Re:Private Voting, Public Counting
on
Brave New Ballot
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· Score: 1
And they have legions of civil servants working weeks to get the exact manual tally. Whereas here in the USA, politicians and news networks demand results now, now, now!
You don't need "legions of civil servants working weeks" to get manual tallies. You may want them to verify and officialize the tallies, but the counting can be started by election officials right after the booths close, in front of the public. Just get one person to record count and one to count ballots, put another pair to recount the same ballots, then add as many quatuors as you may need (counting ballots is trivial to parallelize).
The Now Now Now can be extracted from exit polls, the initial count results comes out a pair of hours after the booths close, under a week later you have the very offical numbers, you have the ballots to recount if needed, everything is done right in front of the public (in front of the ones who care at least), and since all the counting is done on a very small scale counting errors statistically cancel themselves and vote-rigging can't reach large-scale frauds and impact.
The question nobody seems to be able to answer is, "how is this any better than just coming up with a funky PS2 controller?" All the Wii controller does is replace the two thumbsticks of the X-Box with a controller which you can either move or tilt.
That's the PS3 controller. Thanks to the sensor bar, the Wii has what's missing from the PS3: absolute positioning in space. Basically, it's a 3D mouse. And the nunchuk also sports a set of accelerometers & gyroscopes, which means that it has all the abilities of the PS3 controller, and all of the abilities of the wiimote bar absolute positioning (no I'm not joking)
Re:Harris Miller is not a good representative
on
Brave New Ballot
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· Score: 2, Interesting
That takes up what, a pallet or two in a warehouse? Now try multiplying it by 100, and you get the nationwide votes if everybody voted
So what? You can distribute the storage just as you can distribute human-handled vote-counting. In fact, counting vote is one of those few extremely parallelizable, highly scalable operations. That's why democracy and paper ballots work in a country like India, with 1 billion citizens and more potential voters than the total US population.
Storing a hundred pallets of ballots is a fair bit (it's not even a lot). Storing two or 3 pallets per state is small, storing a few boxes of ballots per county is nothing and utterly trivial.
Computerizing votes is one of the few things that can at best be considered stupid, because it's safer, easier and inherently more secure to just use hand-counted ballots.
But I see DS's a lot. Keep thinking I need to get one... but saving for the Wii now instead.
Come on, the DS is only $130, plus $40 for a new game (just import Otsu! Tatakae! Ouendan and you've pretty much covered your gaming addiction need until the Wii is released), and you can find good used games (NSMB, Kirby, Advance Wars Dual Strike,...) for like $15.
Remember, the Wii is only released in mid November (and early December if you're a PAL gamer like me)
Re:You can't win with the controllers!
on
Will the Wii Work?
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· Score: 1
To base your sales on the controllers is stupid.
Exactly, Nintendo's "Touch Generation" touting the DS' touchscreen abilities and focusing most of it's marketting on it utterly failed!
Uh... wait...
Re:Wii-doubting articles - the biggest thing...
on
Will the Wii Work?
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· Score: 1
The Wii is very shiny though, it has the same apple-like coating that is used on the DS Lite. Much shinier than a PS3 or an Xbox360.
Re:Console sales aren't super important for Ninten
on
Will the Wii Work?
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· Score: 1
Yes, but they'll make much more money if they come out 1st place: more console sales (they won't sell Wiis at a loss) + more game sales (the biggest your user base is, the more games you sell, the more money you make) + third-party licenses (having the least successful console means that you don't bring in third-party -- especially when third party games don't sell e.g., GameCube -- and therefore that you don't get either the mindshare or the license fees from them)
I disagree. "dedicated" gamers (as opposed to the ricer-type that just wants "mature" because games without blood are "for sissies") want fun above and beyond everything else. They want good, interresting, quality games.
If they're available on the Wii, they'll dig the wii, just as they're digging the DS because it has awesome game and because the stylus makes many games fun again.
That's it, except that it's not up to the user to write the unwinding code, but up to the service provider (the one who wrote the code in the first place). The user only writes the protected code.
Which is pretty much trivial to implement with unwind-protect.
the point of expressiveness is to make code more readable
I disagree, you can have extremely expressive languages that are completely unreadable.
