The hard part is coming up with a way that the tallied vote database can be public and able to verify a voter's hash, but still prevent people from being able to determine which votes belong to which voter.
Actually, it's impossible. If there's a way for the voter to verify their vote once they leave the polling place, others can as well.
What we really want is the voter to finish voting confident that their vote has been counted, yet without any way to prove that to themselves or others once they leave the polling place.
This is why I'm really a fan of OCR ballots. The precinct's ballot box machine warns you immediately if you spoiled your ballot, the paper trail is built-in if there's a need for a recount, there's no possibility for cracking the modem transmission because there isn't any, and the successful scan of the ballot guarantees that the voter's intention is obvious in the event of a recount (no pregnant chads!).
I think WordPress gets coverage on Slashdot because of its popularity - for whatever the reason, there's far, far more people running it than other open source weblog platforms.
As for why it's so popular, I really can't say. I do think part of the reason is the mass exodus from Movable Type when Six Apart changed the licensing model for the 3.0 release. Perhaps the WordPress people saw an opportunity to increase their user base when they heard the news, and shouted to the people. The increase in marketshare provides incentive to write WordPress plugins, because the audience of potential users is greater.
Perhaps the easiest way to figure out the answers to your question is to ask yourself: what makes Pivot so "awesome?"
Nothing wrong with The L and the A but MySQL+PHP (which run fine on windows and IIS, by the way) is the visual basic of the early 21st century. A shitty, limited system for people who don't really know how to program. These LAMP fascists are just trying to shoehorn everyone into using their crap by making it seem like they're part of some integrated system when really the last two components are cheap 'good enough' hacks for people who don't know what they're doing.
I would argue that these guys have some concept of how to program. A significant portion of their web site runs on AMP.
Some customers of Zend (the company behind PHP) include Deutschen Bank, Lufthansa, EA Games, Disney, and MIT.
Notable users of MySQL include Google, Ticketmaster, Powell's Books, NASA, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, CNET, CraigsList, Technorati, Wikipedia, The Weather Channel, Associated Press, BBC, and Continental Airlines. Oh, and Slashdot.
Are you prepared to argue that all of those companies are using "cheap 'good enough' hacks" and "don't know what they're doing?"
If that's the case, why did Microsoft fight so hard in the first one?
The point of the browser wars was to keep users on Windows. Microsoft was worried (rightfully so) that Netscape would begin to transition people away from the traditional locally-installed binary to web applications, and that such a change would greatly reduce the user's loyalty to a particular operating system since Netscape on Windows, Linux, or Mac would all work the same.
I believe the current buzz around AJAX is merely the beginning of the web-based application era that Microsoft feared enough to develop and bundle Internet Explorer for free.
Today, we have a truly free derivative of Netscape with far fewer bugs than Internet Explorer, cross-platform compatibility, and substantial mindshare among the people ushering in the web-app era. Combine this with a variety of cool web applications (Gmail, Planzo, Writely, Backpack, and many more), and you can suddenly see why if Microsoft's not worried, they should be - all of those will work on a Mac or anything else that runs Firefox.
The Yellow Pages in my area lists businesses whether they buy an ad or not.
Are you sure? The listings in the vast majority of yellow pages are paid for. Just because a company doesn't have a display ad doesn't mean they didn't pay for the listing.
I don't think this has anything to do with Konfabulator. I think the point is to keep people away from live.com. A good thing, too, because I was just about to force myself to learn Microsoft's strange (and poorly documented) gadgets API.
I switched to My Yahoo! when they opened their portal to RSS. Now, I'll probably switch to Google's portal.
The trick to getting people like me to use your portal is to provide ways of getting my content into your page.
Christmas is an economic holiday. I celebrate X-Mas but couldn't care less about Christ.
You do know that the "X" in X-Mas is short for Xristos, the Greek word meaning "Christ," and that Greek believers called the holiday X-Mas in reverence to Him, right?
Dashboard actually makes for a better comparison with Active Desktop. In both cases, you're essentially running a web browser with no chrome and enhanced access to the operating system. The major difference (in my mind) is that Dashboard allows transparent backgrounds, while Active Desktop does not (plus the obvious IE-only features, like ActiveX).
