Yeah, and I know that one of those days I'll be to exhausted or angry and a kick to the head will be in order to teach basics of politeness to one of these a*******
That's an incredible technology. If it works as demonstrated, I can see it replacing the mouse. If we can get useful keyboards in there (sorry, software-based on-screen keyboards suck, they lack tactile feedback) as well, this could open up a whole new way in which to interact.
See, a lot of buttons on the mouse and on the screen are merely to differentiate between different actions, e.g. resize, fullscreen or close a window. More logical and intuitive options are possible with multitouch technology, e.g. as shown in the demos.
The question for me isn't if these "polite phones" are polite to the owner or caller - but to the bystander.
There's nothing more irritating than riding in a full train where every minute or so some cell phone goes off - ringer on loudest possible setting, of course - and the owner proceeds to hold a conversation at a volume level he'd never even consider for a face-to-face talk.
That's where I draw a line: Bodily harm, no matter how small. Any company that requires that employees change their body or mind has crossed the line between employer and slave-owner.
Wake up, you stupid jerks. It's just a job. It's not life, and less and less people define themselves via their jobs. 500 years ago, when you were asked who you are you'd say "the miller" or something like that. Over the past 10 years I've noticed that more and more people don't respond with their job title when asked who they are outside of business context.
It's a funny feeling to see a trainwreck happen in slow motion. The more I read about Vista, the more I want to stay well clear of it and the more problems and trouble it seems to be.
I most definitely does not in any way sound like the revolution it was originally announce to be, years ago.
In more practical terms, an open source project almost always needs a well-known central website, one or two lead developers, an easily-accessible place to store the files and many other public frontends.
The underground approach will work for small, self-contained projects. It won't work for anything as complex as, say KDE or X.org
No matter how you code, there will be bugs. Aside from all the good advise others have given here, what you also need is a human QA. And I don't mean two half-assed testers. I mean hiring a bunch of people with evil glances in their eyes who could code the stuff themselves and pay them on a number-of-bugs-found basis. Give them every incentive to be as mean to your code as they can possibly be. You and the other coders will hate them, but they'll find anything that can be found in testing if you can make "I found a bug" something they can be proud of.
You can follow the link in my.sig, sign up for the game and look at the dynamic map in the info menu. But here's the text:
You seem to be using IE as a web browser. The dynamic map will not work with IE, including the AOL version. This is due to IE being buggy. The dynamic map is proper CSS 2.0 and even verifies without warnings as HTML 4.01.
We suggest that you upgrade your browser to something like Mozilla or Opera or any other modern, standards-complient browser. We recommend Firefox, the most recent Mozilla browser:
If you are, in fact, using one such and have just configured it to identify itself as MSIE, or if you insist to see how IE mangles proper Internet files, go ahead, but don't complain.
I know what you mean. I failed to introduce OpenOffice to my work team, because people were used to Word and Excel and the other crap. OO2 is clearly and very obviously superior to the old Office 2000 we have at work. No surprise, that shit is about 6 years old. But still...
That's why Apple is doing it right moving into the market where people are first exposed to computers.
Of course, without Internet Explorer support, this is basically useless,
And that's a myth.
I run a website. Sections of it rely on CSS2 and don't work in IE. Instead of writing a workaround, I redirect IE users to a page that explains the problem in a few words, and gives them a link to try and look at the page anyways (this is mostly for Opera users identifying as IE).
Despite all the faked statistics claiming IE has a market share of 90%, the browser distribution on my site clearly favors Firefox (which I link to on the above-mentioned page) with almost 50%. IE is a clear second with about 40%, and the rest is Opera, Konqueror, Safari.
If I can do that to my visitors, imagine what would happen if a few major websites would do that, or something a little less radical, i.e. offering a "reduced features" version for IE users, with a box explaining the problem and pointing them to alternative browsers. My guess is that you'd see the same effect. Installing Firefox on windos is a few clicks, and a lot of people will do it if it means having one more cute picture.