For example, Perl is a very expressive language, and yet it's completely unreadable. Haskell could be another example, it's one of the most expressive and concise languages I know, but it's code structure makes it hard to read when you're not familiar with the language.
Python is slightly less expressive than Ruby, but it has a very readable, very clear and "obvious" syntax, and this feeling of obviousness is part of the language's base and philosophy:
~$ python -m this
The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters
Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested. Sparse is better than dense. Readability counts.
Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess. There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!
The point of `with` is not to repeat scope information (and I fail to see how it does too, it just creates a scope within a context generated by a contextmanager that you may or may not have written). It's to provide automated management by the contextmanager, akin to what Ruby does throughout the language and the stdlib: ensure that you don't forget to release a resource, ensure that you don't forget to close a file, ensure that you don't forget to release a lock,...
You rarely want to create a full frame, and much less create a named function, for that kind of job.
And you can make you contextmanager arbitrarily complex, so that they do heavy lifting and just give you the easy-to-work-with part (think DB transaction, create a DB contextmanager, manipulate your data, at the end of the with block you transaction will be cleanly committed or rollbacked, no hassle and no chance for an error in manually handling the transaction yourself)
Yep but I think only 2 or 3 of the 33 challenges require the use of python, so it's mostly a non-issue.
Re:Use the appropriate language
on
Python 2.5 Released
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It has features from many languages. That's why it's so easy to learn. Whatever your programming style, you can probably do it in Python.
Well python is a multiparadigm language and fairly flexible, but it doesn't go far beyond OO, imperative and lightweight functional styles.
It's not fit at all for logic programming, DBC and AOP are not that cool (even though decorators make them at least possible without being too damn ugly), and hardline functional programmin is impossible due to lack of support for recursions (Python doesn't optimize tail-recursion), absence of pattern-matching and mutable states.
Oh, and it has no support whatsoever for distributed or heavy concurrent programming.
Re:Python is not anything like Lisp
on
Python 2.5 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
Now Ruby has the anonymous function thing ("blocks") which lets you do some of the same things you can do in Lisp with Macros
Duh, looks like you never used macros, blocks don't let you do anything macros let you do, they let you do what lambdas (anonymous functions) let you do in lisp.
These is no relation at all between blocks and macros, macros are tools to generate (transform) code. The only think that could be linked to macros in Ruby are class_eval and instance_eval-type methods.
Now please shut up, you don't even being to grasp what macros are or what they're used for, so don't talk about them.
Now I know that's just me (well, not just me) but doesn't it make sense to keep the distribution light?
No. It makes sense to keep the core language light, but it definitely does not make sense to keep the standard library "light". And it would go against Python's philosophy of being offered "batteries included".
It makes sense to keep standard libraries high-quality, and fast, but stdlibs are great assets of computing languages. Many think that more than a language failed because there was no quality, extensive standard library (Common Lisp comes to mind).
Now extensive third-party repositories such as CPAN or easy-to-install third-party libs such as Ruby's gems do make sense, and are also great assets to a language not to be underestimated, but stdlib functions just give much more (potentially misguided though) confidence about quality, and they create common idioms across the language.
I didn't mean that they only used some functions, but simply that they didn't write those functions or anything, they're just linking a library and exposing the API to Python.
Not exactly, they wrapped the library in a DBAPI2 compliant interface (DBAPI2 would be similar to Perl's DBI, it's an official standard DB interface published in PEP 249: the Python Database API Specification v2.0)
Re:Easy transition from Python to Ruby?
on
Python 2.5 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
Oh yeah, the biggest hurdle when transitioning from Python to Ruby is the awfully shitty documentation by the way, and the fact that Ruby's stdlib is fairly anemic compared to Python's (third party packages and the ease of installing them via gem somewhat eases the pain though)
Re:Easy transition from Python to Ruby?
on
Python 2.5 Released
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Migrating from Python to Ruby is trivial, they're 95% identical. Some idioms are different such as Ruby's use of anonymous functions (called blocks) and different ways of metaprogramming (plus the fact that Ruby uses metaprogrammatic abilities much more often than Python), but the difference between them is far smaller than some people make it to be.
I believe the wart was that the finally clause didn't make it if there was an exception in the except clauses. It's a bugfix.
