My thoughts exactly. Something this big and important needs lots of smart, interested people looking at it. Like you said, I think it's not so much "difficult" as a simple lack of effort. After all, if you're a shoo-in, why put in more effort than strictly necessary?
An OSS project wouldn't be in it for the money. We'd be in it because we want it done right. If enough people were to get involved, say 5-10 main developers, I don't see how it could fail. Even if we didn't win over government "hearts-n-minds", it seems like we could at least make Diebold nervous enough to fix their own projects. Win-Win as far as I'm concerned.
I'm actually surprised that BlackBox Voting or an organization like that hasn't already started something. *Shrug*
Can anyone give me a good reason that there isn't a FOSS project to do this?
I could see this being written in something like Python, using hash verification of the sources against a central, *published* list.
The reason I'd pick a scripting language is that compilation requires a certain level of trust that the binary came from the same source as the public is able to see. By using a scripting language, this issue is obviated, since the program can be examined directly. The hashes make sure no one fires up a text editor to monkey around. That, coupled with read-only filesystems, and some other basic measures should make this system lots more trustworthy.
People will always say that the python/ruby/perl/whatever binary could have been altered, but that's much more difficult. They can also have their hashes compared against the hashes of the publicly available binaries.
Maybe even have a daemon that re-hashes everything every 15 minutes, use FAM/inode notify/etc to watch the files for changes, stuff like that. Maybe even the machine resets every 20 votes and does an integrity check on startup against a known-good reference copy.
There are so many ways to check and double check -- proactively and reactively -- and these are already available in the OSS world. The only remaining piece is to write the voting software itself. I imagine that this can be accomplished before the 2012 elections -- maybe even have its maiden run in smaller Congressional elections.
I think there are enough people in the public with an interest in making sure this goes well that finding testers ("breakers") shouldn't be too hard. There can be a QA team whose sole purpose is to break the security of the system. If they can do it, the security is fixed and there's one less vector for attack.
After the software matures a few years, takes its beatings from QA, I'm sure it'll be a much better alternative to Diebold -- cheaper, and transparent.
Another thing about the OSS community is that there are all politics involved. Finding a Republican, Democrat, and independent to approve all source checkins shouldn't be too difficult. Their interest is to verify that a given CVS commit wouldn't put them to a disadvantage.
If I had more time, I'd even start this project myself. In fact, I just might anyway, and maybe someone else could be co-lead or something. I wouldn't even mind my company putting in money to buy prototype hardware to run it. I'm sure there'd be lots of donations from the OSS crowd too, so I can't really see hardware being a problem. Once we have something to show, the units can be built to order as they're adopted.
Meh - just brainstorming.Take it for what you will.
The question is what kind of phoenix will ascend from its ashes? The usual fire bird has tanks, guns, and conducts elections at pistol-point.
As another poster mentioned, this is the reason for the second amendment. It's just ironic that liberals might be leading the pack in wishing that it hadn't been all but repealed.
Where were the privacy rights guys when people wanted gun registrations? Now the government has lists of who could oppose, and they'll be the first to go when the red bird rises.
People have been so divided by this "Conservative" and "Liberal" false separation that they refuse to think about the implications of each. We're all guilty of unquestioningly accepting dogma that someone tells us is consistent with our particular "faith". The evidence is the apparent absence of "moderates" in America.
So here's the revolution: Stop thinking in terms of Liberal and Conservative. Stop letting other people speak for you and think for you. Re-think your beliefs, and know WHY you believe what you do.
I think most intelligent people would understand that disarming the populace is the first step of any dictatorship, and it's only now, when something that always seemed impossible in the U S of A now seems frighteningly plausible, that people will see the obvious. That's also when it's too late.
The irony is that liberals may have set the stage for a conservative dictatorship.
The Cubic Centimeters are the real secret to high density storage!
They just give you lots of little boxes to pour your data into. When you fill up about 10 of 'em, you just slap some duck tape on them, scribble a half-ass lable with a tiny magic marker, pack it into your Tonka truck with about 10 others, and push it to the other side of the data center. I call this last part the Tonka Transport Layer (TTL), and it offers the highest transfer rates in the history of networking!
The RFC requires that you make 'VROOM! VROOM!' noises and smash it into at least one cow-orker's foot along the way. My 5 year old has already mastered this technology.