There is still hope that a new generation will grow up and not accept that computers crash all the time, data gets lost every now and then and for that really important word document, there can't be enough backups because you never know when the machine will just eat it.
Also, they might have much higher expectations for a GUI and point out all the bad stuff about the windos standard we who've grown up with it don't even notice anymore. When my mother got her first PC, I put Linux on it. For surfing and mail it was perfect. Later on she took one of those "internet course" things. She came back with a strong dislike of "that windows thing" she had to use there. I'm certain anyone whose first exposure to computers was a Mac will have a much stronger opinion.
Actually, I do have something, but it's not a ranking system even close to what's discussed in the article. Anyways, here's how it works:
Players can give "medals" to other players for positive things only. There are no negative marks. This removes the incentive for griefers because there's nothing bad they can do to anyone.
The ability to give out medals depends on the number of medals you've received, so only people judged "good" by other people can give out medals.
This can still be gamed by clans who give medals only to other clan members. But due to a dropoff, the clan still requires an influx of medals from outside in order to keep it up, so unless at least one of them actually is a good player, it won't work.
I don't yet judge the system a success. The dropoff is too high, resulting in the need for a constant creation of new medals, usually done by me raising the number of medals certain people I trust can give out (but not the number they received). But I don't want to lower the dropoff, or it becomes too easy to game the system.
I've been running an online game for five years now (see.sig). During that time I've experimented with several feedback systems.
None of them work as they should. The problem is that there is too much abuse in the system. People who want to game a system will always find a way to do so, and it is very hard to design a system that is resilient against that.
Simple example: Everyone can give everyone else a score from 0 (worst) to 10 (best).
Theory: While there are jerks who give bullshit scores, it will average out.
Real life: Most people won't care enough, even if it's just one click. The jerks will dominate the system because if the "fair" average is 5, and one jerk gives you 0, it takes five scores of 6 to counter that. Since jerks are active and normal people are lazy, your chances of getting those five scores are lower than your chances of getting another 0.
Same with more refined system. I had a system that didn't use scores but keywords like "reliable", "cheater", etc. running for a while. That, too, was abused. People were labeled "cheater" not because they were actually suspected of cheating, but because some jerks didn't like what they did. Heck, several of the game designers were labeled cheaters.
It's a really, really difficult problem. Trust flow systems are the only thing I believe would work, but they give a very subjective view (essentially what your friends think of someone) and a lot of people don't really understand them so coding and interface that everyone can use is another tough problem. Aside from the fact that the entire area is pretty much in beta stage still and there's very few code available, so unless you're a math and coding wizard and can create your own trust flow system, that's not something really available right now.
At the moment, what I do is having no system. I rely on the human beings in the game to be able to handle things themselves, using their brains as tools that are infinitly better than anything I could ever code.
"I wonder how Linux idealists feel about their cute little OS being deployed in machinery of war?"
The same I feel about Linux servers being used for spam: I'd like to slowly disembowl the spammers, but what does the OS (by definition a general-purpose tool) have to do with that?
Highly unlikely. M$ has received various Common Criteria certifications on its stuff, and while CC is always hyped as some kind of "security proof", one of its actual main components is documentation. Without loads and loads of documentation, they would've never been able to go beyond EAL2.
Not really sure. Does it make Al Capone a better man if he had given to charity (he didn't for all I know)? Does it make the Hamas better that they give to schools, nurseries and other infrastructure (they do)? Does it make Osama Bin Laden a good guy that he gives to charity (he does)?
So does it make Bill Gates a good man that he gives to charity even though his company is a convicted criminal?
I don't think it does. Not for Osama and not for Bill. You can't "clean" money you've stolen by giving a part to charity.
Jobs, well whatever you think of him, but at least he doesn't rightfully belong in prison. Let's be honest here, the only reason Gates himself isn't a convict is because of the corporate shield.
