We should be trying to remedy this work situation, not prepare people for it.
The Merc is carrying an article just today on a lawsuit against EA [reg may be req'd] regarding deceptive work environment practices. It seems to me that companies that behave this way are just asking for unions.
The old articles are still available on CD. I got a copy a few years ago, and it's great reading this stuff again. Buy a copy for your local high school science teacher.
Suppose you wanted something that didn't expand or contract in certain temperature ranges
No supposition required. A physical metal rod was the official definition of the meter for a long time. Measurement stability requires such properties. And such rods are still used today in less critical areas.
Back on the original topic, any unusual property of materials is bound to find an application.
So did I. And the question seemed moot, since Groklaw had already asked this question of its audience and gotten a resounding yes. A very misleading title.
These are system failures. The entire workflow and resulting system design is plagued with deficiencies that many have reported. The software is only a tiny part of the problem. And, while e-voting greatly increases the number of potential failure points (many of which aren't software related), it's not just about e-voting. We have moved more rapidly to e-voting because of an equally bad paper-based design (punched cards with poor visual layout), but an election can also turn on something as seemingly trivial as washable thumb-print ink in Afghanistan. In every one of these cases, the state of the art at the time was much better than the poor systems that many people actually got. The major problem as I see it, at least in the US, is lack of pressure from vigilant voters on decision makers who should know better.
I've had no significant problems with SP2 itself either. But I did have two external but related issues.
SP2 came out right before my daughter ran off for college with her brand-new laptop in tow, and I wanted to make sure she had SP2 on it, and I also wanted to make sure it wouldn't cause her or me grief. I wouldn't be surprised if SP2's timing proved especially bad for schools.
So I did my first SP2 upgrade on my VM copy of XP (VMware running on a Dell workstation) in a rush and beat it up as much as I could before recommending it to my daughter. SP2 itself gave me no problems, but two important apps did: ZoneAlarm Pro and McAfee VirusScan AsAP. Both fall into the Security Center's "installed but status unknown" pit, meaning that things are fine but the SS nags that they aren't.
ZoneAlarm should have been OK, but Zone Labs so badly botched their SP2-aware 5.x release that I had stayed back with the non-SP2-aware 4.5 version. There are some installation issues with the older version and SP2 that were covered in their forums.
McAfee, on the other hand, seems to be taking its sweet time updating VirusScan AsAP to be SP2-aware. (BTW, I prefer this product over the retail one because I have more than one system, and it nags my family with admin-level messages and focus-stealing far less.)
After my own upgrade, my daughter's upgrade was straightforward with no problems at college so far.
For those two apps, I fault the vendors, not SP2, since both have had plenty of beta time and plenty of time since release to get in gear, but didn't.
It strikes me that there is some significant parallel between the Palm platform's history and the early UNIX wars (SysV, BSD, Ultrix, etc.). The parts of the Palm platform, and its most creative players, went through quite a bit of turmoil, what with aquisitions, break-ups, spin-outs and such. All of these events must have been a major distraction while Microsoft just plowed along and poured in money.
When Microsoft came out with their os for mobile devices palm tried to catch up and wasnt able to
Actually, there was plenty of time, since Palm was in the lead and had a much more user-friendly (fewer clicks to do important things; far better battery life), reliable, focused platform. Handspring pushed that forward as far as it could. The initial Windows CE platform, the H/PC, is all but dead, the AutoPC has gone through massive life support, and what could have been a much faster growth of CE in embedded platforms was greatly slowed by many blunders such as pricing, licensing (not just the OS, but also the initial H/PC applications), and availability of development tools; something the NT side understood and exploited much more effectively.
There's no GUI analogue, perhaps because anybody tempted to make one would add too many "features" that cluttered its ease of use. Think: do you know how to count the words in a Word file?
Tools -> Word Count
Yes, Word could be considered to be wc with too many other "features"!
From the Groklaw discussion, the real importance of this document is not necessarily that it proves that Novell has the copyrights (that's actually more difficult to prove), but that it does prove that Novell firmly believed that it has them. This is a direct defense against the specific slander charge against them.