I almost feel (from how they are advertized) as if they are trying to wage war against Microsoft. Instead of focusing on the unwashed masses, maybe these distros would be better marketed towards those who are fed up with Windows and looking to try something new?
I use linux exclusively - even at work under VMWare. I try to be a Good Evangelist, but you know something? The emotion I typically have regarding my evangelizing is probably best described as "trepidation".
Good ol' fear. I wonder if I recommend this to someone, and they go home and actually try it out, that there's a chance that they're going to want to do something it can't do (Reader Rabbit for the kiddies, maybe), or have some hardware that it can't handle (25-function printer/fax/copier/scanner/masseuse/water-dispense r machines). I'll inevitably have to tell them that the hardware isn't supported, or the program won't run unless they try WINE, or that they might need to compile some software that inevitably won't compile for kernel version 2.6.13, but would have for 2.6.12 or 2.6.14.
Granted, these things aren't as prevalent as they used to be, but I guess it's still the first thing that crosses my mind. Sure *I* know that the Kodak software that comes with the digital camera is fluff, and that I can just mount the camera as a vfat fs under the usb-storage driver, pull off the pictures, and edit them with GIMP, but -- and it's the damndest thing -- my wife seems to have a problem with that. Know what else? Other techies seem to have a problem with that too.
Sadly, Linux is *not* ready for Joe Average, and won't be until vendors start releasing Linux software on the gizmo's CD. It needs to set up reasonably easily and cleanly, and with minimal intervention from the user. Linux already has the answer to the latter with some really stellar package managers, but so far, manufacturers just aren't doing their part. Until they do, Linux on the Desktop is only fit for people who know to use, and don't mind using, the GIMP instead of the provided photo software, and for those who only want to do internet/office type stuff, and don't have any weird hardware.
I've been using Linux for almost 10 years now, and will typically find the linux answer to the Windows versions of a software package because Linux provides me the power, flexibility, and stability I demand. However, "Joe Average" doesn't demand that, but he does demand that the software pictured on the gizmo's packaging works as advertised. GNOME and KDE provide the familiar metaphores, but that's only part of the solution.
Sounds like delivery / read receipts to me, and they've been around for a long time. Some people turn them off. Some clients will return the receipts if the requestor is in the address book.
See - once you add the "if I can approve" it bit, you necessarily forego the "guaranteed" aspect. Hence the problem with receipts. Your request would be to simply re-invent this wheel.
Sorry, Billosaur, I'm not picking on you in particular, but your post was the last one before I decided to say something about it.
Whatever happened to the word "Patrons"? or "Customers"? Did anybody notice that?
People are not consumers. Bacteria are consumers. Mindless consuming machines. The word itself is demeaning.
I think it's high time that business started remembering the slogans: "The Customer is always right", and "Thank you for patronizing us". I think the shift to the demeaning and inhuman word, "Consumer", has a lot to do with the loss of respect for the "Customer" that's been developing in recent years.
I just want to comment on this question from the summary:
[...]or will Google make the art obsolete once they finish indexing everything?
Isn't the value of relational databases in the ability to "relate" indexed datasets? Google doesn't support a "join" syntax, as far as I know.
Even Google's fantastic text indexing doesn't break the data up into the discreet "fields" that would be needed to do any meaningful relating. It's sort of like having all of your data in a single column in a single table, and trying to self-join on "like" expressions.
Yeah, you can probably make-do if your data has some degree of consistency, but as the dataset incorporates a higher degree of "chaos" (read: different languages, topics, author's fluency in the language, etc), the more difficult any real relations become.
It's not impossible, given some significant (human) enrichment of the data, but we're nowhere near the ability to "join" conceptual data from widely disparate data sources. Maybe as AI improves to the point that it can read and "understand" natural languages (and forms of them spoken by non-native speakers), this will become more of a realistic concept. Certainly something to work toward, anyway.
Make up your mind. You may find that instead of making sweeping generalizations about "religion", that it instead depends heavily on the individual.
How can the "opiate of the masses" create violent crazies? Maybe the violent crazies would have been violent crazies without the religious influence, and the religion simply provided a convenient banner to fly?
Similarly, maybe complacent people are complacent people, irrespective of religion.