The example was not the argument, it was to support the argument. It appears you did not actually read the actual argument, which was the one with the number in it.:)
But they don't think they can catch any votes with a 12th century morale.
Anecdote: There was this right-wing party leader in France. He was once seen watching a, let us say erotically liberal theatre piece. When confronted by journalists outside (already dreaming up headlines about his embarresment, I'm sure) and asked how he liked it, he simply replied that it was fairly good.
In the US, you'd have Congress calling for a ban on all theaters as breeding pits of sin or something like that.
...put a stick up that guy's ass? I've locked at the article, I've locked a a few pages of booth babes pictures - and I wonder if "risque outfit" has the same definition in american dictionaries as in mine.
All of these girls are fully and appropriately dressed. Aside from the fact that they have logos all over and some of them are wearing obvious custumes, the only reason any of them would be looked at even twice if they were to, say, go shopping in the center of my city tomorrow was because it doesn't fit to the damn cold.
I've seen much more revealing outfits at pretty much every party and not few during normal summer shopping.
In civilized countries, people like that would tour the talk shows. In the US they run for government. The mind(*) trembles.
(*) for our american guests: The mind is the thing that... oh forget it. The mind is the fluid in that grey air conditioning system we have inside our skulls. It's not important.
Could a 3rd powerful party help remedy this situation?
I don't think anyone can really answer that. Do we have any western democracies with 3 (or more) powerful parties? In most countries where multiple parties work, you still have two strong parties, each flanked by a number of coalition partners, or you have lots of fragmentation, see Italy which is a total mess.
The problem appears to be that the whole minority voice, blabla thing doesn't work out. Parties soon realize that "market share" means power and it is profitable to compromise ones core position if it means getting more votes. So parties don't really represent all that much anymore, except for various groups trying to get as large a share as possible.
We've found that under certain circumstances, you can get the same level of security at less expense by well-designed mechanical systems, backstopped at fewer points by human guardians.
Yes
But!
This isn't about security. It's about assurance. There's a world of difference between that. I'll give you a very trivial example: If I put a bag into a safe, weld it shut, physically destroy the key, then bury the safe and tarmac over it, you'd agree that the bag is pretty safe, right? Good. That is security. Now tell me that you know for certain what the bag contains. That is assurance.
Btw., that's why even though the have motion detectors and biometrics and all the other fancy stuff, we still also have that guard standing there. The simple fact that he knows General Miller is a better guarantee about anyone posing for him than any sophisticated tech.
Back to elections. If you design your electronic voting system properly, then by definition you don't need half a million barefoot technophobic UN workers to monitor your election. Instead, you need a far smaller number of far better-trained workers to monitor critical points in the system. Just like the guard savvy about video tech sitting in his central office.
Again, misconception.
An election is all about being able to tell Joe Doe that his vote was counted and counted correctly. Since we have secret elections, you can't dig out Joe's vote. But you can re-assure him by having a process where every individual vote is, or can be, checked and verified. Checking voltage on a RAM chip does not mean checking votes. You have to get to the actual vote, or you never get what you are looking for. People do not trust technology, and as it seems, quite rightfully so.
Finally, just because you can't subvert a system which relies on paper and chains of human watchers with fancy technological tricks that bemuse them doesn't mean the system can't be hacked.
But the attack will have to take a form that doesn't look like magic to the stakeholders in the matter.
See, you argue from a techno-geek point of view, but you don't get it that you don't own the election. The people do. The dumb, primitive, technophobic people. They are the stakeholders, and this is one of their most important posessions. If they don't like your machine, then go and redesign your machine.
Whatever came of "the customer is king"? Or maybe we don't realize that in politics, the people and not the politicians, are the customers, owners and board.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, and I know that one of those days I'll be to exhausted or angry and a kick to the head will be in order to teach basics of politeness to one of these a*******
.sig? :-)
Did I mention I like your
That's an incredible technology. If it works as demonstrated, I can see it replacing the mouse. If we can get useful keyboards in there (sorry, software-based on-screen keyboards suck, they lack tactile feedback) as well, this could open up a whole new way in which to interact.
