It doesn't scale to typical American ballots, which can include a huge number of races and questions. You have federal, state, county and city offices. Everything from the President to the dog catcher, plus judges, bond issues, constitutional amendments, referenda, school boards, etc.
How does presenting the ballot questions on a tiny screen reduce the complexity? Here in San Francisco, you use a sharpie to connect a line, then you feed it through an optical scanner, which will give it back to you if there are errors.
Why the hell is something so bloody simple being made so complex? It's not a mission to mars or anything, it's simple data collection.
2) Why doesn't AMEX or Visa offer some sort of micropayment system? They've already got the basics for one right now: it's pervasive, easy to use, familer, and cost effective for many transactions. You just add an aggregator account for micropayments along with a dab of crypto and there you go: instant micropayments.[1]
Why it's that easy, just slap some aggregator here with a dab of crypto there, and a little magic sprinkle here, a handwave there, and presto, instant micropayment architecture. Simple.
AMEX is probably closest in that they're giving away smartcard readers with their blue cards. Still, AMEX is legendary for taking great ideas like single-use and limited-use CC numbers, and burying them in obscurity. The companies got burned on smartcards before, and til they can give the pizza delivery guy a smartcard reader instead of a zipzap box (the mechanical doodad that makes carbons), we're stuck with the old system for quite a while.
> Slashdot (the biggest anti MS site) runs banners for MSDN subscriptions. Whats your point?
Feeding the trolls: Microsoft sells a product. It may be a crappy product that OEM's are strongarmed into reselling, but they're still a business. The BSA exists to shake companies down with license audits, and has jackbooted thugs literally break down doors to ensure compliance.
Slashdot is "anti-microsoft" insofar as there's a large and very vocal segment of its population consisting of semi-literate fanboys who have knee-jerk reactions to everything involving microsoft.
So what does the 20+ years' lineage of the SPARC architecture represent, if not Sun's ability to successfully design, implement, market and deploy processors? Hello? McFly?
In the long run, zip. Sun didn't start with SPARC, and it looks likely they won't end with them. Sun Microelectronics may be wedded to the Sparc, but Sun Microsystems appears ready to cast them off if they can sell storage -- their most profitable line. It's not an easy choice, but if the choice becomes "SPARC or Sun", there's no doubt which path they'll take. Besides, I doubt they'll be migrating the E15K line to x86 anytime soon.
Maybe this will breathe some new life into Solaris x86 as well. One can hope.
Belkin(verb) - To serreptitiously alter a product in such a fashion that legitimate use is hijacked to the benefit of the manufacturer or associated beneficiaries, usually in a crass self-promoting fashion.
It's a decent start at a definition. One could say "I installed this topdesk thing which totally belkined my browser". Let's make their name synonymous with bad behavior.
Stored procs, triggers, etc, are evil as they spread your application logic all over the place and there are no standards for how they are implemented by different vendors. It's hard enough to find a relatively standard subset of SQL semantics.
Sounds to me like you bit on the MySQL propoganda hook line and sinker. MySQL doesn't even support views, and no doubt there's legions of fanboys decrying how evil those are as a result, probably something about "indirection being slow" or "hiding the details" or something. People who push this party line usually think slash is a masterpiece of engineering.
With stored procedures, I can make my business logic portable by shoving anything database-specific into the procedure. Not to mention that I don't have to worry about table structure in my program at all once I have a procedure in each of the the CRUD matrix boxes. MySQL fanboys can get back to me when they learn what that term means.
Show me the standard external interface. There's always ODBC I suppose...
> This is like saying that a husband is against the very idea of vacuuming, rather than simply doesn't want to vacuum.
Linus has gone further than that, to slanderous accusations against microkernel research in general, stating that they were in it for the research dollars, knowing they had an inferior architecture. Tanenbaum wasn't mentioned by name, but it's fairly obvious who the comments were directed at. This behavior to me is beyond the pale, and completely unacceptable. He may have a fine OS, microkernel concepts or no, but he has no standing to be throwing around allegations like that.
This is a guy who learns fast when he wants to, an excellent x86 assembly hacker, but he doesn't know when to keep his trap shut when he doesn't know about something.
> Or are there parallels in biological contexts that show parasitic organisms actually inducing host organisms to have sex
Sexual reproduction has bloody little to do with parasites, who thrive just fine thank you on sexually reproducing mammals. It's about creating genetic diversity more rapidly, which allows favorable mutations to occur more often and be selected, while culling unfavorable ones through selection and lack of interoperability (most genetic defects render you sterile). This is an advantage for large organisms where individual survival is important to group survival, but bacteria do just fine with asexual reproduction, where sheer numbers are all that really matters.