In the general case, religion is a civilizing force (most push the "don't steal/kill/whatever" lines). In the general case, religion is a motivator, not an opiate (e.g. World Vision, Catholic schools in areas where there are no schools otherwise, church members helping each other in difficult situations, etc, etc.). Not to say that things don't get out of hand once in a while, but that's the exception, rather than the rule. And again, it's heavily influenced by the predisposition of the individual in question.
By the way - it was Karl Marx. Nice role model. He didn't say "Love thy neighbor" and "Pray for your enemies", though. That was some other guy...
However its alot easier to say porn or drugs are the problem, than it is to tell a person how to fill in the emptiness in their lives... thats something a person has to find for themselves.
You know where I've always heard almost exactly as you've written here? In church. In fact, one Christian pop song has the stanza, "There's a God-shaped hole in all of us / And the restless soul is searching / There's a God-shaped hole in all of us / And it's a void only He can fill."
Every person has needs, wants, and desires that will always need filling. It's the very floorboards of economics. The question comes down to "How does one fill that hole in their soul?" Hopefully they'll do it constructively, but the destructive ones tend to be a lot more fun at first, ergo vastly more popular. By the time the negative effects come around, the person may be too far gone to realize it.
The real trick is to learn to understand that we're creatures of infinite desire, and to begin to think rationally about how to cope with that in a way that won't destroy us. Many major religions try to fill an infinite hole with an infinite God (at least the ones that profess a god or gods). The ones that don't profess (a) god(s) try to teach you how to suppress or channel your desire.
I know there's a general hostility toward religion here, but I submit to you that the idea and the effects of religion on the human psyche are generally positive, because they help people learn to channel humanity's biggest motivator to (usually) positive ends.
(And no fair bringing up the crazies. There are a few psychos in every crowd.)
I'd like to agree with you about the grandparent post, and add a few thoughts, if I may.
I saw Heron of Alexandria on Discovery a while back. He was quite the mechanical engineer, apparently. One of his inventions, called an "aeolipile", pictured in the Wikipedia article, is the first recorded steam engine. The upshot is that he invented it sometime between 150 BC to 0 AD.
Quoth that article:
the first recorded steam engine, (known as Hero's Engine) which was created almost two millennia before the industrial revolution, which was powered by steam engines. Apparently Hero's steam engine was taken to be no more than a toy, and thus its full potential not realized for quite some time.
My point is that, just because something seems inevitable doesn't mean that it is. People miss the obvious all the time, and due to the most incredibly mundane reasons. If not for inexplicable lack of imagination in an otherwise incredibly imaginative and inventive guy, the industrial revolution could conceivable started in Greece around the time of Christ.
It took almost 2000 years before it was obvious to someone else. Inevitable? Maybe. But it might have been your grandkids' grandkids who created the internet, if this guy hadn't hit the right set of circumstances.
Conversely, if the gravitational force decreases, the mass will decrease, causing us to be swept into the garbage can, and placed on a horriffic journey of huge ants and lawnmowers, ending with a nice swim in a cosmic Rick Moranis' cereal bowl?
Even assuming the right indexes, my experience has been that people:
1. inadvertently create Cartesian products, don't know why they're getting 10 copies of each row, and slap distinct on it. The database server now does 10 times as much work because of the product, PLUS it needs to DISTINCT them.
2. Grouping by a dozen columns because they don't understand how "group by" works, or how to perform grouping in a subselect and join it into the main result set.
3. Grouping by incorrect column lists and using "having" to narrow down the resultset, making the DB do much more work than it would with an appropriate "where" and "group by" clause.
It seems to me that most "performance" problems are due to programmer ignorance, rather than actual database slowness.
Most won't complain about performance on simple selects, deletes, or updates, because there's no joining or grouping going on. Improperly joining or grouping will cause performance hits straight-away, because a simple error, masked by 'distinct' or a convoluted 'group by', will cause the database to do several orders of magnitude more work.
Of course, the ignorant programmer then proceeds to blame the database.
I propose this: A "Warning mode" or "Development Mode" for all databases that will detect an unconstrained Cartesian Product in conjunction with a "distinct" directive. This warning should direct the hapless programmer to a web site explaining how to fix the problem appropriately.