See, a lot of buttons on the mouse and on the screen are merely to differentiate between different actions, e.g. resize, fullscreen or close a window. More logical and intuitive options are possible with multitouch technology, e.g. as shown in the demos.
The question for me isn't if these "polite phones" are polite to the owner or caller - but to the bystander.
There's nothing more irritating than riding in a full train where every minute or so some cell phone goes off - ringer on loudest possible setting, of course - and the owner proceeds to hold a conversation at a volume level he'd never even consider for a face-to-face talk.
That's where I draw a line: Bodily harm, no matter how small. Any company that requires that employees change their body or mind has crossed the line between employer and slave-owner.
Wake up, you stupid jerks. It's just a job. It's not life, and less and less people define themselves via their jobs. 500 years ago, when you were asked who you are you'd say "the miller" or something like that. Over the past 10 years I've noticed that more and more people don't respond with their job title when asked who they are outside of business context.
It's a funny feeling to see a trainwreck happen in slow motion. The more I read about Vista, the more I want to stay well clear of it and the more problems and trouble it seems to be.
I most definitely does not in any way sound like the revolution it was originally announce to be, years ago.
In theory, yes.
In more practical terms, an open source project almost always needs a well-known central website, one or two lead developers, an easily-accessible place to store the files and many other public frontends.
The underground approach will work for small, self-contained projects. It won't work for anything as complex as, say KDE or X.org
What happens when you try to collect licensing fees from an open source project?
Open Source project dies.
No matter how you code, there will be bugs. Aside from all the good advise others have given here, what you also need is a human QA. And I don't mean two half-assed testers. I mean hiring a bunch of people with evil glances in their eyes who could code the stuff themselves and pay them on a number-of-bugs-found basis. Give them every incentive to be as mean to your code as they can possibly be. You and the other coders will hate them, but they'll find anything that can be found in testing if you can make "I found a bug" something they can be proud of.
Guild Wars does that. You can turn every part of the HUD on or off, drag them to wherever you want them and change orientation or size on many.
I've seen some crazy HUD layouts in screenshots, but if it works for that guy...
You seem to be using IE as a web browser. The dynamic map will not work
with IE, including the AOL version. This is due to IE being buggy.
The dynamic map is proper CSS 2.0 and even verifies without warnings
as HTML 4.01.
We suggest that you upgrade your browser to something like
Mozilla or Opera
or any other modern, standards-complient browser. We recommend Firefox, the
most recent Mozilla browser:
Get Firefox
If you are, in fact, using one such and have just configured it to identify
itself as MSIE, or if you insist to see how IE mangles proper Internet
files, go ahead, but don't complain.
I know what you mean. I failed to introduce OpenOffice to my work team, because people were used to Word and Excel and the other crap. OO2 is clearly and very obviously superior to the old Office 2000 we have at work. No surprise, that shit is about 6 years old. But still...
That's why Apple is doing it right moving into the market where people are first exposed to computers.
Of course, without Internet Explorer support, this is basically useless,
And that's a myth.
I run a website. Sections of it rely on CSS2 and don't work in IE. Instead of writing a workaround, I redirect IE users to a page that explains the problem in a few words, and gives them a link to try and look at the page anyways (this is mostly for Opera users identifying as IE).
Despite all the faked statistics claiming IE has a market share of 90%, the browser distribution on my site clearly favors Firefox (which I link to on the above-mentioned page) with almost 50%. IE is a clear second with about 40%, and the rest is Opera, Konqueror, Safari.
If I can do that to my visitors, imagine what would happen if a few major websites would do that, or something a little less radical, i.e. offering a "reduced features" version for IE users, with a box explaining the problem and pointing them to alternative browsers. My guess is that you'd see the same effect. Installing Firefox on windos is a few clicks, and a lot of people will do it if it means having one more cute picture.
