The IBM mainframe architecture was well designed and well implemented...
Indeed. In fact, there are many now-old innovations in it that "newer" technologies still don't completely get, like a true virtual machine architecture. Such capabilities, relatively trivial to add if designed into the hardware from the beginning, are painful and inefficient to emulate if not.
Then again, I don't miss hex-based floating-point!
Of course they have made some improvements over the years...
One of the more amazing at the time that I saw was a workable subset implemented in the '80s on a PC card. It turned an early IBM PC into a desktop mainframe for some applications.
The key in breaking the rules is not being caught...
It doesn't even matter if you get caught, if the penalty is low enough. And "low enough" can be quite high, with a marketing budget to back it up. It's just the cost of doing business.
It reminds me of when California raised its fine for littering when they noticed that it was almost as cheap to pay the fine as to pay a city dump fee, and that was before applying the expected value of actually getting caught. In practice, it was much cheaper to litter, and more convenient even if you were caught every time.
This sounds like the old "theorem" that any program can be reduced to 99 lines because any program larger than that can surely be reduced by one measly line without breaking it.
No need to forgive; vendors don't offer choice
on
Spam Bits
·
· Score: 1
'Promotions and greeting cards...'... forgive me for thinking this may not be a bad thing.
No forgiveness, since none is required. Even among the companies with which I actually have an on-line business relationship, practically none of them distinguish between desired product/service related messages (e.g., time to renew, product recall, upgrade available) and undesired promotions. I can't have one without the other. And that makes most of their e-mail spam, as far as I'm concerned, despite a pre-existing business relationship.
When all of the requirements of a complete, fair, trustworthy, straightforward-to-use voting system are taken together, they become extremely complex systems; systems that include all of the people and operation plans, not just the box. Anyone who has followed Peter G. Neumann's Risks Forum for the last few decades, if they aren't hopelessly depressed by the sheer number, scope and seeming endlessness of mistakes out there, at least understands how easy it is to get systems like this wrong. And how much attention to detail, and not just programming detail, it takes to get it right. In this case, there are competitive pressures to do a quick but superficial job, political pressures to appear to be fixing the 2000 election problems, and potential criminal pressures to control the outcome (among other things). Unfortunately, as with many of the cases that make it into the risks forum, it appears that the affected population needs to experience an actual, live failure before they will believe or admit that a failure is possible. The only solution is continued vigilance and action.
What a turnabout. While many here have condemned any possible patents that might be involved in this, it's worth noting that Kodak lost its instant camera business some years ago as a result of infringing Polaroid's patents. Interestingly, neither company is close to its peak anymore.
Well, IIRC, on the very first This Old House show, he personally began demolition without goggles or turning off the power. On the second show, he had to take lumps from a viewer letter that pointed this out. I've been similarly unimpressed with many of his techniques since. His current Home Again show is filled with explicit product name references and long verbal lists of marketing feature/benefit bullets associated with them. It's crossed way over the line to an infomercial, and thus is worthless to me. Add to these his leaving This Old House after conflicting himself by signing up to sell for Sears.
So to me, he has a long history of wreckless overpromotion. So if his company's chosen a spammer to promote itself, intentionally or not, I'd certainly be disgusted but I wouldn't be too surprised.
Where I vote, the "old" paper system used before last fall's recall of CA governor Davis was punched cards with chads (both polling place and absentee). That's almost as bad as the touch-screen systems. And the state is not requiring paper trails on the new systems until long after the presidential election (2005-2006, if I recall correctly). Strike 1.
The only good news here is that concurrently with the touch-screen roll-out, absentee ballots were changed to scannable paper forms.
Unfortunately, the voter guide arrived too late to order one using the form it came with. Strike 2.
So I drove down to the registrar's office for early voting and gave as my reason, under penalty of perjury,
that I distrust the new touch-screen systems. They gave me a ballot and I voted. Since this is a 3-strike state, I'm glad it didn't get that far.