The eclipse will begin just before the game begins, the moon's color taking on a reddish hue - the ruby orb a perfect lunatic lighting for a crimson showdown between the Red Sox and a club named for red birds.
The software was never intended to be deployed in a business or other multi-user environment.
That rules out many (most?) home systems, shared by all family members. In fact, it rules out so many systems that it's hard to imagine this not getting addressed before the beta ends.
Sometimes you need a hack, and Pascal's purpose in life it to prevent those convient little hacks.
While all of the typical classroom compiler projects used simulated, interpreted machine languages to avoid all of the hard problems of generating commercial, messy object files, the Pascal compiler itself, for the PDP-10, managed to generate native object files. The primary trick was to use variant records (unions in C). Many, many structures named "wandlung" (German for "transformation"). Depending on your point of view, it's enlightening or depressing (or both) to find out that the gurus used the back door when you believed the party line and kept banging on the front door.
Of course, the most annoying aspect of Pascal for me is string handling. Even Modula2 didn't fix them.
I believe it's been decided in the courts that sampling does require permission...
That's exactly my point. It's exactly the same.
... (and it could have gone the other way too, as sampling could have been seen as fair use)
That's a meaningless statement, because the decision didn't go the other way. It's like sports announcers yelling "Almost a great play!". The ball was dropped and it wasn't a great play.
Samplers use only a tiny part of the original work,...
Again, the court ruled otherwise, that size doesn't matter. You can't be just a little bit pregnant.
... and it's original source is usually obvious to anybody who's heard the original song.
Again, the court ruled otherwise. The samplers specifically argued that much of their work totally obfuscates the original, sampled work (just as some coders have attempted, bringing this back on-topic), but that's still not good enough. It's still clearly a derivative work, the perps were passing it off as their own, and they were making money from it. Leaving the original source obvious doesn't make it less of a violation, either.
You can't be righteously indignant about one but not the other (sampling code versus audio).
And it's not simply that GDS might allow access by others of files they shouldn't access. It's also that it causes files and other transactions to hang around longer than people think, due to the cache. For example, if you believe you've deleted a sensitive file or e-mail message, and even wiped it with one of several programs that can do this, you're wrong. The GDS cache still has the data. At the very least, this creates yet another place that data you thought was gone is still around (think personal info, future legal discovery processes, etc.).
Mike Langberg of the San Jose Mercury News provided an additional view (reg req'd) yesterday. Sample quote:
Second, the software keeps its own copy of all your Outlook and Outlook Express e-mail messages -- even after you delete them from within Outlook or Outlook Express. A confidential company memo, in other words, will still pop up during Google searches after you've emptied the Deleted Items folder in Outlook.
Mossberg Solution reviews it today
on
OQO For Sale
·
· Score: 1
WSJ'sThe Mossberg Solution reviews it today; pix both undocked and docked. Bottom line: he doesn't like it much; get a laptop. A quote:
But the worst feature of the OQO is the awful way you have to use it on a desktop. It has a sort of docking cradle, but the cradle lacks the array of ports and connectors familiar on laptop docking cradles. Instead, the OQO comes with a very long, stiff, weird cable that has various ports and connectors embedded in it at intervals. You plug the cable into the cradle.
The libertarian party wouldn't be doing this if they were in the debate, even if all the other 'third' parties were excluded.
That's a bogus argument for several reasons. First, as someone pointed out above, Arizona (the government involved in this case) has approved one third-party candidate, the Libertarian. So none of the other third parties has a role there for this election (that's another, ballot access, problem). Second, various of the third parties have a history of joint efforts at ballot access. Third, IANAL, but it probably takes a wronged party (one that is on the ballot yet not invited to the state-sponsored debate) to have standing in a lawsuit. If, in your scenario, the Libertarian party was invited but another third party, on the ballot, was not, the best the Libertarians might be able to do is to offer some kind of friend-of-the-court argument (and I would not be surprised to see one).