In a way, common protocols allow for some of the same strengths of sexual reproduction, by allowing for different implementations to implement their own features and augment each other's strengths as they communicate (e.g. spam filtering inbound with throttling outbound)... as well as pass on weaknesses (exchange's eagerness to bounce). It's not exactly the same, but it's the same idea of diversity moderated by a requirement to stay the same "species" to interoperate.
The system you describe is something called "Challenge-Response", which is vastly broken in a number of ways. Sure the recipient isn't bothered by spam, they just offload the problem to everyone else, like blind people, email helpdesks (at one job I typically just binned customer support emails from people using Matador) and forged sender addresses -- every single C/R system I've seen is stupid enough to send challenges to people in the From: line, either message or envelope. More than one C/R vendor has been known to spam the senders who sent to a "protected" mailbox. This sort of cost-shifting is the very basis of what makes spam a problem in the first place.
the (Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem) [FUSSP] requires that anyone wanting to send mail obtain a certificate that will be checked by all SMTP servers.
the FUSSP involves certificates, but there is no barrier to spammers buying many independent certificates.
you know that certifying that a user legitimately claims a name and has never used some other name is cheap and easy.
A more effective tactic might be to purchase one share of SCO stock. Not short, you need a real share. Or a few thousand, then sell them one at a time to everyone else.
Invade the stockholders meeting. They have to have these, and they cannot keep you out. They can toss you out if you're being disruptive, but otherwise you can freely press the flesh with other stockholders and tell them what worthless wastes of flesh the current board is...
> It's kind of like a virus brededing ground, they fiddle with local copies of Bayesian Filters and what not until they're slime oozes through, and is hopefully not completely unreadable.
Although I've seen some really tortured english -- not quite broken english, just "weird" -- that may have been employed to bust a bayesian filter, fiddling with local copies simply doesn't work. If you're a spammer doing this, you end up training your filter on your own spam, then retraining it with the new version of your own spam, and either you're either going to identify your own stuff as spam or you aren't. In either case, you don't get results that are useful, as in the first you'd never send anything out at all, and in the second, you merely make other people train their filters differently than yours. Perhaps it makes some sense for pre-trained filters. Or if you had some sophisticated language generation that produced differently structured sentences each time (going to get hard to mention your product, eh?). Of course you're going to have to use it on your website too for the inevitable day when people run bayesian filters on the target site content... One could use random thesaurus substitution, though that could get pretty amusing...
Besides, all you need to bust most any of the bayesian filters is to include some "neutral" text on an obscure subject after your pitch as filler. You don't need your local copy, you just need a mirror of Project Gutenberg. Or just use an image.
Re:The Best of All Possible Worlds
on
Microsoft's new CLI
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Monads are also a branch of category theory that are adopted by languages like Haskell (the prime developer of which works for Microsoft Research). By obeying a certain set of basic principles, programs structured with monads achieve high degrees of interoperability and consistency, while safely encapsulating data and keeping it from being destroyed by unwanted side effects.
Sure that's an apropos name for a Microsoft product?
> How exactly does this take away from the child's freedom again?
That Joe is a troublemaker. Hmm, Janie seems to hang out with him a lot, it's right here in the movement logs. Better bring her in and ask her some questions....
> That is a very scary/funny website. It sounds exactly like what those wackos really say, yet it was too messed up to be true
It in fact looks exactly like a cousin to the famous and outrageously funny Landover Baptist site. The article on the site that excoriates them just reinforces my suspicion that it's the same person or outfit.
> There's probably a logic gap in my solution: any suggestions?
Yes. Drop something totally different in the ballot box, give barcode to creep/mafioso.
Simple solution: you get nothing except a receipt that says that you voted, period. You see a receipt printed, under glass, but no way to get to it. No one would want to forge this anyway.
Better yet, make a freakin "X". It's a vote, not a video game.
> Because the internet (www especially) would work FINE if it was all p2p.
Psst. TCP/IP is a p2p design. Connections between nodes require no brokering by third parties, merely routing of packets. The protocol is symmetric regardless of who initiates the connection (accept() merely contacts the port of the originating peer and starts the server end of the handshake).
