Actually, I thought it was morph + run time the first time, and an optimized runtime the second time so the result looks like this:
1st Each Additional Run
Morph + Runtime Runtime - x%
X being however much it was able to adapt to the instruction stream and how well it cached. Notice that the "how well it cached" statement is somewhat misleading because this part, as you indicate, is what you're paying the piper for no matter what, however, it doesn't change the fact that it is supposed to be making a dynamic effort to actually (re)optimize the instruction stream. I *assume* this is even when new and subttle code branches are hit which may effect morph cache. In other words, it would seem very reasonable to newly optimize a portion of related cache code when a new branch has been hit which may lead to a slightly improved optimization over the original cached version. The net effect is that it may be, for example, 1% faster now through that section of code on the third pass, as the second pass optimized over and above what was done on the first pass. Make sense?
When you get right down to it, the first 80% of coding (which takes 20% of the time) is fun, since that's where the design decisions and experimentation goes on. The last 20% (80% of the total time) sucks, because it's churning out the boring bits of the code, or driving yourself nuts debugging.
Unfortunately, 80% of your career goes into doing 20%-work. By the time you get to the fun stuff, you're cynical and sick of it.
Sounds like you're working in the wrong field. If you don't have a passion for problem solving, and them implementing your solution, you're not, IMOHO, cut out to be a long term programmer.
For me, solving the hard or challenging 20%, and then, watching it work well is what gives me satisfaction in my job.
...yes, I too sometimes code in my sleep, and have even been known to wake with the solution in hand...love it when that happens...
It's funny how people are quick to forget about the "spirit of the law" when it's in their best interest. Clearly, they both agreeded on the intent and spirit a it pertains to this matter, yet Perens clearly doesn't care.
On the other hand, the information was publicly visable and accessable. This is exactly like published API's. Just because they messed up doesn't mean that it's not usable.
Unless you live in Texas, whereby, I believe you have the right to bare arms and create your own private/state miltia. Like it or not, I think Texas is the only state where that's expressly granted.
I think the point the poster was making is that who really cares if it's a valid itrace packet or not. Now, you're flooding a host with invalid itrace packets. Still sounds like a valid DoS to me. Now, the target host, instead of saying, "oh now, I'm being DoS'd by a spoofed IP packet", he'll say, "Alright! Lots of worthless itrace packets that can't tell me anything and I'm in the same boat and it's still chewing host CPU to process them." I'm sure they'll all do a nice song and jig to rejoice that they spent the money on a worthless upgrade so they can do it all over again on IPv6.
This is nothing but a complete waste of time, energy, and money. They need to get off their butts and start an IPv6 roll out. That's what it's there for. That's what it's designed for. Let's get the IPv6 guys to get over their egos so they can do what they are supposed to be doing and get IPv6 rolled on out the door!!! Greg
That statement makes NO sense what-so-ever. I can't believe that it has scored like it has! First of all, Linus is a person, not a company. His personal feelings are his own. Nothing stops Linux developers from helping BSD developers (inverse true too). Second of all, Linux doesn't run on FreeBSD (as LVM does/will with Linux). Third of all, in what shape or form will IBM competing with open source developers help Linux (yes I understand the basic concept of competition). The point being, that I believe the original post was trying to make, we don't want another Sun/Blackdown problem. It is a show of good faith for IBM to enbrace what is currently out there. In the long run, both projects can gain if IBM handles this properly and does NOT try to compete. If IBM's LVM is better than what is already in place, they might gain extra help from the Linux LVM group. Either way they can complement each other. LVM for home users (Linux LVM) and LVM for enterprise users (IBM). Having a common look/feel of the tools, would be very nice!
You missed the part where it said the LVM would *REQUEST* the *FILESYSTEM* to resize its self. So, unless you know of any ext2, reiserfs, ext3, xfs, or jfs system calls that allow for this, while it's mounted, you're getting too excited. As I read it, it's limited to what the filesystem it self can support. I don't think the LVM can marshall disk I/O as to allow the FS to be resized without the FS needing to be aware of it.
