human should have to OK it).
Unfortunately I don't read Dutch; maybe they've thought of this already.
How can anyone argue against the government cracking down on illegal activities like this? It's illegal. The legality of this material isn't even the subject of controversy.
One the functions of governments is to crack down on illegal activities and generally enforce their laws. As long as it's illegal, this is what I'd expect.
Now you might argue that this material shouldn't be illegal. Go ahead and argue, but you're not going to get any sympathy from me.
Don't obscure the algorithms. That would be security through obscurity.
Do obscure the passwords. They're the part of the system that's supposed to be a secret. It doesn't matter what kind of lock you put on the door if you stupidly leave the key on the front porch.
Gadzooks, could they have made it any easier for script kiddies to exploit this? Might as well just power down your netgear box until a new firmware patch comes out (assuming the firmware can be patched).
I don't believe in security through obscurity, but I also don't believe in publishing backdoor passwords. It's not like it has any educational value (unlike looking at some exploits, which helps programmers learn how to write code that's not vulnerable).
It probably doesn't install simply because they haven't written an installer with the right language strings. They should give you your money back.
I can kind of see their point; if people try to install using instructions in a language they don't know, the results can be random. I was once asked to help a friend install something on her PC. She booted up her PC, popped in the CD, and up came a dialog box. In Chinese. She asked "what should the answer to this question be?" and I asked her "well, what is the question?" It took a long time because the translation process was non-trivial. I can see why Sony might balk at the idea of having their help desk try to sort out the problems experienced by users trying to install on a system using an unfamiliar language.
One reason that this is such a nuisance is that the cost/benefit equation is a mess. We (the community at large) wants everyone to upgrade/patch their systems (it doesn't matter whether we're talking about linux, or *bsd, or windows) so that their systems won't be turned into spam or DOS bots. MS wants money from the pirated versions and they think that denying this SP gives them leverage. People who pirate XP on average (from my admitedly limited sample) just don't give a damn.
Both the community and MS are victims of the pirates. Who should pay? The pirates. Who is going to pay? Us, and MS.
I don't really need this much fidelity, but I am very interested in the cable modem that comes with this puppy.
I wonder how long it will be before the local utility offers a 24 Gb/s connection. (of course it will all be for naught if the uploads are still snaily)
I am mildly distressed that so many people who have read my posting saw "large numbers" and somehow interpreted that as "prime numbers". I guess I should just let that go.
Have you ever studied prime numbers and factoring? Do so, you'll learn a lot.
You're not a very good troll.
While it may be possible, theoretically, to come up with a magic prime number algorithm - if that happens, it's a breakthrough in math systems akin to the development of Calculus and algebra.:P
These are both developments that have happened. Thus your argument is that it is only a matter of time before your "magic prime number algorithm" (whatever you mean by that) is discovered. I merely stated that it was possible, but you seem to think that it is inevitable.
Slashdot Mirror
Given the fiasco of the 2000 US presidential elections, I'd guess that it's possible for the machines to be both buggy and better than the alternatives.
I think we should focus on getting something that works well. If we wait for it to be perfect, it's going to be an awfull long wait.
Now, if you want to play what-if, I think the question is what would have happened if IBM had chosen the original 68k as the basis for the PC, instead if the 8088. Then Motorola would have had the cash to keep the 68k development going at a peppy pace. But that's just too bitter-sweet to think about... at least for those of use who lived through coding the 286/386 architectures.
The reading list for a very sound K-12 education would probably fit in a few Megs (compressed). Even a fairly complete encylopedia (i.e. Brittanica) fits in a few Gigs.
I suspect that if they're really filling these disks, they're not being very choosy and they're giving people tons of stuff they don't want. I would propose giving more people stuff that's likely to actually interest them.
It seems pretty sketchy to ask people to pony up money without much information about what they are buying and without a track record to show that the market for this thing (whatever it is) actually exists and is capable of supporting this company.
However, like far too many dotcoms, they'll probably find someone greedy enough...
It seems like they could spread the wealth a lot more widely if they just burned a bunch of CDs and sent them out. They could even send updates more quickly and easily than sending more disks.
Before the obvious comment comes back saying "but CD-ROM drives don't exist everywhere" please remember that CD-ROM drives became the standard way of distributing bulk data a few years before ATA controllers that can grok disks larger than 32G appeared. So I'm guessing that a computer in some remote area is at least as likely to have a CD drive as a controller that can take a huge disk.
Well, given the problems that people had getting general workloads to run on the i860, probably almost nowhere...
But this always raises the question of what the world might have looked like if intel had dropped the ball and forced the PC world to abandon the x86 world in favor of another architecture. Given the time frame, the other architecture would almost certainly have been RISC. Who would have won, and why? And how would the world look now if we had the descendents of the MC86000, Sparc, or MIPS R3000?