There is still hope that a new generation will grow up and not accept that computers crash all the time, data gets lost every now and then and for that really important word document, there can't be enough backups because you never know when the machine will just eat it.
Also, they might have much higher expectations for a GUI and point out all the bad stuff about the windos standard we who've grown up with it don't even notice anymore.
When my mother got her first PC, I put Linux on it. For surfing and mail it was perfect. Later on she took one of those "internet course" things. She came back with a strong dislike of "that windows thing" she had to use there. I'm certain anyone whose first exposure to computers was a Mac will have a much stronger opinion.
At the moment, what I do is having no system.
Actually, I do have something, but it's not a ranking system even close to what's discussed in the article. Anyways, here's how it works:
Players can give "medals" to other players for positive things only. There are no negative marks. This removes the incentive for griefers because there's nothing bad they can do to anyone.
The ability to give out medals depends on the number of medals you've received, so only people judged "good" by other people can give out medals.
This can still be gamed by clans who give medals only to other clan members. But due to a dropoff, the clan still requires an influx of medals from outside in order to keep it up, so unless at least one of them actually is a good player, it won't work.
I don't yet judge the system a success. The dropoff is too high, resulting in the need for a constant creation of new medals, usually done by me raising the number of medals certain people I trust can give out (but not the number they received). But I don't want to lower the dropoff, or it becomes too easy to game the system.
I've been running an online game for five years now (see .sig). During that time I've experimented with several feedback systems.
None of them work as they should. The problem is that there is too much abuse in the system. People who want to game a system will always find a way to do so, and it is very hard to design a system that is resilient against that.
Simple example: Everyone can give everyone else a score from 0 (worst) to 10 (best).
Theory: While there are jerks who give bullshit scores, it will average out.
Real life: Most people won't care enough, even if it's just one click. The jerks will dominate the system because if the "fair" average is 5, and one jerk gives you 0, it takes five scores of 6 to counter that. Since jerks are active and normal people are lazy, your chances of getting those five scores are lower than your chances of getting another 0.
Same with more refined system. I had a system that didn't use scores but keywords like "reliable", "cheater", etc. running for a while. That, too, was abused. People were labeled "cheater" not because they were actually suspected of cheating, but because some jerks didn't like what they did. Heck, several of the game designers were labeled cheaters.
It's a really, really difficult problem. Trust flow systems are the only thing I believe would work, but they give a very subjective view (essentially what your friends think of someone) and a lot of people don't really understand them so coding and interface that everyone can use is another tough problem. Aside from the fact that the entire area is pretty much in beta stage still and there's very few code available, so unless you're a math and coding wizard and can create your own trust flow system, that's not something really available right now.
At the moment, what I do is having no system. I rely on the human beings in the game to be able to handle things themselves, using their brains as tools that are infinitly better than anything I could ever code.
"I wonder how Linux idealists feel about their cute little OS being deployed in machinery of war?"
The same I feel about Linux servers being used for spam: I'd like to slowly disembowl the spammers, but what does the OS (by definition a general-purpose tool) have to do with that?
Their only documentation IS THE CODE.
Highly unlikely. M$ has received various Common Criteria certifications on its stuff, and while CC is always hyped as some kind of "security proof", one of its actual main components is documentation. Without loads and loads of documentation, they would've never been able to go beyond EAL2.
Not really sure. Does it make Al Capone a better man if he had given to charity (he didn't for all I know)? Does it make the Hamas better that they give to schools, nurseries and other infrastructure (they do)? Does it make Osama Bin Laden a good guy that he gives to charity (he does)?
So does it make Bill Gates a good man that he gives to charity even though his company is a convicted criminal?
I don't think it does. Not for Osama and not for Bill. You can't "clean" money you've stolen by giving a part to charity.
Jobs, well whatever you think of him, but at least he doesn't rightfully belong in prison. Let's be honest here, the only reason Gates himself isn't a convict is because of the corporate shield.