I've been saying this from the beginning. There should of been no less than THREE splits. I agree with exactly what you are saying. They need to be split somewhere along these lines: OS (NT/CE), apps (office), media apps(streaming video, multimedia, games), hardware (duh), media/services (news, ISP, multimedia business line, msnbc).
A break up at this level requires that they treat the various business segments as they would any other company. As is, the sector will gain some from the breaking for the OS/application tying, however, it does little to make them compete on the basis of applications in other technologies embedded within those applications (e.g., aside from the the various bone head moves Real has done, they would be much futher along in market pentration otherwise). Likewise, it would also prevent them from doing the same thing in the growing internet market (Internet, desktop units, smart phones, etc). In case it's not already clear, I'm saying that they are still too strong in this position which can prevent the desired results from happening. As is, I see nothing that prevents them from maintaining their current monopoly on the existing markets. In short, once this goes into effect it could take years before the market feels the effects and Microsoft loses it's grip.
I would like to point out that Java supports two thread models. One is an user space implementation, while the second is a kernel space implementation. In a nut shell, as a rule of thumb, user space implemenations scale better on single CPU systems. The sole exception is when the application is not the sole application running on said system. As such, the application gets scheduled, competting with any other applications. What happens is that the process must now divy it's available slices among the many user based threads. The result typically leads to poor performance. Likewise, when you use kernel based threads on a single CPU, you pay the cost of additional scheduling overhead. On a multi CPU system, Linux does have some "thread based" optimizations that allows multiple threads on a multi-CPU system to scale rather well. With current implementations on Linux, there are some gotchas to watch out for. Most of these should be addressed in the 2.3/2.4 kernels.
You do a wonderful job of highlighting why it hard to get meaningful benchmarks for applications when presented using different languages. Some languages work well with certain constructs, as such, can optimize a specific implementation rather well. Likewise, the same construct, my not be able to be optimized at all in another language. A good example of this is Perl programmers moving to Python. If you do things in Python the "Perl way", typically, it performs rather poorly. Likewise, if you do it the Python way, it performs on par with Perl. This highlights the fact that no optimizer can replace a good programmer with good design skills. It does, perhaps, highlight that perhaps you can get reasonable results with less skilled programmers using Java than you might get with C, or especially C++.
Interesting followup on the x86 backend, but I don't think that it effects my original comments. As for MSVC being a good compiler or not, my comments did not address this; even though, MS typically does a very good job of optimizing. However you choose to rank MSVC, fact is, for x86 platforms, GCC typically scores much worse than most compilers.
A poor benchmark, on it's own, does not constitute a "Mindcraft test." A "Mindcraft test" is a test created and designed to achive ones goals. As such, the test is specifically biased to meet or exceed one initial objective. I don't belive this was the case here.
The results are seemingly suspect to me. MS's compiler historically optimizes rather well. Additionally, gcc is known for poor optimizations on Intel platforms (compared to MS and Borland; gcc is said to do well on CPU's with lots of registers - aka RISC). MS/Borland are able to take advantage of CPU specific instructions. GCC can not. Remember, -mpentium, et al, only does CPU specific scheduling and does not actually generate pentium specific code. That's why a program compiled with -mpentiumpro will still run on a 486. The second obvious oversite is that I assume (I didn't look at the code) that the benchmarks were measured from within application run-time (whereas, each measure's it's own run-time). If this is the case, all of the Java benchmarks are incorrectly measured. I, for one, think that startup time is an important measure. This is one of the biggest reasons why I choose not to use Java, as I don't like the three hour startup time required for everything to get going. Having said that, if the application startup is included, typcially, Java falls far back to the pack unless the benchmark is long enough to effectively make it noise in the overall test. Overall, I consider these tests to be interesting but worthless. I also completly agree with posting above. Memory allocation performance is not a function of the compiler. As such, if you know you are going to have a memory intensive application in C/C++, it's easy to get optimized allocators (or write your own) to address performance issues. Likewise, in Java, when allocation is an issue, the results are again biased unless the benchmark runs long enough to account for memory collections within a Java program (I assume that the benchmarks don't account for this). Not to mention, collection algorithms used tend to vary from implementation to implementation. So, it's difficult to say if this is already included in the returned results.