Wrong. In the previous versions there were two versions of the try clause: try/except/else and try/finally. You couldn't use both except and finally in a single try clause (the idiom was usually to wrap your try/except in a try/finally). This was a wart indeed in the eyes of many people (including me), but it is not a bugfix.
The code that you run after the part you may want to protect could thrown an exception that you wouldn't want to catch in your except handlers.
The else clause gives you a way to run it without the risk of shadowing/accidentaly catching these exceptions.
Re:Woot -- conditional expressions!
on
Python 2.5 Released
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· Score: 4, Informative
I suppose that would have been too easy, though.
It's not about "too easy", it was rejected after lenghy discussions on python-dev. You can read explanations, modivations, and get links to quite a lot of discussions on the PEP 308 - Conditional Expressions page.
Whatever your thought on the result is, don't think for a second that the decision of this was easy, or a side-note on a receipt.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't need "legions of civil servants working weeks" to get manual tallies. You may want them to verify and officialize the tallies, but the counting can be started by election officials right after the booths close, in front of the public. Just get one person to record count and one to count ballots, put another pair to recount the same ballots, then add as many quatuors as you may need (counting ballots is trivial to parallelize).
The Now Now Now can be extracted from exit polls, the initial count results comes out a pair of hours after the booths close, under a week later you have the very offical numbers, you have the ballots to recount if needed, everything is done right in front of the public (in front of the ones who care at least), and since all the counting is done on a very small scale counting errors statistically cancel themselves and vote-rigging can't reach large-scale frauds and impact.
No, the solution to e-voting can be found in not using e-voting in the first place.
That's the PS3 controller. Thanks to the sensor bar, the Wii has what's missing from the PS3: absolute positioning in space. Basically, it's a 3D mouse. And the nunchuk also sports a set of accelerometers & gyroscopes, which means that it has all the abilities of the PS3 controller, and all of the abilities of the wiimote bar absolute positioning (no I'm not joking)
So what? You can distribute the storage just as you can distribute human-handled vote-counting. In fact, counting vote is one of those few extremely parallelizable, highly scalable operations. That's why democracy and paper ballots work in a country like India, with 1 billion citizens and more potential voters than the total US population.
Storing a hundred pallets of ballots is a fair bit (it's not even a lot). Storing two or 3 pallets per state is small, storing a few boxes of ballots per county is nothing and utterly trivial.
Computerizing votes is one of the few things that can at best be considered stupid, because it's safer, easier and inherently more secure to just use hand-counted ballots.
Come on, the DS is only $130, plus $40 for a new game (just import Otsu! Tatakae! Ouendan and you've pretty much covered your gaming addiction need until the Wii is released), and you can find good used games (NSMB, Kirby, Advance Wars Dual Strike, ...) for like $15.
Remember, the Wii is only released in mid November (and early December if you're a PAL gamer like me)
Exactly, Nintendo's "Touch Generation" touting the DS' touchscreen abilities and focusing most of it's marketting on it utterly failed!
Uh... wait...
The Wii is very shiny though, it has the same apple-like coating that is used on the DS Lite. Much shinier than a PS3 or an Xbox360.
Yes, but they'll make much more money if they come out 1st place: more console sales (they won't sell Wiis at a loss) + more game sales (the biggest your user base is, the more games you sell, the more money you make) + third-party licenses (having the least successful console means that you don't bring in third-party -- especially when third party games don't sell e.g., GameCube -- and therefore that you don't get either the mindshare or the license fees from them)
I disagree. "dedicated" gamers (as opposed to the ricer-type that just wants "mature" because games without blood are "for sissies") want fun above and beyond everything else. They want good, interresting, quality games.
If they're available on the Wii, they'll dig the wii, just as they're digging the DS because it has awesome game and because the stylus makes many games fun again.
That's it, except that it's not up to the user to write the unwinding code, but up to the service provider (the one who wrote the code in the first place). The user only writes the protected code.
Which is pretty much trivial to implement with unwind-protect.
So what? There is no mention of macros in here, and no mention of the relation between macros and lambdas (rightfully so, because there is none).
I disagree, you can have extremely expressive languages that are completely unreadable.
For example, Perl is a very expressive language, and yet it's completely unreadable. Haskell could be another example, it's one of the most expressive and concise languages I know, but it's code structure makes it hard to read when you're not familiar with the language.