Web apps are not the classic client-server design. The "thin" client of a web app is orthogonal to the server, being a general purpose web browser, the protocol remains generic and not some flavor of RPC architected for the application. Though to say "n-tier is replacing client/server" is like saying "CPU's are getting faster than 100 MHz". A pair of shades for all who were blinded by the obviousness. I can stick my finger up in a gale and tell you which the way the wind's blowing, it doesn't make me much of a prognosticator.
Guess they fixed it. That program would tickle a bug in MSVC that would crash any w2k box with a BSOD. And you wouldn't have to be an administrator. Maybe it was something really amazingly subtle, but it more smacks to me of the NT4 days where it was demonstrated that most of the Native API functions never did any sanity checking on their args and would gleefully bluescreen the system or worse when given random data.
I use w2k, and I like it... only in a relative sense. Come to think of it I have the same attitude toward Linux. Most OS's really just suck in different ways.
> To make matters worse, having a card printed out allows for chain voting. This is a scheme in which one voter sneaks their card out of the polling place
Print card into lexan case. Voter presses button to accept or destroy vote. Of course there seems little reason to do this either.
There's another method too, where you use readily available input devices on ultra hi-res displays that are still amazingly cheap. It's called paper and pen. Here in San Francisco, I get a ballot with broken arrows that look like so: = => Bodybuilder = => Lieutenant Governer = => Porn Star = => Wonk
(repeat 2395428357235 times)
And I just connect the arrow with a magic marker. Then feed it into an optical recognition scanner atop a locked box. That's as high-tech as it ever needs to get. Voting is simply not something that requires gee-wiz technology -- it's not like we need to be doing freakin OLAP or live metrics on it. Nor is it like we're doing instant referenda that need to be decided in a day; one of the very reasons we have a republic is to slow down the democratic process.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't scale to typical American ballots, which can include a huge number of races and questions. You have federal, state, county and city offices. Everything from the President to the dog catcher, plus judges, bond issues, constitutional amendments, referenda, school boards, etc.
How does presenting the ballot questions on a tiny screen reduce the complexity? Here in San Francisco, you use a sharpie to connect a line, then you feed it through an optical scanner, which will give it back to you if there are errors.
Why the hell is something so bloody simple being made so complex? It's not a mission to mars or anything, it's simple data collection.
2) Why doesn't AMEX or Visa offer some sort of micropayment system? They've already got the basics for one right now: it's pervasive, easy to use, familer, and cost effective for many transactions. You just add an aggregator account for micropayments along with a dab of crypto and there you go: instant micropayments.[1]
Why it's that easy, just slap some aggregator here with a dab of crypto there, and a little magic sprinkle here, a handwave there, and presto, instant micropayment architecture. Simple.
AMEX is probably closest in that they're giving away smartcard readers with their blue cards. Still, AMEX is legendary for taking great ideas like single-use and limited-use CC numbers, and burying them in obscurity. The companies got burned on smartcards before, and til they can give the pizza delivery guy a smartcard reader instead of a zipzap box (the mechanical doodad that makes carbons), we're stuck with the old system for quite a while.
> Slashdot (the biggest anti MS site) runs banners for MSDN subscriptions. Whats your point?
Feeding the trolls: Microsoft sells a product. It may be a crappy product that OEM's are strongarmed into reselling, but they're still a business. The BSA exists to shake companies down with license audits, and has jackbooted thugs literally break down doors to ensure compliance.
Slashdot is "anti-microsoft" insofar as there's a large and very vocal segment of its population consisting of semi-literate fanboys who have knee-jerk reactions to everything involving microsoft.
I will never visit or recommend tomshardware again as long as they run ads for the Business Software Alliance.
So what does the 20+ years' lineage of the SPARC architecture represent, if not Sun's ability to successfully design, implement, market and deploy processors? Hello? McFly?
In the long run, zip. Sun didn't start with SPARC, and it looks likely they won't end with them. Sun Microelectronics may be wedded to the Sparc, but Sun Microsystems appears ready to cast them off if they can sell storage -- their most profitable line. It's not an easy choice, but if the choice becomes "SPARC or Sun", there's no doubt which path they'll take. Besides, I doubt they'll be migrating the E15K line to x86 anytime soon.
Maybe this will breathe some new life into Solaris x86 as well. One can hope.
Belkin (verb) - To serreptitiously alter a product in such a fashion that legitimate use is hijacked to the benefit of the manufacturer or associated beneficiaries, usually in a crass self-promoting fashion.