What a lot of replies on this post are missing is that TFA is discussing passwords for programs to log in to other programs. It has nothing to do with user passwords.
What? You didn't read the article? Oh. Never mind.
Yep. They're also making it as inconvenient as possible to use.
A publisher who wants to opt-out their books must opt-out all of them, by title. A simple "We refuse you permission to scan any of the books published by our company" won't do. This shifts the cost of paperwork from Google to the publishers whose rights are arguably being violated.
If they want to "not be evil", they can do like Amazon.com and make Google Print an opt-in system. They might also return to the short list of medium to large sized companies I respect.
That "woosh" sound you hear is the wink emoticon zooming over your head, joke in tow.
I know PHP is a great web language and that it probably isn't the cause of the slowdown. Heck, even Yahoo! uses it these days.
I was attempting (unsuccessfully, it seems) to make fun of the purists who insist that robust web applications must run on something compiled in order to reach acceptable performance under high load.
I think you're not clear on the term "wizard." A wizard is an interview. It consists of a dialog box with multiple pages where you only answer 1-2 questions per page and then click the "Next" button, until you get to the last page and click "Finish."
At least one of the examples you cited clearly doesn't fit the definition. I think only the ultimate die-hard coders would argue that Intellisense is a bad thing, but it's certainly not a wizard.
If you don't know stealing is wrong, should we trust you to elect the government?
If committing a crime gets you banned from choosing your government, doesn't that open a convenient loophole? It means that the incumbents can stay in power forever by having those who would vote against them convicted of an unjust law.
Slashdot Mirror
Just think of the horsepower that warp engine must have...
The hard part is coming up with a way that the tallied vote database can be public and able to verify a voter's hash, but still prevent people from being able to determine which votes belong to which voter.
Actually, it's impossible. If there's a way for the voter to verify their vote once they leave the polling place, others can as well.
What we really want is the voter to finish voting confident that their vote has been counted, yet without any way to prove that to themselves or others once they leave the polling place.
There are plenty of companies that make good money renting voting machines to governments.
This is why I'm really a fan of OCR ballots. The precinct's ballot box machine warns you immediately if you spoiled your ballot, the paper trail is built-in if there's a need for a recount, there's no possibility for cracking the modem transmission because there isn't any, and the successful scan of the ballot guarantees that the voter's intention is obvious in the event of a recount (no pregnant chads!).
Mozilla Corporation gets a cut every time you click on an ad from a Google search.
I think WordPress gets coverage on Slashdot because of its popularity - for whatever the reason, there's far, far more people running it than other open source weblog platforms.
As for why it's so popular, I really can't say. I do think part of the reason is the mass exodus from Movable Type when Six Apart changed the licensing model for the 3.0 release. Perhaps the WordPress people saw an opportunity to increase their user base when they heard the news, and shouted to the people. The increase in marketshare provides incentive to write WordPress plugins, because the audience of potential users is greater.
Perhaps the easiest way to figure out the answers to your question is to ask yourself: what makes Pivot so "awesome?"
Nothing wrong with The L and the A but MySQL+PHP (which run fine on windows and IIS, by the way) is the visual basic of the early 21st century. A shitty, limited system for people who don't really know how to program. These LAMP fascists are just trying to shoehorn everyone into using their crap by making it seem like they're part of some integrated system when really the last two components are cheap 'good enough' hacks for people who don't know what they're doing.
I would argue that these guys have some concept of how to program. A significant portion of their web site runs on AMP.
Some customers of Zend (the company behind PHP) include Deutschen Bank, Lufthansa, EA Games, Disney, and MIT.
Notable users of MySQL include Google, Ticketmaster, Powell's Books, NASA, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, CNET, CraigsList, Technorati, Wikipedia, The Weather Channel, Associated Press, BBC, and Continental Airlines. Oh, and Slashdot.
Are you prepared to argue that all of those companies are using "cheap 'good enough' hacks" and "don't know what they're doing?"
The browser wars are completely pointless.
If that's the case, why did Microsoft fight so hard in the first one?