I believe that your idea that third parties have a negative impact on the state of politics (from a response of yours below) is also bogus. It sounds like you are alluding to the Nader-nuked-Gore argument. If indeed that argument is true (and there is plenty of dispute on that), the only serious negative impact is on the losing 2-party candidate, certainly not politics. Even the winner must deal with a more limited mandate. On the contrary, it forces the dominant parties to be more responsive the next time; that is a positive impact on politics as a whole. And such responsiveness is extremely unlikely when attempted from within today's primary parties; alternate ideas tend to get quashed.
Re:It's not like this is new logic...
on
Fluid Logic Chips
·
· Score: 1
Yes; the whole point of using abstractions like these (in this case, using a totally new technology to implement well-understood AND, OR, etc.) is to hide the underlying lower-level technology so that everything we already know can be reused on top. While there may be reasons that the whole system might be better or worse for some applications (somebody alluded radiation), once standard gates are available, there's no inherent reason why a fluid computer would need to be programmed any differently from other computers based on the same abstraction. Same old meaning for flowchart, at least above the gates.
Re:Thanks Due to CMU
on
ACM on E-Voting
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Too many Americans lack the knowledge to understand the science of electronic voting... Computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon University and other top universities stepped into the picture and signed a petition demanding a paper trail on all machines.
Unfortunately, that was not enough. Much of that effort didn't even make the mainstream press initially, and certainly little positive action resulted... until the poorly designed voting machines actually failed, with no paper trail to recover with. And even when they did, many of the county officials in my state (CA) continued to claim that there were no major problems. It took the state official to show some spine by enforcing reasonable minimum requirements, and his actions were still strongly fought by the county officials. That is the price we pay for insufficient voter knowledge. Much of the initial press measured voting machine effectiveness almost entirely in terms of convenience.
What I cannot understand is how the Pentagon can approve electronic voting by Internet without any paper trail for soldiers stationed overseas.
I am not the least bit surprised, though I am disgusted.
Slashdot Mirror
We should be trying to remedy this work situation, not prepare people for it.
The Merc is carrying an article just today on a lawsuit against EA [reg may be req'd] regarding deceptive work environment practices. It seems to me that companies that behave this way are just asking for unions.
The old articles are still available on CD. I got a copy a few years ago, and it's great reading this stuff again. Buy a copy for your local high school science teacher.
Suppose you wanted something that didn't expand or contract in certain temperature ranges
No supposition required. A physical metal rod was the official definition of the meter for a long time. Measurement stability requires such properties. And such rods are still used today in less critical areas.
Back on the original topic, any unusual property of materials is bound to find an application.
For a moment, I thought this was an Ask Slashdot.
So did I. And the question seemed moot, since Groklaw had already asked this question of its audience and gotten a resounding yes. A very misleading title.
They are complete failures of the software, ...
These are system failures. The entire workflow and resulting system design is plagued with deficiencies that many have reported. The software is only a tiny part of the problem. And, while e-voting greatly increases the number of potential failure points (many of which aren't software related), it's not just about e-voting. We have moved more rapidly to e-voting because of an equally bad paper-based design (punched cards with poor visual layout), but an election can also turn on something as seemingly trivial as washable thumb-print ink in Afghanistan. In every one of these cases, the state of the art at the time was much better than the poor systems that many people actually got. The major problem as I see it, at least in the US, is lack of pressure from vigilant voters on decision makers who should know better.
I've had no significant problems with SP2 itself either. But I did have two external but related issues.
SP2 came out right before my daughter ran off for college with her brand-new laptop in tow, and I wanted to make sure she had SP2 on it, and I also wanted to make sure it wouldn't cause her or me grief. I wouldn't be surprised if SP2's timing proved especially bad for schools.
So I did my first SP2 upgrade on my VM copy of XP (VMware running on a Dell workstation) in a rush and beat it up as much as I could before recommending it to my daughter. SP2 itself gave me no problems, but two important apps did: ZoneAlarm Pro and McAfee VirusScan AsAP. Both fall into the Security Center's "installed but status unknown" pit, meaning that things are fine but the SS nags that they aren't.
