Well, our system is pretty damn fast, so that can't really be it. It can of course be the perceived reason, because many people think that machines *must* be faster.
Our elections close usually at 6 PM, several prognoses (sp?) are made during the following hours, which are mostly quite accurate. The final official result is usually available late in the evening or during the night.
Serious question, I'd honestly like to know why everyone is so hell-bent on using voting machines, electronic or paper-punching or whatever. What for? Here in Germany you get a big piece of paper with a list of the candidates/parties and you just draw an "X" beside your choice, then fold the paper and drop it in a box. Yes, the results are most likely (I've never been there) entered into a computer when they are counted, but this way there's a really good paper trail for everything. And we need neither video-streaming voting XP media centers, nor funny mechanical card punch machines that confuse voters.
Please note, this is not meant as a flame to you Americans - I would *really* like to know why you need these machines.
While his style is, as usual, not quite professional, the points he makes are right on target. Usability is sorely lacking in most Unix/Linux setups.
But instead of pointing to various short user-friendliness rants and mini-howtos, I suggest reading a few books, to see what the current state of the art is.
I suggest the following two, which I am using for my thesis work on this subject as well:
Donald A. Norman: The Design of Everyday Things This book focuses on everday gadgets and appliances instead of computer interfaces, but the advice Norman gives is perfectly applicable to our field of work. Highly recommended.
Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann: About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design Now this book is pure gold. Excellent advice on user research, goal-oriented design and lots of insight on GUI design as well. Yes, Microsoft gets some praise for parts of their efforts - where they deserve it. They also are criticized properly - just like everybody else - where they failed. If developers would apply at least a little of this stuff, we would have vastly better software.
Emusic encodes their MP3s at 128 kbps, do they not? I would hardly call that high-quality.
Well, for 128kbps it's pretty damn good. There are tons of incredibly bad MP3s out there on the net, but that doesn't mean you can't get acceptable or even good results at 128. I don't know what encoder the folks at Emusic use, but I have found the quality of their files to be quite acceptable for normal listening. Sure, Vorbis files would be better, but this is a very good compromise between quality and download times.
There is a very good frontend available right now!
on
Can GnuPG Deliver?
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· Score: 3, Informative
Go to www.gnupp.org, home of the GNU Privacy Project. GnuPP is (currently) only for Windows and consists of an easy installer for GPA, GPG and WinPT. This is being sponsored by the German government (like GnuPG itself too), fully GPL'ed, and at least for us Germans, there's a good manual available from the Wirtschaftsministerium too. Anybody can order it for _free_. They gave printed documentations including an installer CD away for free at CeBIT. Anybody who can get this, should. The page there is still in German, but there's an english version of GnuPP too.
The Music Keg is based on the PhatBox car audio system, and neither supports OggVorbis in the car at this time. Only the accompanying Windows software lets you encode CDs into.ogg, nothing more. There's still hope though, here's a quote from the Vorbis mailing list from Vince Busam, who seems to be one of the developers of the PhatBox:
The PhatBox (and Music Keg) will support Ogg as soon as FREE libraries are available which will run on the ARM 7. If anybody is working towareds such a goal, please let me know. I can test it out on the PhatBox, and incorporate it into future upgrades.
I guess this is as good a time as ever to ask: What was that screw-up concerning the openness of DivX4? All I seem to know at the moment is that they apparently were open at the beginning and then closed their stuff, basically screwing over all the contributors up to that point. Can anybody shine some light on this and tell whether that really happened?
A few weeks ago, the German Bundesgerichtshof ruled exactly this. As soon as the vendor gets the money, the stuff is out of control. OEMs can now legally sell their OEM CDs without hardware attached to them:)
Source: German c't Newsticker
Slashdot Mirror
Even better: A good old parking meter is prior art, because that actually measures progress.
Well, our system is pretty damn fast, so that can't really be it. It can of course be the perceived reason, because many people think that machines *must* be faster.
Our elections close usually at 6 PM, several prognoses (sp?) are made during the following hours, which are mostly quite accurate. The final official result is usually available late in the evening or during the night.
Serious question, I'd honestly like to know why everyone is so hell-bent on using voting machines, electronic or paper-punching or whatever. What for? Here in Germany you get a big piece of paper with a list of the candidates/parties and you just draw an "X" beside your choice, then fold the paper and drop it in a box. Yes, the results are most likely (I've never been there) entered into a computer when they are counted, but this way there's a really good paper trail for everything. And we need neither video-streaming voting XP media centers, nor funny mechanical card punch machines that confuse voters.
Please note, this is not meant as a flame to you Americans - I would *really* like to know why you need these machines.
While his style is, as usual, not quite professional, the points he makes are right on target. Usability is sorely lacking in most Unix/Linux setups.
But instead of pointing to various short user-friendliness rants and mini-howtos, I suggest reading a few books, to see what the current state of the art is.
I suggest the following two, which I am using for my thesis work on this subject as well:
Donald A. Norman: The Design of Everyday Things
This book focuses on everday gadgets and appliances instead of computer interfaces, but the advice Norman gives is perfectly applicable to our field of work. Highly recommended.
Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann: About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design
Now this book is pure gold. Excellent advice on user research, goal-oriented design and lots of insight on GUI design as well. Yes, Microsoft gets some praise for parts of their efforts - where they deserve it. They also are criticized properly - just like everybody else - where they failed. If developers would apply at least a little of this stuff, we would have vastly better software.
Go to www.gnupp.org, home of the GNU Privacy Project. GnuPP is (currently) only for Windows and consists of an easy installer for GPA, GPG and WinPT. This is being sponsored by the German government (like GnuPG itself too), fully GPL'ed, and at least for us Germans, there's a good manual available from the Wirtschaftsministerium too. Anybody can order it for _free_. They gave printed documentations including an installer CD away for free at CeBIT. Anybody who can get this, should. The page there is still in German, but there's an english version of GnuPP too.
I guess this is as good a time as ever to ask: What was that screw-up concerning the openness of DivX4? All I seem to know at the moment is that they apparently were open at the beginning and then closed their stuff, basically screwing over all the contributors up to that point. Can anybody shine some light on this and tell whether that really happened?
A few weeks ago, the German Bundesgerichtshof ruled exactly this. As soon as the vendor gets the money, the stuff is out of control. OEMs can now legally sell their OEM CDs without hardware attached to them :)
Source: German c't Newsticker