Python is slightly less expressive than Ruby, but it has a very readable, very clear and "obvious" syntax, and this feeling of obviousness is part of the language's base and philosophy:
The point of `with` is not to repeat scope information (and I fail to see how it does too, it just creates a scope within a context generated by a contextmanager that you may or may not have written). It's to provide automated management by the contextmanager, akin to what Ruby does throughout the language and the stdlib: ensure that you don't forget to release a resource, ensure that you don't forget to close a file, ensure that you don't forget to release a lock, ...
You rarely want to create a full frame, and much less create a named function, for that kind of job.
And you can make you contextmanager arbitrarily complex, so that they do heavy lifting and just give you the easy-to-work-with part (think DB transaction, create a DB contextmanager, manipulate your data, at the end of the with block you transaction will be cleanly committed or rollbacked, no hassle and no chance for an error in manually handling the transaction yourself)
The documentation for Python 2.5 is still in docs.python.org/dev
It's also up to date in the Windows bundle, and the SQLite3 documentation seems fairly good
Yep but I think only 2 or 3 of the 33 challenges require the use of python, so it's mostly a non-issue.
Well python is a multiparadigm language and fairly flexible, but it doesn't go far beyond OO, imperative and lightweight functional styles.
It's not fit at all for logic programming, DBC and AOP are not that cool (even though decorators make them at least possible without being too damn ugly), and hardline functional programmin is impossible due to lack of support for recursions (Python doesn't optimize tail-recursion), absence of pattern-matching and mutable states.
Oh, and it has no support whatsoever for distributed or heavy concurrent programming.
Duh, looks like you never used macros, blocks don't let you do anything macros let you do, they let you do what lambdas (anonymous functions) let you do in lisp.
These is no relation at all between blocks and macros, macros are tools to generate (transform) code. The only think that could be linked to macros in Ruby are class_eval and instance_eval-type methods.
Now please shut up, you don't even being to grasp what macros are or what they're used for, so don't talk about them.
Damn, missed that one.
No. It makes sense to keep the core language light, but it definitely does not make sense to keep the standard library "light". And it would go against Python's philosophy of being offered "batteries included".
It makes sense to keep standard libraries high-quality, and fast, but stdlibs are great assets of computing languages. Many think that more than a language failed because there was no quality, extensive standard library (Common Lisp comes to mind).
Now extensive third-party repositories such as CPAN or easy-to-install third-party libs such as Ruby's gems do make sense, and are also great assets to a language not to be underestimated, but stdlib functions just give much more (potentially misguided though) confidence about quality, and they create common idioms across the language.
Not exactly, they wrapped the library in a DBAPI2 compliant interface (DBAPI2 would be similar to Perl's DBI, it's an official standard DB interface published in PEP 249: the Python Database API Specification v2.0)
Oh yeah, the biggest hurdle when transitioning from Python to Ruby is the awfully shitty documentation by the way, and the fact that Ruby's stdlib is fairly anemic compared to Python's (third party packages and the ease of installing them via gem somewhat eases the pain though)
Migrating from Python to Ruby is trivial, they're 95% identical. Some idioms are different such as Ruby's use of anonymous functions (called blocks) and different ways of metaprogramming (plus the fact that Ruby uses metaprogrammatic abilities much more often than Python), but the difference between them is far smaller than some people make it to be.
Wrong. In the previous versions there were two versions of the try clause: try/except/else and try/finally. You couldn't use both except and finally in a single try clause (the idiom was usually to wrap your try/except in a try/finally). This was a wart indeed in the eyes of many people (including me), but it is not a bugfix.
The code that you run after the part you may want to protect could thrown an exception that you wouldn't want to catch in your except handlers.
The else clause gives you a way to run it without the risk of shadowing/accidentaly catching these exceptions.
It's not about "too easy", it was rejected after lenghy discussions on python-dev. You can read explanations, modivations, and get links to quite a lot of discussions on the PEP 308 - Conditional Expressions page.
Whatever your thought on the result is, don't think for a second that the decision of this was easy, or a side-note on a receipt.
They put the whole pysqlite library in the stdlib.
(so no, not just some functions of it, the module is now included in Python's stdlib and maintained as such)