The point of the browser wars was to keep users on Windows. Microsoft was worried (rightfully so) that Netscape would begin to transition people away from the traditional locally-installed binary to web applications, and that such a change would greatly reduce the user's loyalty to a particular operating system since Netscape on Windows, Linux, or Mac would all work the same.
I believe the current buzz around AJAX is merely the beginning of the web-based application era that Microsoft feared enough to develop and bundle Internet Explorer for free.
Today, we have a truly free derivative of Netscape with far fewer bugs than Internet Explorer, cross-platform compatibility, and substantial mindshare among the people ushering in the web-app era. Combine this with a variety of cool web applications (Gmail, Planzo, Writely, Backpack, and many more), and you can suddenly see why if Microsoft's not worried, they should be - all of those will work on a Mac or anything else that runs Firefox.
I think you're wrong.
Obviously, Steve Ballmer and Eric Schmidt had a chair-throwing match.
The Yellow Pages in my area lists businesses whether they buy an ad or not.
Are you sure? The listings in the vast majority of yellow pages are paid for. Just because a company doesn't have a display ad doesn't mean they didn't pay for the listing.
Am I being naughty if I'm serving XHTML 1.1 with application/xhtml+xml only to browsers that support it?
Yes.
Was your web hosting company on the list before today? ;)
I don't think this has anything to do with Konfabulator. I think the point is to keep people away from live.com. A good thing, too, because I was just about to force myself to learn Microsoft's strange (and poorly documented) gadgets API.
I switched to My Yahoo! when they opened their portal to RSS. Now, I'll probably switch to Google's portal.
The trick to getting people like me to use your portal is to provide ways of getting my content into your page.
Christmas is an economic holiday. I celebrate X-Mas but couldn't care less about Christ.
You do know that the "X" in X-Mas is short for Xristos, the Greek word meaning "Christ," and that Greek believers called the holiday X-Mas in reverence to Him, right?
Dashboard actually makes for a better comparison with Active Desktop. In both cases, you're essentially running a web browser with no chrome and enhanced access to the operating system. The major difference (in my mind) is that Dashboard allows transparent backgrounds, while Active Desktop does not (plus the obvious IE-only features, like ActiveX).
He becomes a posterior support specialist assigned to Steve Ballmer.
Neat. It's a shame there's no table-align.
What a lot of replies on this post are missing is that TFA is discussing passwords for programs to log in to other programs. It has nothing to do with user passwords.
What? You didn't read the article? Oh. Never mind.
Yep. They're also making it as inconvenient as possible to use.
A publisher who wants to opt-out their books must opt-out all of them, by title. A simple "We refuse you permission to scan any of the books published by our company" won't do. This shifts the cost of paperwork from Google to the publishers whose rights are arguably being violated.
If they want to "not be evil", they can do like Amazon.com and make Google Print an opt-in system. They might also return to the short list of medium to large sized companies I respect.
They can wait till everybody start using their extensions and then "disover" a patent and get fees (but constant fees) from people.
What's the "royalty-free" part mean then?
It's IE-only, and unsupported (for good reason) in Firefox, SeaMonkey, Konqueror, Galeon, Safari, OmniWeb, Opera, Lynx, Links...
I think that's the point your parent poster was trying to make.
That "woosh" sound you hear is the wink emoticon zooming over your head, joke in tow.
I know PHP is a great web language and that it probably isn't the cause of the slowdown. Heck, even Yahoo! uses it these days.
I was attempting (unsuccessfully, it seems) to make fun of the purists who insist that robust web applications must run on something compiled in order to reach acceptable performance under high load.
I think you're not clear on the term "wizard." A wizard is an interview. It consists of a dialog box with multiple pages where you only answer 1-2 questions per page and then click the "Next" button, until you get to the last page and click "Finish."
At least one of the examples you cited clearly doesn't fit the definition. I think only the ultimate die-hard coders would argue that Intellisense is a bad thing, but it's certainly not a wizard.
So uhm... 2 minutes?
;).
Sounds like you should have written it in C++ instead of a laggard language like PHP
If you don't know stealing is wrong, should we trust you to elect the government?
If committing a crime gets you banned from choosing your government, doesn't that open a convenient loophole? It means that the incumbents can stay in power forever by having those who would vote against them convicted of an unjust law.