It this judgement holds up, wouldn't it make for a good point of product tying? In short, they are saying that you can not view a DVD unless you also purchase one of OUR devices. Unless I'm confused, they are making the argument of illegal product tying.
When legal versus techie topics came up not too long ago, many people were quick to say that tech is easy and law is hard. This, I think, proves my point! As you can see, he doesn't understand law, and technology is completely beyond him. Furthermore, he is out right implying that fair use is illegal. Furthermore, it is stating that code is not free expression even though, as I understood it, it is well accepted (legally) that code is expression and protected as such.
In short, it is clear that technology issues should be tried by an elite sect of judges provided with impartial technology experts. Without this, technology cases are woefully screwed. In this case, it's clear the judge doesn't understand basic law and let alone have any hope of understanding the technology involved.
Furthermore, as I understand it, proof of damage has to be shown. I've yet to see any factual evidence offered that indicated any damage would result from this code. As far as I can see, its based soley on opinion. Since when is opinion accepted as factual evidence short of expert witness?
That's an interesting point. One that I was quick to point out when it was first announced here on/. IMOHO, everytime you purchase a blank CD, you are prepurchasing the right to copy songs you've haven't purchsed otherwise. I would find it hard to believe that effective legal arguments could be made to counter this.
"It seems you've been making copies of songs that you don't own."
"Actually, when I purchased my blank CD's, the industry was paid for the songs that I copied."
"Is this true?"
"Well, yes your honor. We have a tax for this purpose on every blank sold."
"So you've already been paid for the songs indirectly?"
"We'll, yes, your honor. But we have the right to be paid as many times as we see fit."
"If the plantif has already been paid...blah...blah..."
That's a great observation. It seems they are trying hard to forget about fair use. They're trying hard to keep you from your legal rights with DVD's and are trying hard with digital music. Does anyone remember when you'd buy a tape and have to buy a new one in 6-8 months because it degraded or just plain wore out? That doesn't happen anymore. Especially with the advent of technology to take advantage of fair use (make your own high quality copies). Seems to me that the recording industry is trying hard to prevent people from being able to take advantage of "fair use" so they can bolster their sales. Don't you think that it's viewed as just another slice of their potential revenue stream? In their eyes, fair use is just plain bad business. After all, it cuts down on repeat sales.
BTW, has anyone noticed that CD's cost half as much (physical meia) as cassetts, yet on average, they charge 20% more when you buy on CD?
It's pretty clear that the students are paying for these technologies. Furthermore, bandwidth these days is cheap compared to what it was ten years ago. As this is the case, the facilities simply needs to invest to provide what they said they would. If they are not providing enough bandwidth to satisfy their students, then it sounds like they need to adjust within reason.
I haven't checked the price of a T1 in a while, but I do know that they price has continued to fall. Furthermore, other technologies that provide for very cheap bandwidth that were not previously available, are now. There isn't a single reason why the college can not, within reason, adjust their available bandwidth to keep everyone happy. I do want to stress, within reason. Obviously, providing each student with a t3 is silly, but it sounds like they need to be addressing their technology commitment prior to terminating network services.
I would be interested to hear if fractal antennas can help much here. With a maximum length on the anennas, perhaps that would be a slick was to side step the issue.
Throw in the fact that most browsers use 56-bit encryption, no host authentication and no user certificates, the level of trust you can put into who is sending the data is amazingly low.
Except, you made the assumption that online voting would be performed through your web browser and/or use the same security facilities that are used for online purchases. This is, of course, wrong. A better way to do it would be to send each person a serialized application when they register. Furthermore, this application would implement the "secure/anonymous" crypto-algos.
I've worked with ATMs, credit card systems (private lable and otherwise), debit systems, EBT, etc. None of these systems are designed to prevent fraud!!!! They are all designed for fraud detection and to create enough of a audit trail to catch the guilty. I don't think we want to follow this trend in voting. As such, obviously different technologies are required.
Still there are many advantages to online voting like: higher precentages of more educated people vote (remember, you can find out all sorts of things about the candidates online that you never hear from main stream news and you can get the opinion of importent groups like the ACLU) and people can vote more oftin since it is less hassel.