It looks like the only solution here for the time being is to request a permanent absentee ballot.
For many years, I wondered which volume 4 would come out first, George Lucas' or Knuth's. I'd much rather have had them the other way around!
Fresh view: visit next lower level of abstraction
on
Debugging
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
A good list. As part of rule 8, it's often extremely helpful to look at the problem from a different level of abstraction than one normally would (e.g., different than you coded, or that you best understand it). This often exposes false assumptions that may be blocking a proper analysis.
Successful debugging is a lot like any hard science, particularly if you are not, and cannot, become familiar with the entire system first. Your "universe" is the failing system. You develop hypotheses (failure modes and potential fixes) and run experiments (test them). You have solved the problem only if you completely close the loop (your fix worked, it worked in the way you expected, your hypothesis completely explains the circumstances, and peer review concurrs).
A big part of the "art" is cultivating an attitude of how systems are stressed, and how they may fail under those stresses.
There should always be a way to use the key without unconditionally setting off the alarm, however brief. A short delay to allow enough time to get in and start the car would be plenty sufficient.
My older car's seat belt nag goes off if the very first thing I do, even before turning over the ignition, is buckle up. As anoying as this is, it only affects people in the car. An alarm system is much worse, particularly with its high false-positive rate.
And I think this problem is only made worse by the increasing number of applications that adopt a "cool" skin style with that one particular designer's idea of the world's best color scheme--and then neglect to provide the most basic standard GUI skin. By "standard", I mean one that will automatically follow the global GUI changes I might make in, say, Windows' Appearance tab, to select a very high contrast scheme for just such outdoor, high-glare situations.
This was brought home to me years ago when I took my laptop, a camcorder, and that then-cool Snappy parallel port dongle up to Dante's View in Death Valley to take a full-circle pan. In all that sunlight, I could pick one of the high-contrast schemes and easily work with any normal app. But Snappy's "ultra-cool" but inflexible gadget style skin was practically invisible. RealOne Player is one current example, but more appear daily.
Sounds like the old Twilight episode
on
Space Burial
·
· Score: 2, Informative
This more complete article has a quote that suggests this issue really isn't closed after all:
Wolfowitz's memo, written to David Chu, under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, allows the Pentagon to continue work already in progress to look into "other technical applications for voting on the Internet or electronically," the defense official said.
"The door is still open to other methods. It's just that the SERVE we have decided not to use," he said.
Fundamental Algorithms, volume 1 of Knuth's well-known series, handled nearly all of the programming exercises in MIX, his "virtual" assembly language that modeled capabilities on a variety of real processors. There were and are a variety of simulators for it.
Another one is this relic I have on my bookshelf: cardiac, "A cardboard illustrative aid to computation", by David Hagelbarger and Saul Fingerman of Bell Telephone Laboratories. It's literally a cardboard "computer" on which you write decimal instructions, move sliders around for addressing and opcodes, and use a cardboard "bug" (a ladybug) as the PC.
It's a pre-release copy that will expire in 360 days (which probably means the final will be out by then).
Not necessarily, maybe not even likely, particularly for something as big as an XP release. Many's the time that Microsoft has slipped a release beyond such dates. And in many of those cases, an update or date extender patch appeared to cover the slippage (sometimes several such patches).
The ordinance does not require video surveillance of e-mail or images from the Internet appearing on the
customer's computer screens. The ordinance requires only that the system be capable of
showing "the activity and physical features of persons or areas within the premises."
So what is the primary "activity" of someone at a CyberCafe that is supposed to be monitored, if not what they're doing on the Internet? It reads to me as if the majority opinion is trying to have it both ways.
[A slight OT diversion, in answer] I don't know if GG's charges or not (a quick search didn't say). But mine has time limits and charges for printing Web pages (and doesn't charge for printing catalog entries). And a quick search discloses some public libraries that charge for any services beyond basic browsing (e-mail, chat), or any Internet access by non-residents. Any of these (particularly the last) could easily be interpreted as providing "Internet access for paying customers".