It's a decent start at a definition. One could say "I installed this topdesk thing which totally belkined my browser". Let's make their name synonymous with bad behavior.
If the leader of the free world is George W Bush ... I'm Martha Washington.
Stored procs, triggers, etc, are evil as they spread your application logic all over the place and there are no standards for how they are implemented by different vendors. It's hard enough to find a relatively standard subset of SQL semantics.
Sounds to me like you bit on the MySQL propoganda hook line and sinker. MySQL doesn't even support views, and no doubt there's legions of fanboys decrying how evil those are as a result, probably something about "indirection being slow" or "hiding the details" or something. People who push this party line usually think slash is a masterpiece of engineering.
With stored procedures, I can make my business logic portable by shoving anything database-specific into the procedure. Not to mention that I don't have to worry about table structure in my program at all once I have a procedure in each of the the CRUD matrix boxes. MySQL fanboys can get back to me when they learn what that term means.
Show me the standard external interface. There's always ODBC I suppose...
> This is like saying that a husband is against the very idea of vacuuming, rather than simply doesn't want to vacuum.
Linus has gone further than that, to slanderous accusations against microkernel research in general, stating that they were in it for the research dollars, knowing they had an inferior architecture. Tanenbaum wasn't mentioned by name, but it's fairly obvious who the comments were directed at. This behavior to me is beyond the pale, and completely unacceptable. He may have a fine OS, microkernel concepts or no, but he has no standing to be throwing around allegations like that.
This is a guy who learns fast when he wants to, an excellent x86 assembly hacker, but he doesn't know when to keep his trap shut when he doesn't know about something.
> Or are there parallels in biological contexts that show parasitic organisms actually inducing host organisms to have sex
... as well as pass on weaknesses (exchange's eagerness to bounce). It's not exactly the same, but it's the same idea of diversity moderated by a requirement to stay the same "species" to interoperate.
Sexual reproduction has bloody little to do with parasites, who thrive just fine thank you on sexually reproducing mammals. It's about creating genetic diversity more rapidly, which allows favorable mutations to occur more often and be selected, while culling unfavorable ones through selection and lack of interoperability (most genetic defects render you sterile). This is an advantage for large organisms where individual survival is important to group survival, but bacteria do just fine with asexual reproduction, where sheer numbers are all that really matters.
In a way, common protocols allow for some of the same strengths of sexual reproduction, by allowing for different implementations to implement their own features and augment each other's strengths as they communicate (e.g. spam filtering inbound with throttling outbound)
The system you describe is something called "Challenge-Response", which is vastly broken in a number of ways. Sure the recipient isn't bothered by spam, they just offload the problem to everyone else, like blind people, email helpdesks (at one job I typically just binned customer support emails from people using Matador) and forged sender addresses -- every single C/R system I've seen is stupid enough to send challenges to people in the From: line, either message or envelope. More than one C/R vendor has been known to spam the senders who sent to a "protected" mailbox. This sort of cost-shifting is the very basis of what makes spam a problem in the first place.
Taken from the excellent list You Might Be an Anti-Spam Kook If:
the (Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem) [FUSSP] requires that anyone wanting to send mail obtain a certificate that will be checked by all SMTP servers.
the FUSSP involves certificates, but there is no barrier to spammers buying many independent certificates.
you know that certifying that a user legitimately claims a name and has never used some other name is cheap and easy.
"You cost me five minutes from my life, and I want them back! Nevermind, I would have wasted them anyway..."
Even in the "steady state" western nations you can have local overpopulations with dramatic consequences.
Gang violence, school shootings, "going postal"?
By that logic, Hong Kong and Tokyo should have the highest violent crime rates in the world...
A more effective tactic might be to purchase one share of SCO stock. Not short, you need a real share. Or a few thousand, then sell them one at a time to everyone else.
Invade the stockholders meeting. They have to have these, and they cannot keep you out. They can toss you out if you're being disruptive, but otherwise you can freely press the flesh with other stockholders and tell them what worthless wastes of flesh the current board is...
> It's kind of like a virus brededing ground, they fiddle with local copies of Bayesian Filters and what not until they're slime oozes through, and is hopefully not completely unreadable.