It should also detect and warn on inordinate numbers of columns in a "group by" clause (say, more than 4 or 5), and point to a site containing information on grouping in subselects (derived tables in the FROM clause) and joining the results back into the main query as a table. I'm sure PG understands derived tables -- I don't know about MySQL, though.
Of course, this is a self-fulfilling complaint, because bad programmers writing bad SQL will *cause* the database to grind to a halt for other concurrent, correctly written queries as well.
TIME magazine ran Google on their cover, along with the piercing question: "Can we trust Google with our private information?" (or something like that)
I say: NO! NO! A thousand times, NO!
The fact that people would even consider putting their "private information" anywhere on the internet illustrates an epic disconnect between the perception of internet security or privacy with the realities of the same.
This GDrive service strikes me the same way. I suppose I could think of some uses for this service, but certainly, Google's interest here would likely be to index the information stored on your GDrive. With that in mind, I certainly wouldn't be using them for anywhere near 100% of my information storage needs.
My wife is from South America, with her mother also living her in the States. When her mother was recently hospitalized, she related an interesting conversation she overheard between a doctor and another Hispanic patient.
Apparently, the doctor wanted the patient to scootch her butt over a little on the bed. Because of the large number of Columbians working at the hospital, he'd picked up some Spanish, and was trying it out.
Unfortunately, he didn't realize just *what kind* of language he'd picked up, and wound up telling her to "Move your ass!"
If their concern truly is about these discs being used to unfairly copy their music, to the detriment of the artists, maybe I have a solution.
The MusicBiz has all the infrastructure in place to make CDs, right? Maybe they could *get into the CD-R/W business*. That way they could make money from the people who are *obviously* (ergh!) trying to steal from them -- and even those who don't. They can then divide up the profit according to some Fair Formula (double ergh!), keep some portion, and distribute the rest to the poor-starving-artists.
They can then proceed to shut the hell up. See? Free market solution to a free market problem. Of course, I'm sure the next "logical" step would be to lobby through a law prohibiting the sale of CDR's not manufactured by *IAA.
For older machines, hardware support is built in for Linux, almost in every case. For instance, I have a 700MHz Dell workstation (not all that old), which "just works" under Linux. Conversely, every time I install Win2k on it since it became my kids' machine, it gets harder and harder to find video drivers.
I'm not about to buy a new version of Windows that'll barely run on this machine, so Windows is basically going bye-bye when I can no longer find decent drivers for it.
Windows may have the market cornered on bleeding-edge hardware drivers because of de-facto manufacturer support, but it fails miserably in the "long tail" of hardware support, and that's where it counts most for an increasing number of people whose 1.0Ghz machine is still more than enough.
Go with your gut. That's been sage advice for longer than any of us have been alive. I guess now there's research to back it up.
It seems that the more I concentrate on solving a problem, the more difficult it tends to become. I think too far into it, and get a bad case of the "what if's". It ends up so that I can't see the forest through the trees.
To come up with a plan for attacking a problem, it's always seemed to me that the unconscious mind is the best for generating a general plan of attack, because it doesn't confuse itself with too many details. Concentration is for the "sit down and get it done" part, which comes after you've figured out your plan. That's where you worry about the one-off's and special cases.
I guess that's why I tend have my ah-hah moments at the most inopportune times -- riding the train, taking a shower, watching TV, sometimes even in my dreams... Those are the times that I tend to solve the bigger problems I'm facing at work: when I'm not even there.
from http://www.unixodbc.org/ -- "Also; ALL unixODBC development is and will be distributed under GPL or LGPL. The LGPL on libs will ensure that commercial solutions will be able to utilize unixODBC."
If you use an ODBC layer (unixODBC / Windows ODBC subsystem), then you are linking your application against *that*, not the mysql driver.
I don't see how drawing a simple abstraction layer diagram wouldn't disprove the assertion that simply using the drivers involves linking against GPL code.
Amusingly, unixODBC may link against myodbc, but it's opensource anyway. Maybe if you're using myodbc in Windows, Microsoft is in violation of GPL because they didn't release the code for the ODBC subsystem?:-)
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My thoughts exactly. Something this big and important needs lots of smart, interested people looking at it. Like you said, I think it's not so much "difficult" as a simple lack of effort. After all, if you're a shoo-in, why put in more effort than strictly necessary?