ZoneAlarm should have been OK, but Zone Labs so badly botched their SP2-aware 5.x release that I had stayed back with the non-SP2-aware 4.5 version. There are some installation issues with the older version and SP2 that were covered in their forums.
McAfee, on the other hand, seems to be taking its sweet time updating VirusScan AsAP to be SP2-aware. (BTW, I prefer this product over the retail one because I have more than one system, and it nags my family with admin-level messages and focus-stealing far less.)
After my own upgrade, my daughter's upgrade was straightforward with no problems at college so far.
For those two apps, I fault the vendors, not SP2, since both have had plenty of beta time and plenty of time since release to get in gear, but didn't.
I think it was from the stagnation of palm.
It strikes me that there is some significant parallel between the Palm platform's history and the early UNIX wars (SysV, BSD, Ultrix, etc.). The parts of the Palm platform, and its most creative players, went through quite a bit of turmoil, what with aquisitions, break-ups, spin-outs and such. All of these events must have been a major distraction while Microsoft just plowed along and poured in money.
When Microsoft came out with their os for mobile devices palm tried to catch up and wasnt able to
Actually, there was plenty of time, since Palm was in the lead and had a much more user-friendly (fewer clicks to do important things; far better battery life), reliable, focused platform. Handspring pushed that forward as far as it could. The initial Windows CE platform, the H/PC, is all but dead, the AutoPC has gone through massive life support, and what could have been a much faster growth of CE in embedded platforms was greatly slowed by many blunders such as pricing, licensing (not just the OS, but also the initial H/PC applications), and availability of development tools; something the NT side understood and exploited much more effectively.
There's no GUI analogue, perhaps because anybody tempted to make one would add too many "features" that cluttered its ease of use. Think: do you know how to count the words in a Word file?
Tools -> Word Count
Yes, Word could be considered to be wc with too many other "features"!
From the Groklaw discussion, the real importance of this document is not necessarily that it proves that Novell has the copyrights (that's actually more difficult to prove), but that it does prove that Novell firmly believed that it has them. This is a direct defense against the specific slander charge against them.
an expanding shell of debris which, seen from the Earth, is twice the diameter of the Moon [unattributed quote from the original article]
So its diameter is a function of viewing position. Sounds like angular diameter. That's still huge, though not as huge as M31 in Andromeda.
I agree. This is the most effective way to destroy any bad bureaucratic rules, whether they reside on drives or not.
Hmm. Yahoo! seems to have deleted the article. A copy remains here
Does Baseball have anything to do with lunar/planetary/solar alignment?
Yahoo! has a nice summary: Lunar eclipse might signal Sox curse or lights out for St. Louis. This will be game 4 and possibly (as I type this) the deciding game. Choice quote:
How much more coincidence do you need? :-)
The software was never intended to be deployed in a business or other multi-user environment.
That rules out many (most?) home systems, shared by all family members. In fact, it rules out so many systems that it's hard to imagine this not getting addressed before the beta ends.
Sometimes you need a hack, and Pascal's purpose in life it to prevent those convient little hacks.
While all of the typical classroom compiler projects used simulated, interpreted machine languages to avoid all of the hard problems of generating commercial, messy object files, the Pascal compiler itself, for the PDP-10, managed to generate native object files. The primary trick was to use variant records (unions in C). Many, many structures named "wandlung" (German for "transformation"). Depending on your point of view, it's enlightening or depressing (or both) to find out that the gurus used the back door when you believed the party line and kept banging on the front door.
Of course, the most annoying aspect of Pascal for me is string handling. Even Modula2 didn't fix them.
I believe it's been decided in the courts that sampling does require permission...
That's exactly my point. It's exactly the same.
That's a meaningless statement, because the decision didn't go the other way. It's like sports announcers yelling "Almost a great play!". The ball was dropped and it wasn't a great play.