Personally, I think that online voting should require various amounts of platform information to be made available. Furthermore, I would want to require a random 3-4 question quiz on each canidate. This way, we are ensuring that more educated are voted. This would be a wonderful way of raising the bar for voting.
Ya, ya, how horrible that I would want people to educate themselves prior to voting instead of letting someone else do the thinking for them. Obviously this isn't fool proof, but I think it beats our existing system. Why would I want this? Well, imagine a day when everyone has a computer and online voting is the norm. As it is, people have to make an effort to go vote. This implies some level of civic responsibility. I don't want voting to be on the same level of thought as changing the channel on our remote controls. I want people to have to make an effort for society. I want people to vote for whom they think is best for the job and not because their brother's cousin's wife's uncle decided that this who they should vote for.
But do we really want SCSI? Big expensive cables? Termination problems? All sorts of crazy complexity?
This isn't the first time I've heard people call SCSI complex. I for one, can figure it out. I would rather tackle a SCSI system than have to screw with EIDE. To me, SCSI makes since. On SCSI, the termination rules are EXTREEMLY straight forward for 90% of the desktop population (e.g. Joe Blow as his desk). I never really understood what was so hard about counting to determine your SCSI ID (most of us can count to 7 or 15). Shoot, most (if not all) drives even come with layouts the tell you which pins to jumper. Most drives (all that I use) come jumpered with parity. The only thing I've had to do on my last five SCSI drives is to set the ID and plug it in (I already had the chain terminated and plan ahead for expanding).
Am I missing something? After fighting a number of crappy EIDE solutions for friends, not to mention poorly documented disks, I find it hard to believe that SCSI is harder than EIDE. As I said before, I'll take SCSI anyday.
So, am I missing something? Are there situations where 4x is really not 4x?
Well, I've seen many a frisbee come out of IDE burners. Especially if you plan on doing CD to CD copies. Most of the people that I know, wind up having to CD -> HD -> CD to get reliable copies on EIDE with more than 2x. This was on a slower PII. But really! Not being able to copy a CD on a PII (of any speed) is silly. I think that does a wonderful job of pointing out how crappy the EIDE interface is.
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Actually, I thought it was morph + run time the first time, and an optimized runtime the second time so the result looks like this:
1st Each Additional Run
Morph + Runtime Runtime - x%
X being however much it was able to adapt to the instruction stream and how well it cached. Notice that the "how well it cached" statement is somewhat misleading because this part, as you indicate, is what you're paying the piper for no matter what, however, it doesn't change the fact that it is supposed to be making a dynamic effort to actually (re)optimize the instruction stream. I *assume* this is even when new and subttle code branches are hit which may effect morph cache. In other words, it would seem very reasonable to newly optimize a portion of related cache code when a new branch has been hit which may lead to a slightly improved optimization over the original cached version. The net effect is that it may be, for example, 1% faster now through that section of code on the third pass, as the second pass optimized over and above what was done on the first pass. Make sense?
When you get right down to it, the first 80% of coding (which takes 20% of the time) is fun, since that's where the design decisions and experimentation goes on. The last 20% (80% of the total time) sucks, because it's churning out the boring bits of the code, or driving yourself nuts debugging.
Unfortunately, 80% of your career goes into doing 20%-work. By the time you get to the fun stuff, you're cynical and sick of it.
Sounds like you're working in the wrong field. If you don't have a passion for problem solving, and them implementing your solution, you're not, IMOHO, cut out to be a long term programmer.
For me, solving the hard or challenging 20%, and then, watching it work well is what gives me satisfaction in my job.
It's funny how people are quick to forget about the "spirit of the law" when it's in their best interest. Clearly, they both agreeded on the intent and spirit a it pertains to this matter, yet Perens clearly doesn't care.
Where's flog at....
On the other hand, the information was publicly visable and accessable. This is exactly like published API's. Just because they messed up doesn't mean that it's not usable.
Unless you live in Texas, whereby, I believe you have the right to bare arms and create your own private/state miltia. Like it or not, I think Texas is the only state where that's expressly granted.