An OSS project wouldn't be in it for the money. We'd be in it because we want it done right. If enough people were to get involved, say 5-10 main developers, I don't see how it could fail. Even if we didn't win over government "hearts-n-minds", it seems like we could at least make Diebold nervous enough to fix their own projects. Win-Win as far as I'm concerned.
I'm actually surprised that BlackBox Voting or an organization like that hasn't already started something. *Shrug*
Can anyone give me a good reason that there isn't a FOSS project to do this?
I could see this being written in something like Python, using hash verification of the sources against a central, *published* list.
The reason I'd pick a scripting language is that compilation requires a certain level of trust that the binary came from the same source as the public is able to see. By using a scripting language, this issue is obviated, since the program can be examined directly. The hashes make sure no one fires up a text editor to monkey around. That, coupled with read-only filesystems, and some other basic measures should make this system lots more trustworthy.
People will always say that the python/ruby/perl/whatever binary could have been altered, but that's much more difficult. They can also have their hashes compared against the hashes of the publicly available binaries.
Maybe even have a daemon that re-hashes everything every 15 minutes, use FAM/inode notify/etc to watch the files for changes, stuff like that. Maybe even the machine resets every 20 votes and does an integrity check on startup against a known-good reference copy.
There are so many ways to check and double check -- proactively and reactively -- and these are already available in the OSS world. The only remaining piece is to write the voting software itself. I imagine that this can be accomplished before the 2012 elections -- maybe even have its maiden run in smaller Congressional elections.
I think there are enough people in the public with an interest in making sure this goes well that finding testers ("breakers") shouldn't be too hard. There can be a QA team whose sole purpose is to break the security of the system. If they can do it, the security is fixed and there's one less vector for attack.
After the software matures a few years, takes its beatings from QA, I'm sure it'll be a much better alternative to Diebold -- cheaper, and transparent.
Another thing about the OSS community is that there are all politics involved. Finding a Republican, Democrat, and independent to approve all source checkins shouldn't be too difficult. Their interest is to verify that a given CVS commit wouldn't put them to a disadvantage.
If I had more time, I'd even start this project myself. In fact, I just might anyway, and maybe someone else could be co-lead or something. I wouldn't even mind my company putting in money to buy prototype hardware to run it. I'm sure there'd be lots of donations from the OSS crowd too, so I can't really see hardware being a problem. Once we have something to show, the units can be built to order as they're adopted.
Meh - just brainstorming.Take it for what you will.
The question is what kind of phoenix will ascend from its ashes? The usual fire bird has tanks, guns, and conducts elections at pistol-point.
As another poster mentioned, this is the reason for the second amendment. It's just ironic that liberals might be leading the pack in wishing that it hadn't been all but repealed.
Where were the privacy rights guys when people wanted gun registrations? Now the government has lists of who could oppose, and they'll be the first to go when the red bird rises.
People have been so divided by this "Conservative" and "Liberal" false separation that they refuse to think about the implications of each. We're all guilty of unquestioningly accepting dogma that someone tells us is consistent with our particular "faith". The evidence is the apparent absence of "moderates" in America.
So here's the revolution: Stop thinking in terms of Liberal and Conservative. Stop letting other people speak for you and think for you. Re-think your beliefs, and know WHY you believe what you do.
I think most intelligent people would understand that disarming the populace is the first step of any dictatorship, and it's only now, when something that always seemed impossible in the U S of A now seems frighteningly plausible, that people will see the obvious. That's also when it's too late.
The irony is that liberals may have set the stage for a conservative dictatorship.
The Cubic Centimeters are the real secret to high density storage!
They just give you lots of little boxes to pour your data into. When you fill up about 10 of 'em, you just slap some duck tape on them, scribble a half-ass lable with a tiny magic marker, pack it into your Tonka truck with about 10 others, and push it to the other side of the data center. I call this last part the Tonka Transport Layer (TTL), and it offers the highest transfer rates in the history of networking!
The RFC requires that you make 'VROOM! VROOM!' noises and smash it into at least one cow-orker's foot along the way. My 5 year old has already mastered this technology.
So if you don't want to lose the contents of your RAM I guess you just stick it in the freezer?