Samplers use only a tiny part of the original work, ...
Again, the court ruled otherwise, that size doesn't matter. You can't be just a little bit pregnant.
Again, the court ruled otherwise. The samplers specifically argued that much of their work totally obfuscates the original, sampled work (just as some coders have attempted, bringing this back on-topic), but that's still not good enough. It's still clearly a derivative work, the perps were passing it off as their own, and they were making money from it. Leaving the original source obvious doesn't make it less of a violation, either.
You can't be righteously indignant about one but not the other (sampling code versus audio).
He was probably watching an ad with an image of new currency, and the TV detected the anti-counterfeit pattern. :-)
Downloaders don't pass the music/movies off as their own work.
But samplers who use without attribution or payment sure do. It's exactly the same.
And it's not simply that GDS might allow access by others of files they shouldn't access. It's also that it causes files and other transactions to hang around longer than people think, due to the cache. For example, if you believe you've deleted a sensitive file or e-mail message, and even wiped it with one of several programs that can do this, you're wrong. The GDS cache still has the data. At the very least, this creates yet another place that data you thought was gone is still around (think personal info, future legal discovery processes, etc.).
Mike Langberg of the San Jose Mercury News provided an additional view (reg req'd) yesterday. Sample quote:
So, you'd be defecting.
WSJ's The Mossberg Solution reviews it today; pix both undocked and docked. Bottom line: he doesn't like it much; get a laptop. A quote:
The libertarian party wouldn't be doing this if they were in the debate, even if all the other 'third' parties were excluded.
That's a bogus argument for several reasons. First, as someone pointed out above, Arizona (the government involved in this case) has approved one third-party candidate, the Libertarian. So none of the other third parties has a role there for this election (that's another, ballot access, problem). Second, various of the third parties have a history of joint efforts at ballot access. Third, IANAL, but it probably takes a wronged party (one that is on the ballot yet not invited to the state-sponsored debate) to have standing in a lawsuit. If, in your scenario, the Libertarian party was invited but another third party, on the ballot, was not, the best the Libertarians might be able to do is to offer some kind of friend-of-the-court argument (and I would not be surprised to see one).
I believe that your idea that third parties have a negative impact on the state of politics (from a response of yours below) is also bogus. It sounds like you are alluding to the Nader-nuked-Gore argument. If indeed that argument is true (and there is plenty of dispute on that), the only serious negative impact is on the losing 2-party candidate, certainly not politics. Even the winner must deal with a more limited mandate. On the contrary, it forces the dominant parties to be more responsive the next time; that is a positive impact on politics as a whole. And such responsiveness is extremely unlikely when attempted from within today's primary parties; alternate ideas tend to get quashed.
Yes; the whole point of using abstractions like these (in this case, using a totally new technology to implement well-understood AND, OR, etc.) is to hide the underlying lower-level technology so that everything we already know can be reused on top. While there may be reasons that the whole system might be better or worse for some applications (somebody alluded radiation), once standard gates are available, there's no inherent reason why a fluid computer would need to be programmed any differently from other computers based on the same abstraction. Same old meaning for flowchart, at least above the gates.
... who is still dead, BTW.
Too many Americans lack the knowledge to understand the science of electronic voting... Computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon University and other top universities stepped into the picture and signed a petition demanding a paper trail on all machines.
Unfortunately, that was not enough. Much of that effort didn't even make the mainstream press initially, and certainly little positive action resulted... until the poorly designed voting machines actually failed, with no paper trail to recover with. And even when they did, many of the county officials in my state (CA) continued to claim that there were no major problems. It took the state official to show some spine by enforcing reasonable minimum requirements, and his actions were still strongly fought by the county officials. That is the price we pay for insufficient voter knowledge. Much of the initial press measured voting machine effectiveness almost entirely in terms of convenience.
What I cannot understand is how the Pentagon can approve electronic voting by Internet without any paper trail for soldiers stationed overseas.
I am not the least bit surprised, though I am disgusted.