I think the point the poster was making is that who really cares if it's a valid itrace packet or not. Now, you're flooding a host with invalid itrace packets. Still sounds like a valid DoS to me. Now, the target host, instead of saying, "oh now, I'm being DoS'd by a spoofed IP packet", he'll say, "Alright! Lots of worthless itrace packets that can't tell me anything and I'm in the same boat and it's still chewing host CPU to process them." I'm sure they'll all do a nice song and jig to rejoice that they spent the money on a worthless upgrade so they can do it all over again on IPv6.
This is nothing but a complete waste of time, energy, and money. They need to get off their butts and start an IPv6 roll out. That's what it's there for. That's what it's designed for. Let's get the IPv6 guys to get over their egos so they can do what they are supposed to be doing and get IPv6 rolled on out the door!!! Greg
That statement makes NO sense what-so-ever. I can't believe that it has scored like it has! First of all, Linus is a person, not a company. His personal feelings are his own. Nothing stops Linux developers from helping BSD developers (inverse true too). Second of all, Linux doesn't run on FreeBSD (as LVM does/will with Linux). Third of all, in what shape or form will IBM competing with open source developers help Linux (yes I understand the basic concept of competition). The point being, that I believe the original post was trying to make, we don't want another Sun/Blackdown problem. It is a show of good faith for IBM to enbrace what is currently out there. In the long run, both projects can gain if IBM handles this properly and does NOT try to compete. If IBM's LVM is better than what is already in place, they might gain extra help from the Linux LVM group. Either way they can complement each other. LVM for home users (Linux LVM) and LVM for enterprise users (IBM). Having a common look/feel of the tools, would be very nice!
You missed the part where it said the LVM would *REQUEST* the *FILESYSTEM* to resize its self. So, unless you know of any ext2, reiserfs, ext3, xfs, or jfs system calls that allow for this, while it's mounted, you're getting too excited. As I read it, it's limited to what the filesystem it self can support. I don't think the LVM can marshall disk I/O as to allow the FS to be resized without the FS needing to be aware of it.
I've been saying this from the beginning. There should of been no less than THREE splits. I agree with exactly what you are saying. They need to be split somewhere along these lines: OS (NT/CE), apps (office), media apps(streaming video, multimedia, games), hardware (duh), media/services (news, ISP, multimedia business line, msnbc).
A break up at this level requires that they treat the various business segments as they would any other company. As is, the sector will gain some from the breaking for the OS/application tying, however, it does little to make them compete on the basis of applications in other technologies embedded within those applications (e.g., aside from the the various bone head moves Real has done, they would be much futher along in market pentration otherwise). Likewise, it would also prevent them from doing the same thing in the growing internet market (Internet, desktop units, smart phones, etc). In case it's not already clear, I'm saying that they are still too strong in this position which can prevent the desired results from happening. As is, I see nothing that prevents them from maintaining their current monopoly on the existing markets. In short, once this goes into effect it could take years before the market feels the effects and Microsoft loses it's grip.
I would like to point out that Java supports two thread models. One is an user space implementation, while the second is a kernel space implementation. In a nut shell, as a rule of thumb, user space implemenations scale better on single CPU systems. The sole exception is when the application is not the sole application running on said system. As such, the application gets scheduled, competting with any other applications. What happens is that the process must now divy it's available slices among the many user based threads. The result typically leads to poor performance. Likewise, when you use kernel based threads on a single CPU, you pay the cost of additional scheduling overhead. On a multi CPU system, Linux does have some "thread based" optimizations that allows multiple threads on a multi-CPU system to scale rather well. With current implementations on Linux, there are some gotchas to watch out for. Most of these should be addressed in the 2.3/2.4 kernels.
You do a wonderful job of highlighting why it hard to get meaningful benchmarks for applications when presented using different languages. Some languages work well with certain constructs, as such, can optimize a specific implementation rather well. Likewise, the same construct, my not be able to be optimized at all in another language.
A good example of this is Perl programmers moving to Python. If you do things in Python the "Perl way", typically, it performs rather poorly. Likewise, if you do it the Python way, it performs on par with Perl.
This highlights the fact that no optimizer can replace a good programmer with good design skills. It does, perhaps, highlight that perhaps you can get reasonable results with less skilled programmers using Java than you might get with C, or especially C++.
Interesting followup on the x86 backend, but I don't think that it effects my original comments.