Do I see on the horizon a new implementation of PERL's freeze() and thaw() ??
Meh - maybe in PERL 6...
I almost feel (from how they are advertized) as if they are trying to wage war against Microsoft. Instead of focusing on the unwashed masses, maybe these distros would be better marketed towards those who are fed up with Windows and looking to try something new?
I use linux exclusively - even at work under VMWare. I try to be a Good Evangelist, but you know something? The emotion I typically have regarding my evangelizing is probably best described as "trepidation".
Good ol' fear. I wonder if I recommend this to someone, and they go home and actually try it out, that there's a chance that they're going to want to do something it can't do (Reader Rabbit for the kiddies, maybe), or have some hardware that it can't handle (25-function printer/fax/copier/scanner/masseuse/water-dispens
Granted, these things aren't as prevalent as they used to be, but I guess it's still the first thing that crosses my mind. Sure *I* know that the Kodak software that comes with the digital camera is fluff, and that I can just mount the camera as a vfat fs under the usb-storage driver, pull off the pictures, and edit them with GIMP, but -- and it's the damndest thing -- my wife seems to have a problem with that. Know what else? Other techies seem to have a problem with that too.
Sadly, Linux is *not* ready for Joe Average, and won't be until vendors start releasing Linux software on the gizmo's CD. It needs to set up reasonably easily and cleanly, and with minimal intervention from the user. Linux already has the answer to the latter with some really stellar package managers, but so far, manufacturers just aren't doing their part. Until they do, Linux on the Desktop is only fit for people who know to use, and don't mind using, the GIMP instead of the provided photo software, and for those who only want to do internet/office type stuff, and don't have any weird hardware.
I've been using Linux for almost 10 years now, and will typically find the linux answer to the Windows versions of a software package because Linux provides me the power, flexibility, and stability I demand. However, "Joe Average" doesn't demand that, but he does demand that the software pictured on the gizmo's packaging works as advertised. GNOME and KDE provide the familiar metaphores, but that's only part of the solution.
Sounds like delivery / read receipts to me, and they've been around for a long time. Some people turn them off. Some clients will return the receipts if the requestor is in the address book.
See - once you add the "if I can approve" it bit, you necessarily forego the "guaranteed" aspect. Hence the problem with receipts. Your request would be to simply re-invent this wheel.
Sorry, Billosaur, I'm not picking on you in particular, but your post was the last one before I decided to say something about it.
Whatever happened to the word "Patrons"? or "Customers"? Did anybody notice that?
People are not consumers. Bacteria are consumers. Mindless consuming machines. The word itself is demeaning.
I think it's high time that business started remembering the slogans: "The Customer is always right", and "Thank you for patronizing us". I think the shift to the demeaning and inhuman word, "Consumer", has a lot to do with the loss of respect for the "Customer" that's been developing in recent years.
Words have power. Use the correct ones.
[...]or will Google make the art obsolete once they finish indexing everything?
Isn't the value of relational databases in the ability to "relate" indexed datasets? Google doesn't support a "join" syntax, as far as I know.
Even Google's fantastic text indexing doesn't break the data up into the discreet "fields" that would be needed to do any meaningful relating. It's sort of like having all of your data in a single column in a single table, and trying to self-join on "like" expressions.
Yeah, you can probably make-do if your data has some degree of consistency, but as the dataset incorporates a higher degree of "chaos" (read: different languages, topics, author's fluency in the language, etc), the more difficult any real relations become.
It's not impossible, given some significant (human) enrichment of the data, but we're nowhere near the ability to "join" conceptual data from widely disparate data sources. Maybe as AI improves to the point that it can read and "understand" natural languages (and forms of them spoken by non-native speakers), this will become more of a realistic concept. Certainly something to work toward, anyway.
Make up your mind. You may find that instead of making sweeping generalizations about "religion", that it instead depends heavily on the individual.
How can the "opiate of the masses" create violent crazies? Maybe the violent crazies would have been violent crazies without the religious influence, and the religion simply provided a convenient banner to fly?
Similarly, maybe complacent people are complacent people, irrespective of religion.