[Back on topic] My concern here is that the opinion bundles in an extremely broad definition of a CyberCafe, well beyond a reasonable person's definition of one, I think. Perhaps GG's ordinances limit the definition to something more restricted. But even if they do, the opinion's inclusion of its own, broad definition suggests that the city is fully covered if it defines, or has defined, a similarly broad definition of CyberCafe. And that seems dangerous to me.
The CyberCafe ordinance defines a "CyberCafe" as an establishment that
provides Internet access to fee paying customers.
Sounds like all ISPs are CyberCafes in Garden Grove. Are those ISPs similarly required to monitor their customers? Even if it's not interpreted that widely, how about libraries that charge for access, say, beyond 1 hour?
The most recent
incident, occurring the day before the memorandum was written, was the murder of a 20-
year-old male while he was standing in front of a CyberCafe.
In other words, the first specific act mentioned wasn't even in the cafe. Does Garden Grove require or advocate similar monitoring inside each and every establishment that is in the same business as one in which a murder was ever committed in front of? How far in front of?
Even the simple ones have too many features
on
KISS
·
· Score: 1
When my cell phone plan came up for renewal a few months ago, I intentionally bypassed all of the color, camera, extraneously feature-rich models for one of the few remaining black-and-white models, an LG VX10, for just the reasons suggested: I want a phone, period.
But even this simple model comes with feature overkill: try as you may, you can't make it silent. Even with every single sound option disabled or set to buzz, it still plays a silly tune during shutdown, precisely when I've discovered I've entered a quiet zone like a theatre and want to turn it off!
Guilty disclaimer: But I'd pay money for a ring tone of Elmer Fudd saying "Wiiiing!", as in "Yes opawaitah, it went Wiiiing!"
Perhaps the hackers were respectable, finding the clearly serious flaws. But at least one decision maker still seems to have reached the wrong conclusions:
It's apparently "impossible" to put some of the recommendations in place in time, but they're sticking with the system. How do they add a paper trail without patches of some kind, assuming they don't just make everyone vote twice?
"I don't disagree with what they say -- they're the experts," Lamone said after the Senate hearing. But, she added, "I think it's a very good system."
And how do they put "tamper tape" on a phone number whose answering system the consultant says is "easily" breakable and can't be patched in time?
Their higher priority appears to be that the Diebold systems will fly in March, not that they will use a trustworthy system.
Why should the websites that these people are seeing the ads on be forced to develop and support a website free of charge?
Wrong. At least one of the named companies is a nationwide ISP that charges its users for the privilege of receiving banner ads on its home page, and presumably will now be charging them to receive these new ones. This same company is about to release a major browser update that blocks pop-up ads. (BTW, I don't see much difference between this situation and D-Squared Solutions' alleged extortion.)
How convenient that this ISP will concurrently "enhance" ads blockable by its new browser with unblockable ones.
To my mind, Lego's return to basics is a great feature, but beyond that, they have always made it as difficult as possible to purchase their products. My girls are just about grown, but when I was buying Lego for them (and myself!), I constantly ran into arbitrary road blocks to purchase, and I don't (yet) see this mindset changing with the back-to-basics transition:
Very limited selection in stores; the best, most generic sets often had to be ordered. The same goes for special-purpose yet generic sets like roof pieces or doors+windows.
When serious mail-order houses all had toll-free numbers, Lego remained a toll call.
When serious mail-order houses added 24-hour ordering, Lego maintained limited business hours.
When serious mail-order houses added Web sites for ordering, Lego waited again.
While Lego offered coupons and other incentives to buy through shop-at-home, they didn't stock all sets. They would refuse to sell some items that they reserved strictly for retail. That meant limits on the rebates, and polling low stock at local stores instead of exercising one of the chief advantages of mail-order: complete stock.