As for MSVC being a good compiler or not, my comments did not address this; even though, MS typically does a very good job of optimizing. However you choose to rank MSVC, fact is, for x86 platforms, GCC typically scores much worse than most compilers.
A poor benchmark, on it's own, does not constitute a "Mindcraft test." A "Mindcraft test" is a test created and designed to achive ones goals. As such, the test is specifically biased to meet or exceed one initial objective. I don't belive this was the case here.
The results are seemingly suspect to me. MS's compiler historically optimizes rather well. Additionally, gcc is known for poor optimizations on Intel platforms (compared to MS and Borland; gcc is said to do well on CPU's with lots of registers - aka RISC). MS/Borland are able to take advantage of CPU specific instructions. GCC can not. Remember, -mpentium, et al, only does CPU specific scheduling and does not actually generate pentium specific code. That's why a program compiled with -mpentiumpro will still run on a 486. The second obvious oversite is that I assume (I didn't look at the code) that the benchmarks were measured from within application run-time (whereas, each measure's it's own run-time). If this is the case, all of the Java benchmarks are incorrectly measured. I, for one, think that startup time is an important measure. This is one of the biggest reasons why I choose not to use Java, as I don't like the three hour startup time required for everything to get going. Having said that, if the application startup is included, typcially, Java falls far back to the pack unless the benchmark is long enough to effectively make it noise in the overall test.
Overall, I consider these tests to be interesting but worthless. I also completly agree with posting above. Memory allocation performance is not a function of the compiler. As such, if you know you are going to have a memory intensive application in C/C++, it's easy to get optimized allocators (or write your own) to address performance issues. Likewise, in Java, when allocation is an issue, the results are again biased unless the benchmark runs long enough to account for memory collections within a Java program (I assume that the benchmarks don't account for this). Not to mention, collection algorithms used tend to vary from implementation to implementation. So, it's difficult to say if this is already included in the returned results.
It this judgement holds up, wouldn't it make for a good point of product tying? In short, they are saying that you can not view a DVD unless you also purchase one of OUR devices. Unless I'm confused, they are making the argument of illegal product tying.
I welcome anyone to explain why this isn't.
When legal versus techie topics came up not too long ago, many people were quick to say that tech is easy and law is hard. This, I think, proves my point! As you can see, he doesn't understand law, and technology is completely beyond him. Furthermore, he is out right implying that fair use is illegal. Furthermore, it is stating that code is not free expression even though, as I understood it, it is well accepted (legally) that code is expression and protected as such.
In short, it is clear that technology issues should be tried by an elite sect of judges provided with impartial technology experts. Without this, technology cases are woefully screwed. In this case, it's clear the judge doesn't understand basic law and let alone have any hope of understanding the technology involved.
Furthermore, as I understand it, proof of damage has to be shown. I've yet to see any factual evidence offered that indicated any damage would result from this code. As far as I can see, its based soley on opinion. Since when is opinion accepted as factual evidence short of expert witness?
That's an interesting point. One that I was quick to point out when it was first announced here on /. IMOHO, everytime you purchase a blank CD, you are prepurchasing the right to copy songs you've haven't purchsed otherwise. I would find it hard to believe that effective legal arguments could be made to counter this.
"It seems you've been making copies of songs that you don't own."
"Actually, when I purchased my blank CD's, the industry was paid for the songs that I copied."
"Is this true?"
"Well, yes your honor. We have a tax for this purpose on every blank sold."
"So you've already been paid for the songs indirectly?"
"We'll, yes, your honor. But we have the right to be paid as many times as we see fit."
"If the plantif has already been paid...blah...blah..."
That's a great observation. It seems they are trying hard to forget about fair use. They're trying hard to keep you from your legal rights with DVD's and are trying hard with digital music. Does anyone remember when you'd buy a tape and have to buy a new one in 6-8 months because it degraded or just plain wore out? That doesn't happen anymore. Especially with the advent of technology to take advantage of fair use (make your own high quality copies). Seems to me that the recording industry is trying hard to prevent people from being able to take advantage of "fair use" so they can bolster their sales. Don't you think that it's viewed as just another slice of their potential revenue stream? In their eyes, fair use is just plain bad business. After all, it cuts down on repeat sales.