Such a pleasant dream for such a pleasant Saturday...
He did not learned the lesson that mattered.
I recommend the Ant microprocessor (which pre-dates and has nothing to do with the Java Ant project). It's a small architecture and was designed specifically for teaching. It has everything you need, and nothing that you do not.
Linux started off with a fairly conservative goal: implement the UNIX syscall interface. I'm not saying this is easy, I'm just saying that it is not particularly innovative from a technical perspective. (The open source model and development methodology were a bit more innovative, but not unique.) And Linux succeeded for the same reason that MS succeeds -- it let other companies take the risk of figuring out what should and shouldn't be in the kernel, and leveraged the GNU suite of apps to create a complete, usable system. The time was right and there was very little risk.
At present, Linux is a bit more innovative; people use it as a platform for research, and that research (when it works out) finds its way back into the kernel. But again there is little risk-taking because nobody really wants there to be -- nobody wants to break the world. As a result, you can still use your first edition of "The UNIX Programming Environment" (circa Seventh Edition) as a useful reference to programming on Linux. I don't expect that to ever change.
Microsoft has never been big on technical innovation (although when it comes to licensing and marketing, they've come up with some new tricks). They've done a few new things here and there, but their time-tested strategy is to let other companies do the pioneering research and develop markets, and then either buy those companies and/or steamroller them and take the market. They don't take risks because they don't need to.
This is not an issue of free speech. This is an issue of adults exploiting children and then attempting to pass off the results as an expression of free speech. Don't kid yourself.
Imagine (since this is slashdot) that make a video of someone punching Bill Gates in the nose and then post the result on my web page. Would you want to see it? Maybe. Do I have the right to show it to you? No, not unless Bill Gates gave his consent (unlikely, by my guess). Is it legal for someone to punch Bill Gates in the nose and post the video on the theory that this will satisfy everyone else's urge to punch him in the nose? No, of course not.
It does say that they "exlude known large email servers" so presumably it would be hard to take out an ISP. But it sounds like you could DHCP-hop your way through a an address bank and make things pretty miserable for someone.
It seems like a good idea, but it seems like the threshold is too low and there ought to be a human in the loop (i.e., if the system suddenly decides to block half the IP numbers in the universe, a human should have to OK it).
Unfortunately I don't read Dutch; maybe they've thought of this already.
One the functions of governments is to crack down on illegal activities and generally enforce their laws. As long as it's illegal, this is what I'd expect.
Now you might argue that this material shouldn't be illegal. Go ahead and argue, but you're not going to get any sympathy from me.
Do obscure the passwords. They're the part of the system that's supposed to be a secret. It doesn't matter what kind of lock you put on the door if you stupidly leave the key on the front porch.
Fine, they could mail it to you if you send in your registration card or something. They didn't just tell you, they told everyone.
I'm curious what you will do with this information -- what can you do that you couldn't do before? Perhaps I am overlooking something.
The purpose of a password is to limit access. If everyone knows the password, it might as well not exist.
Two, it allows me to test if I'm vulnerable.
If you've got that version of the firmware, then you're vulnerable.
I don't believe in security through obscurity, but I also don't believe in publishing backdoor passwords. It's not like it has any educational value (unlike looking at some exploits, which helps programmers learn how to write code that's not vulnerable).
I can kind of see their point; if people try to install using instructions in a language they don't know, the results can be random. I was once asked to help a friend install something on her PC. She booted up her PC, popped in the CD, and up came a dialog box. In Chinese. She asked "what should the answer to this question be?" and I asked her "well, what is the question?" It took a long time because the translation process was non-trivial. I can see why Sony might balk at the idea of having their help desk try to sort out the problems experienced by users trying to install on a system using an unfamiliar language.
Both the community and MS are victims of the pirates. Who should pay? The pirates. Who is going to pay? Us, and MS.
I wonder how long it will be before the local utility offers a 24 Gb/s connection. (of course it will all be for naught if the uploads are still snaily)
Have you ever studied prime numbers and factoring? Do so, you'll learn a lot.
You're not a very good troll.
While it may be possible, theoretically, to come up with a magic prime number algorithm - if that happens, it's a breakthrough in math systems akin to the development of Calculus and algebra. :P
These are both developments that have happened. Thus your argument is that it is only a matter of time before your "magic prime number algorithm" (whatever you mean by that) is discovered. I merely stated that it was possible, but you seem to think that it is inevitable.
The fact that Brown is an idiot isn't news, and hasn't been for a while. We don't need Linus, Andy, RMS, or DR to tell us. Move along, now.