Before Mindstorms, some of the coolest sets were the ones targeted at schools. I forget how I stumbled onto those. But they were in a separate catalog with a separate phone number targeted at schools. When I ordered, they were talking purchase orders and school letterhead but I was talking consumer credit card. That took some effort to thwart.
Others have complained about Lego's high price. That's as may be. But the biggest gouge for me came shortly after Mindstorms came out. Lego arbitrarily held back some of the cooler peripherals from consumers and licensed them exclusively through an educational partner that added an additional hefty mark-up (determined by comparing parts that the partner sold non-exclusively). It was easy to turn the partner's distinct part numbers into Lego part numbers, and Lego people knew what they were, but would refuse to sell those parts. In addition to price, that added yet another entity I had to deal with to get Lego.
Now you can probably guess why the catalog's "Hard to find!" and "Not available in any store!" icons, which they intend as positive marketing, drive me crazy instead.
In my view, the Lego people still have a lot to learn about removing barriers to purchase.
Slashdot Mirror
The IBM mainframe architecture was well designed and well implemented...
Indeed. In fact, there are many now-old innovations in it that "newer" technologies still don't completely get, like a true virtual machine architecture. Such capabilities, relatively trivial to add if designed into the hardware from the beginning, are painful and inefficient to emulate if not.
Then again, I don't miss hex-based floating-point!
Of course they have made some improvements over the years...
One of the more amazing at the time that I saw was a workable subset implemented in the '80s on a PC card. It turned an early IBM PC into a desktop mainframe for some applications.
The key in breaking the rules is not being caught...
It doesn't even matter if you get caught, if the penalty is low enough. And "low enough" can be quite high, with a marketing budget to back it up. It's just the cost of doing business.
It reminds me of when California raised its fine for littering when they noticed that it was almost as cheap to pay the fine as to pay a city dump fee, and that was before applying the expected value of actually getting caught. In practice, it was much cheaper to litter, and more convenient even if you were caught every time.
This sounds like the old "theorem" that any program can be reduced to 99 lines because any program larger than that can surely be reduced by one measly line without breaking it.
'Promotions and greeting cards ...' ... forgive me for thinking this may not be a bad thing.
No forgiveness, since none is required. Even among the companies with which I actually have an on-line business relationship, practically none of them distinguish between desired product/service related messages (e.g., time to renew, product recall, upgrade available) and undesired promotions. I can't have one without the other. And that makes most of their e-mail spam, as far as I'm concerned, despite a pre-existing business relationship.
When all of the requirements of a complete, fair, trustworthy, straightforward-to-use voting system are taken together, they become extremely complex systems; systems that include all of the people and operation plans, not just the box. Anyone who has followed Peter G. Neumann's Risks Forum for the last few decades, if they aren't hopelessly depressed by the sheer number, scope and seeming endlessness of mistakes out there, at least understands how easy it is to get systems like this wrong. And how much attention to detail, and not just programming detail, it takes to get it right. In this case, there are competitive pressures to do a quick but superficial job, political pressures to appear to be fixing the 2000 election problems, and potential criminal pressures to control the outcome (among other things). Unfortunately, as with many of the cases that make it into the risks forum, it appears that the affected population needs to experience an actual, live failure before they will believe or admit that a failure is possible. The only solution is continued vigilance and action.
What a turnabout. While many here have condemned any possible patents that might be involved in this, it's worth noting that Kodak lost its instant camera business some years ago as a result of infringing Polaroid's patents. Interestingly, neither company is close to its peak anymore.
Well, IIRC, on the very first This Old House show, he personally began demolition without goggles or turning off the power. On the second show, he had to take lumps from a viewer letter that pointed this out. I've been similarly unimpressed with many of his techniques since. His current Home Again show is filled with explicit product name references and long verbal lists of marketing feature/benefit bullets associated with them. It's crossed way over the line to an infomercial, and thus is worthless to me. Add to these his leaving This Old House after conflicting himself by signing up to sell for Sears.