BTW, has anyone noticed that CD's cost half as much (physical meia) as cassetts, yet on average, they charge 20% more when you buy on CD?
I wonder how long it takes before someone finds a burning pile of emails on their front door. Just don't stomp on it. That would be a stink-o-gram.
It's pretty clear that the students are paying for these technologies. Furthermore, bandwidth these days is cheap compared to what it was ten years ago. As this is the case, the facilities simply needs to invest to provide what they said they would. If they are not providing enough bandwidth to satisfy their students, then it sounds like they need to adjust within reason.
I haven't checked the price of a T1 in a while, but I do know that they price has continued to fall. Furthermore, other technologies that provide for very cheap bandwidth that were not previously available, are now. There isn't a single reason why the college can not, within reason, adjust their available bandwidth to keep everyone happy. I do want to stress, within reason. Obviously, providing each student with a t3 is silly, but it sounds like they need to be addressing their technology commitment prior to terminating network services.
I would be interested to hear if fractal antennas can help much here. With a maximum length on the anennas, perhaps that would be a slick was to side step the issue.
Throw in the fact that most browsers use 56-bit encryption, no host authentication and no user certificates, the level of trust you can put into who is sending the data is amazingly low.
Except, you made the assumption that online voting would be performed through your web browser and/or use the same security facilities that are used for online purchases. This is, of course, wrong. A better way to do it would be to send each person a serialized application when they register. Furthermore, this application would implement the "secure/anonymous" crypto-algos.
I've worked with ATMs, credit card systems (private lable and otherwise), debit systems, EBT, etc. None of these systems are designed to prevent fraud!!!! They are all designed for fraud detection and to create enough of a audit trail to catch the guilty. I don't think we want to follow this trend in voting. As such, obviously different technologies are required.
Still there are many advantages to online voting like: higher precentages of more educated people vote (remember, you can find out all sorts of things about the candidates online that you never hear from main stream news and you can get the opinion of importent groups like the ACLU) and people can vote more oftin since it is less hassel.
Personally, I think that online voting should require various amounts of platform information to be made available. Furthermore, I would want to require a random 3-4 question quiz on each canidate. This way, we are ensuring that more educated are voted. This would be a wonderful way of raising the bar for voting.
Ya, ya, how horrible that I would want people to educate themselves prior to voting instead of letting someone else do the thinking for them. Obviously this isn't fool proof, but I think it beats our existing system. Why would I want this? Well, imagine a day when everyone has a computer and online voting is the norm. As it is, people have to make an effort to go vote. This implies some level of civic responsibility. I don't want voting to be on the same level of thought as changing the channel on our remote controls. I want people to have to make an effort for society. I want people to vote for whom they think is best for the job and not because their brother's cousin's wife's uncle decided that this who they should vote for.
But do we really want SCSI? Big expensive cables? Termination problems? All sorts of crazy complexity?
This isn't the first time I've heard people call SCSI complex. I for one, can figure it out. I would rather tackle a SCSI system than have to screw with EIDE. To me, SCSI makes since. On SCSI, the termination rules are EXTREEMLY straight forward for 90% of the desktop population (e.g. Joe Blow as his desk). I never really understood what was so hard about counting to determine your SCSI ID (most of us can count to 7 or 15). Shoot, most (if not all) drives even come with layouts the tell you which pins to jumper. Most drives (all that I use) come jumpered with parity. The only thing I've had to do on my last five SCSI drives is to set the ID and plug it in (I already had the chain terminated and plan ahead for expanding).
Am I missing something? After fighting a number of crappy EIDE solutions for friends, not to mention poorly documented disks, I find it hard to believe that SCSI is harder than EIDE. As I said before, I'll take SCSI anyday.
So, am I missing something? Are there situations where 4x is really not 4x?
Well, I've seen many a frisbee come out of IDE burners. Especially if you plan on doing CD to CD copies. Most of the people that I know, wind up having to CD -> HD -> CD to get reliable copies on EIDE with more than 2x. This was on a slower PII. But really! Not being able to copy a CD on a PII (of any speed) is silly. I think that does a wonderful job of pointing out how crappy the EIDE interface is.