Although I've seen some really tortured english -- not quite broken english, just "weird" -- that may have been employed to bust a bayesian filter, fiddling with local copies simply doesn't work. If you're a spammer doing this, you end up training your filter on your own spam, then retraining it with the new version of your own spam, and either you're either going to identify your own stuff as spam or you aren't. In either case, you don't get results that are useful, as in the first you'd never send anything out at all, and in the second, you merely make other people train their filters differently than yours. Perhaps it makes some sense for pre-trained filters. Or if you had some sophisticated language generation that produced differently structured sentences each time (going to get hard to mention your product, eh?). Of course you're going to have to use it on your website too for the inevitable day when people run bayesian filters on the target site content... One could use random thesaurus substitution, though that could get pretty amusing...
Besides, all you need to bust most any of the bayesian filters is to include some "neutral" text on an obscure subject after your pitch as filler. You don't need your local copy, you just need a mirror of Project Gutenberg. Or just use an image.
Monads are also a branch of category theory that are adopted by languages like Haskell (the prime developer of which works for Microsoft Research). By obeying a certain set of basic principles, programs structured with monads achieve high degrees of interoperability and consistency, while safely encapsulating data and keeping it from being destroyed by unwanted side effects.
Sure that's an apropos name for a Microsoft product?
> How exactly does this take away from the child's freedom again?
That Joe is a troublemaker. Hmm, Janie seems to hang out with him a lot, it's right here in the movement logs. Better bring her in and ask her some questions....
> That is a very scary/funny website. It sounds exactly like what those wackos really say, yet it was too messed up to be true
It in fact looks exactly like a cousin to the famous and outrageously funny Landover Baptist site. The article on the site that excoriates them just reinforces my suspicion that it's the same person or outfit.
> There's probably a logic gap in my solution: any suggestions?
Yes. Drop something totally different in the ballot box, give barcode to creep/mafioso.
Simple solution: you get nothing except a receipt that says that you voted, period. You see a receipt printed, under glass, but no way to get to it. No one would want to forge this anyway.
Better yet, make a freakin "X". It's a vote, not a video game.
> I started to realize that email is no longer a tool of the little guy.
You are correct. Spam killed it. Fortunately there's HTTP, IRC, and legions of file sharing networks to get your messages across.
Note that most ISP's won't screw around with port 587 connections, leaving you to do whatever you "little guys" do with endpoint mail servers.
> Because the internet (www especially) would work FINE if it was all p2p.
Psst. TCP/IP is a p2p design. Connections between nodes require no brokering by third parties, merely routing of packets. The protocol is symmetric regardless of who initiates the connection (accept() merely contacts the port of the originating peer and starts the server end of the handshake).
Web apps are not the classic client-server design. The "thin" client of a web app is orthogonal to the server, being a general purpose web browser, the protocol remains generic and not some flavor of RPC architected for the application. Though to say "n-tier is replacing client/server" is like saying "CPU's are getting faster than 100 MHz". A pair of shades for all who were blinded by the obviousness. I can stick my finger up in a gale and tell you which the way the wind's blowing, it doesn't make me much of a prognosticator.
Guess they fixed it. That program would tickle a bug in MSVC that would crash any w2k box with a BSOD. And you wouldn't have to be an administrator. Maybe it was something really amazingly subtle, but it more smacks to me of the NT4 days where it was demonstrated that most of the Native API functions never did any sanity checking on their args and would gleefully bluescreen the system or worse when given random data.
... only in a relative sense. Come to think of it I have the same attitude toward Linux. Most OS's really just suck in different ways.
I use w2k, and I like it
> To make matters worse, having a card printed out allows for chain voting. This is a scheme in which one voter sneaks their card out of the polling place
Print card into lexan case. Voter presses button to accept or destroy vote. Of course there seems little reason to do this either.
There's another method too, where you use readily available input devices on ultra hi-res displays that are still amazingly cheap. It's called paper and pen. Here in San Francisco, I get a ballot with broken arrows that look like so:
= => Bodybuilder
= => Lieutenant Governer
= => Porn Star
= => Wonk
(repeat 2395428357235 times)
And I just connect the arrow with a magic marker. Then feed it into an optical recognition scanner atop a locked box. That's as high-tech as it ever needs to get. Voting is simply not something that requires gee-wiz technology -- it's not like we need to be doing freakin OLAP or live metrics on it. Nor is it like we're doing instant referenda that need to be decided in a day; one of the very reasons we have a republic is to slow down the democratic process.
> Voila, no more BSODs.
#include <stdio.h>
while (1) { printf("\t\b\b"); }
Compile with MSVC.