In the general case, religion is a civilizing force (most push the "don't steal/kill/whatever" lines). In the general case, religion is a motivator, not an opiate (e.g. World Vision, Catholic schools in areas where there are no schools otherwise, church members helping each other in difficult situations, etc, etc.). Not to say that things don't get out of hand once in a while, but that's the exception, rather than the rule. And again, it's heavily influenced by the predisposition of the individual in question.
By the way - it was Karl Marx. Nice role model. He didn't say "Love thy neighbor" and "Pray for your enemies", though. That was some other guy...
However its alot easier to say porn or drugs are the problem, than it is to tell a person how to fill in the emptiness in their lives... thats something a person has to find for themselves.
You know where I've always heard almost exactly as you've written here? In church. In fact, one Christian pop song has the stanza, "There's a God-shaped hole in all of us / And the restless soul is searching / There's a God-shaped hole in all of us / And it's a void only He can fill."
Every person has needs, wants, and desires that will always need filling. It's the very floorboards of economics. The question comes down to "How does one fill that hole in their soul?" Hopefully they'll do it constructively, but the destructive ones tend to be a lot more fun at first, ergo vastly more popular. By the time the negative effects come around, the person may be too far gone to realize it.
The real trick is to learn to understand that we're creatures of infinite desire, and to begin to think rationally about how to cope with that in a way that won't destroy us. Many major religions try to fill an infinite hole with an infinite God (at least the ones that profess a god or gods). The ones that don't profess (a) god(s) try to teach you how to suppress or channel your desire.
I know there's a general hostility toward religion here, but I submit to you that the idea and the effects of religion on the human psyche are generally positive, because they help people learn to channel humanity's biggest motivator to (usually) positive ends.
(And no fair bringing up the crazies. There are a few psychos in every crowd.)
I saw Heron of Alexandria on Discovery a while back. He was quite the mechanical engineer, apparently. One of his inventions, called an "aeolipile", pictured in the Wikipedia article, is the first recorded steam engine. The upshot is that he invented it sometime between 150 BC to 0 AD.
Quoth that article:
the first recorded steam engine, (known as Hero's Engine) which was created almost two millennia before the industrial revolution, which was powered by steam engines. Apparently Hero's steam engine was taken to be no more than a toy, and thus its full potential not realized for quite some time.
My point is that, just because something seems inevitable doesn't mean that it is. People miss the obvious all the time, and due to the most incredibly mundane reasons. If not for inexplicable lack of imagination in an otherwise incredibly imaginative and inventive guy, the industrial revolution could conceivable started in Greece around the time of Christ.
It took almost 2000 years before it was obvious to someone else. Inevitable? Maybe. But it might have been your grandkids' grandkids who created the internet, if this guy hadn't hit the right set of circumstances.
Sure -- if they all look like Natasia Henstridge (sp?). The Nast, Big, Pointy Teeth are a real turnoff, though.
Conversely, if the gravitational force decreases, the mass will decrease, causing us to be swept into the garbage can, and placed on a horriffic journey of huge ants and lawnmowers, ending with a nice swim in a cosmic Rick Moranis' cereal bowl?
Even assuming the right indexes, my experience has been that people:
1. inadvertently create Cartesian products, don't know why they're getting 10 copies of each row, and slap distinct on it. The database server now does 10 times as much work because of the product, PLUS it needs to DISTINCT them.
2. Grouping by a dozen columns because they don't understand how "group by" works, or how to perform grouping in a subselect and join it into the main result set.
3. Grouping by incorrect column lists and using "having" to narrow down the resultset, making the DB do much more work than it would with an appropriate "where" and "group by" clause.
It seems to me that most "performance" problems are due to programmer ignorance, rather than actual database slowness.
Most won't complain about performance on simple selects, deletes, or updates, because there's no joining or grouping going on. Improperly joining or grouping will cause performance hits straight-away, because a simple error, masked by 'distinct' or a convoluted 'group by', will cause the database to do several orders of magnitude more work.
Of course, the ignorant programmer then proceeds to blame the database.
I propose this: A "Warning mode" or "Development Mode" for all databases that will detect an unconstrained Cartesian Product in conjunction with a "distinct" directive. This warning should direct the hapless programmer to a web site explaining how to fix the problem appropriately.
It should also detect and warn on inordinate numbers of columns in a "group by" clause (say, more than 4 or 5), and point to a site containing information on grouping in subselects (derived tables in the FROM clause) and joining the results back into the main query as a table. I'm sure PG understands derived tables -- I don't know about MySQL, though.