So to me, he has a long history of wreckless overpromotion. So if his company's chosen a spammer to promote itself, intentionally or not, I'd certainly be disgusted but I wouldn't be too surprised.
Where I vote, the "old" paper system used before last fall's recall of CA governor Davis was punched cards with chads (both polling place and absentee). That's almost as bad as the touch-screen systems. And the state is not requiring paper trails on the new systems until long after the presidential election (2005-2006, if I recall correctly). Strike 1.
The only good news here is that concurrently with the touch-screen roll-out, absentee ballots were changed to scannable paper forms.
Unfortunately, the voter guide arrived too late to order one using the form it came with. Strike 2.
So I drove down to the registrar's office for early voting and gave as my reason, under penalty of perjury, that I distrust the new touch-screen systems. They gave me a ballot and I voted. Since this is a 3-strike state, I'm glad it didn't get that far.
It looks like the only solution here for the time being is to request a permanent absentee ballot.
For many years, I wondered which volume 4 would come out first, George Lucas' or Knuth's. I'd much rather have had them the other way around!
A good list. As part of rule 8, it's often extremely helpful to look at the problem from a different level of abstraction than one normally would (e.g., different than you coded, or that you best understand it). This often exposes false assumptions that may be blocking a proper analysis.
Successful debugging is a lot like any hard science, particularly if you are not, and cannot, become familiar with the entire system first. Your "universe" is the failing system. You develop hypotheses (failure modes and potential fixes) and run experiments (test them). You have solved the problem only if you completely close the loop (your fix worked, it worked in the way you expected, your hypothesis completely explains the circumstances, and peer review concurrs).
A big part of the "art" is cultivating an attitude of how systems are stressed, and how they may fail under those stresses.
There should always be a way to use the key without unconditionally setting off the alarm, however brief. A short delay to allow enough time to get in and start the car would be plenty sufficient.
My older car's seat belt nag goes off if the very first thing I do, even before turning over the ignition, is buckle up. As anoying as this is, it only affects people in the car. An alarm system is much worse, particularly with its high false-positive rate.
And I think this problem is only made worse by the increasing number of applications that adopt a "cool" skin style with that one particular designer's idea of the world's best color scheme--and then neglect to provide the most basic standard GUI skin. By "standard", I mean one that will automatically follow the global GUI changes I might make in, say, Windows' Appearance tab, to select a very high contrast scheme for just such outdoor, high-glare situations.
This was brought home to me years ago when I took my laptop, a camcorder, and that then-cool Snappy parallel port dongle up to Dante's View in Death Valley to take a full-circle pan. In all that sunlight, I could pick one of the high-contrast schemes and easily work with any normal app. But Snappy's "ultra-cool" but inflexible gadget style skin was practically invisible. RealOne Player is one current example, but more appear daily.
For a few more dollars, you could be embalmed in your favorite fantasy.
This more complete article has a quote that suggests this issue really isn't closed after all:
Wolfowitz's memo, written to David Chu, under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, allows the Pentagon to continue work already in progress to look into "other technical applications for voting on the Internet or electronically," the defense official said.
"The door is still open to other methods. It's just that the SERVE we have decided not to use," he said.
Fundamental Algorithms, volume 1 of Knuth's well-known series, handled nearly all of the programming exercises in MIX, his "virtual" assembly language that modeled capabilities on a variety of real processors. There were and are a variety of simulators for it.
Another one is this relic I have on my bookshelf: cardiac, "A cardboard illustrative aid to computation", by David Hagelbarger and Saul Fingerman of Bell Telephone Laboratories. It's literally a cardboard "computer" on which you write decimal instructions, move sliders around for addressing and opcodes, and use a cardboard "bug" (a ladybug) as the PC.
It's a pre-release copy that will expire in 360 days (which probably means the final will be out by then).
Not necessarily, maybe not even likely, particularly for something as big as an XP release. Many's the time that Microsoft has slipped a release beyond such dates. And in many of those cases, an update or date extender patch appeared to cover the slippage (sometimes several such patches).