The example was not the argument, it was to support the argument. It appears you did not actually read the actual argument, which was the one with the number in it. :)
Next time, turn left from when you enter main station, that's the shopping area.
;)
To the right is the seedier of our two red-light districts. I'd advise avoiding it, but I see you no longer need that advise.
Let's see...
No.
But they don't think they can catch any votes with a 12th century morale.
Anecdote: There was this right-wing party leader in France. He was once seen watching a, let us say erotically liberal theatre piece. When confronted by journalists outside (already dreaming up headlines about his embarresment, I'm sure) and asked how he liked it, he simply replied that it was fairly good.
In the US, you'd have Congress calling for a ban on all theaters as breeding pits of sin or something like that.
...put a stick up that guy's ass? I've locked at the article, I've locked a a few pages of booth babes pictures - and I wonder if "risque outfit" has the same definition in american dictionaries as in mine.
All of these girls are fully and appropriately dressed. Aside from the fact that they have logos all over and some of them are wearing obvious custumes, the only reason any of them would be looked at even twice if they were to, say, go shopping in the center of my city tomorrow was because it doesn't fit to the damn cold.
I've seen much more revealing outfits at pretty much every party and not few during normal summer shopping.
In civilized countries, people like that would tour the talk shows. In the US they run for government. The mind(*) trembles.
(*) for our american guests: The mind is the thing that... oh forget it. The mind is the fluid in that grey air conditioning system we have inside our skulls. It's not important.
Could a 3rd powerful party help remedy this situation?
I don't think anyone can really answer that. Do we have any western democracies with 3 (or more) powerful parties? In most countries where multiple parties work, you still have two strong parties, each flanked by a number of coalition partners, or you have lots of fragmentation, see Italy which is a total mess.
The problem appears to be that the whole minority voice, blabla thing doesn't work out. Parties soon realize that "market share" means power and it is profitable to compromise ones core position if it means getting more votes. So parties don't really represent all that much anymore, except for various groups trying to get as large a share as possible.
We've found that under certain circumstances, you can get the same level of security at less expense by well-designed mechanical systems, backstopped at fewer points by human guardians.
Yes
But!
This isn't about security. It's about assurance. There's a world of difference between that. I'll give you a very trivial example: If I put a bag into a safe, weld it shut, physically destroy the key, then bury the safe and tarmac over it, you'd agree that the bag is pretty safe, right? Good. That is security.
Now tell me that you know for certain what the bag contains. That is assurance.
Btw., that's why even though the have motion detectors and biometrics and all the other fancy stuff, we still also have that guard standing there. The simple fact that he knows General Miller is a better guarantee about anyone posing for him than any sophisticated tech.
Back to elections. If you design your electronic voting system properly, then by definition you don't need half a million barefoot technophobic UN workers to monitor your election. Instead, you need a far smaller number of far better-trained workers to monitor critical points in the system. Just like the guard savvy about video tech sitting in his central office.
Again, misconception.
An election is all about being able to tell Joe Doe that his vote was counted and counted correctly. Since we have secret elections, you can't dig out Joe's vote. But you can re-assure him by having a process where every individual vote is, or can be, checked and verified.
Checking voltage on a RAM chip does not mean checking votes. You have to get to the actual vote, or you never get what you are looking for. People do not trust technology, and as it seems, quite rightfully so.
Finally, just because you can't subvert a system which relies on paper and chains of human watchers with fancy technological tricks that bemuse them doesn't mean the system can't be hacked.
But the attack will have to take a form that doesn't look like magic to the stakeholders in the matter.
See, you argue from a techno-geek point of view, but you don't get it that you don't own the election. The people do. The dumb, primitive, technophobic people. They are the stakeholders, and this is one of their most important posessions. If they don't like your machine, then go and redesign your machine.
Whatever came of "the customer is king"? Or maybe we don't realize that in politics, the people and not the politicians, are the customers, owners and board.