Of course, this is a self-fulfilling complaint, because bad programmers writing bad SQL will *cause* the database to grind to a halt for other concurrent, correctly written queries as well.
My vote is with Excel! Do I win a prize?
TIME magazine ran Google on their cover, along with the piercing question: "Can we trust Google with our private information?" (or something like that)
I say: NO! NO! A thousand times, NO!
The fact that people would even consider putting their "private information" anywhere on the internet illustrates an epic disconnect between the perception of internet security or privacy with the realities of the same.
This GDrive service strikes me the same way. I suppose I could think of some uses for this service, but certainly, Google's interest here would likely be to index the information stored on your GDrive. With that in mind, I certainly wouldn't be using them for anywhere near 100% of my information storage needs.
My wife is from South America, with her mother also living her in the States. When her mother was recently hospitalized, she related an interesting conversation she overheard between a doctor and another Hispanic patient.
Apparently, the doctor wanted the patient to scootch her butt over a little on the bed. Because of the large number of Columbians working at the hospital, he'd picked up some Spanish, and was trying it out.
Unfortunately, he didn't realize just *what kind* of language he'd picked up, and wound up telling her to "Move your ass!"
If their concern truly is about these discs being used to unfairly copy their music, to the detriment of the artists, maybe I have a solution.
The MusicBiz has all the infrastructure in place to make CDs, right? Maybe they could *get into the CD-R/W business*. That way they could make money from the people who are *obviously* (ergh!) trying to steal from them -- and even those who don't. They can then divide up the profit according to some Fair Formula (double ergh!), keep some portion, and distribute the rest to the poor-starving-artists.
They can then proceed to shut the hell up. See? Free market solution to a free market problem. Of course, I'm sure the next "logical" step would be to lobby through a law prohibiting the sale of CDR's not manufactured by *IAA.
For older machines, hardware support is built in for Linux, almost in every case. For instance, I have a 700MHz Dell workstation (not all that old), which "just works" under Linux. Conversely, every time I install Win2k on it since it became my kids' machine, it gets harder and harder to find video drivers.
I'm not about to buy a new version of Windows that'll barely run on this machine, so Windows is basically going bye-bye when I can no longer find decent drivers for it.
Windows may have the market cornered on bleeding-edge hardware drivers because of de-facto manufacturer support, but it fails miserably in the "long tail" of hardware support, and that's where it counts most for an increasing number of people whose 1.0Ghz machine is still more than enough.
You can't shrink the grease molicules so they don't fit right anymore.
:-)
Didn't Rick Moranis have this covered pretty well? Maybe he should have given that science career more thought before moving on to country music?
Wow, Mods. Someone really misread this post. A troll it's not.
Go with your gut. That's been sage advice for longer than any of us have been alive. I guess now there's research to back it up.
It seems that the more I concentrate on solving a problem, the more difficult it tends to become. I think too far into it, and get a bad case of the "what if's". It ends up so that I can't see the forest through the trees.
To come up with a plan for attacking a problem, it's always seemed to me that the unconscious mind is the best for generating a general plan of attack, because it doesn't confuse itself with too many details. Concentration is for the "sit down and get it done" part, which comes after you've figured out your plan. That's where you worry about the one-off's and special cases.
I guess that's why I tend have my ah-hah moments at the most inopportune times -- riding the train, taking a shower, watching TV, sometimes even in my dreams... Those are the times that I tend to solve the bigger problems I'm facing at work: when I'm not even there.
ODBC?
from http://www.unixodbc.org/ --
"Also; ALL unixODBC development is and will be distributed under GPL or LGPL. The LGPL on libs will ensure that commercial solutions will be able to utilize unixODBC."
Emphasis mine.
If you use an ODBC layer (unixODBC / Windows ODBC subsystem), then you are linking your application against *that*, not the mysql driver.
:-)
I don't see how drawing a simple abstraction layer diagram wouldn't disprove the assertion that simply using the drivers involves linking against GPL code.
Amusingly, unixODBC may link against myodbc, but it's opensource anyway. Maybe if you're using myodbc in Windows, Microsoft is in violation of GPL because they didn't release the code for the ODBC subsystem?