From the opinion:
The ordinance does not require video surveillance of e-mail or images from the Internet appearing on the customer's computer screens. The ordinance requires only that the system be capable of showing "the activity and physical features of persons or areas within the premises."
So what is the primary "activity" of someone at a CyberCafe that is supposed to be monitored, if not what they're doing on the Internet? It reads to me as if the majority opinion is trying to have it both ways.
[A slight OT diversion, in answer] I don't know if GG's charges or not (a quick search didn't say). But mine has time limits and charges for printing Web pages (and doesn't charge for printing catalog entries). And a quick search discloses some public libraries that charge for any services beyond basic browsing (e-mail, chat), or any Internet access by non-residents. Any of these (particularly the last) could easily be interpreted as providing "Internet access for paying customers".
[Back on topic] My concern here is that the opinion bundles in an extremely broad definition of a CyberCafe, well beyond a reasonable person's definition of one, I think. Perhaps GG's ordinances limit the definition to something more restricted. But even if they do, the opinion's inclusion of its own, broad definition suggests that the city is fully covered if it defines, or has defined, a similarly broad definition of CyberCafe. And that seems dangerous to me.
From the opinion:
The CyberCafe ordinance defines a "CyberCafe" as an establishment that provides Internet access to fee paying customers.Sounds like all ISPs are CyberCafes in Garden Grove. Are those ISPs similarly required to monitor their customers? Even if it's not interpreted that widely, how about libraries that charge for access, say, beyond 1 hour?
From the opinion,
The most recent incident, occurring the day before the memorandum was written, was the murder of a 20- year-old male while he was standing in front of a CyberCafe.In other words, the first specific act mentioned wasn't even in the cafe. Does Garden Grove require or advocate similar monitoring inside each and every establishment that is in the same business as one in which a murder was ever committed in front of? How far in front of?
When my cell phone plan came up for renewal a few months ago, I intentionally bypassed all of the color, camera, extraneously feature-rich models for one of the few remaining black-and-white models, an LG VX10, for just the reasons suggested: I want a phone, period.
But even this simple model comes with feature overkill: try as you may, you can't make it silent. Even with every single sound option disabled or set to buzz, it still plays a silly tune during shutdown, precisely when I've discovered I've entered a quiet zone like a theatre and want to turn it off!
Guilty disclaimer: But I'd pay money for a ring tone of Elmer Fudd saying "Wiiiing!", as in "Yes opawaitah, it went Wiiiing!"
Perhaps the hackers were respectable, finding the clearly serious flaws. But at least one decision maker still seems to have reached the wrong conclusions:
It's apparently "impossible" to put some of the recommendations in place in time, but they're sticking with the system. How do they add a paper trail without patches of some kind, assuming they don't just make everyone vote twice?
"I don't disagree with what they say -- they're the experts," Lamone said after the Senate hearing. But, she added, "I think it's a very good system."
And how do they put "tamper tape" on a phone number whose answering system the consultant says is "easily" breakable and can't be patched in time?
Their higher priority appears to be that the Diebold systems will fly in March, not that they will use a trustworthy system.
Why should the websites that these people are seeing the ads on be forced to develop and support a website free of charge?
Wrong. At least one of the named companies is a nationwide ISP that charges its users for the privilege of receiving banner ads on its home page, and presumably will now be charging them to receive these new ones. This same company is about to release a major browser update that blocks pop-up ads. (BTW, I don't see much difference between this situation and D-Squared Solutions' alleged extortion.)
How convenient that this ISP will concurrently "enhance" ads blockable by its new browser with unblockable ones.To my mind, Lego's return to basics is a great feature, but beyond that, they have always made it as difficult as possible to purchase their products. My girls are just about grown, but when I was buying Lego for them (and myself!), I constantly ran into arbitrary road blocks to purchase, and I don't (yet) see this mindset changing with the back-to-basics transition:
In my view, the Lego people still have a lot to learn about removing barriers to purchase.