Can someone please explain to me why an electronic voting machine is a Bad Thing(tm)? Just about everyone electronically manages their financial transactions and trusts ATM's, which are arguably more important and touch more people than the 50% (or less) that vote... If we can develop machines that accurately track billions of financial transactions every second, why can't we develop a machine that can count votes?
It just seems strange to me they're so vilified. Is it the companies that are developing them that you don't like? I mean, voter fraud will always exist as long as there are politicians that do things like driving bus loads of homeless people that vote for dead people and then drive to another polling station to vote again.
If someone could explain this anti-voting machine phenomenon, I'd appreciate it.
From his article, "The Coming Divide" "There is in fact a coming divide that will hit the Linux community like a freight train. The battle lines have already been drawn, and companies that support Linux, such as Canonical, will eventually find themselves fiercely pitted against companies like Linspire, who only a short time ago, entered into an agreement of cooperation." http://www.madpenguin.org/cms/?m=show&id=7988
From my article, "The Coming Linux Storm" "The Linux community is heading for a clash between three disparate groups with very different goals and agendas. We've already seen some light skirmishes between them already. Sometimes these groups will align for the purposes of advancing their own views, but for the most part, these three groups will either destroy Linux as we know it or have to learn how to get along." http://www.openaddict.com/the_three_types_of_linux _users.html
I dunno.. just smacks of something I wrote 5 months ago...
I thought I'd do a quick Google search and see if good ol' Microsoft has ever "appropriated" any code themselves. In just a few minutes, I found eight instances where Microsoft lost court battles over the code they stole. Here you go:
As a response to Digital Research's DR-DOS 6.0, which bundled SuperStor disk compression, Microsoft opened negotiations with Stac Electronics, vendor of the most popular DOS disk compression tool, Stacker. Stac was unwilling to meet Microsoft's terms for licensing Stacker and withdrew from the negotiations. In the due diligence process, Stac engineers had shown Microsoft some Stacker source code. However, Microsoft chose to license Vertisoft's DoubleDisk instead of Stacker.[2]
Soon, MS-DOS 6.0 was released, including the Microsoft DoubleSpace disk compression utility program. Stac successfully sued Microsoft for patent infringement regarding the compression algorithm used in DoubleSpace. This resulted in the release of MS-DOS 6.21, which had disk-compression removed. Shortly afterwards came version 6.22, with a new version of the disk compression system, DriveSpace, rewritten to avoid the infringing code.
A new patent battle is brewing -- this time over Microsoft's (Quote) claim over Caller ID for E-Mail.
F. Scott Deaver, owner of Failsafe Designs, says Microsoft is guilty of the "outright theft" of his product name and intellectual property (IP), and will seek legal and financial redress from the Redmond, Wash., software giant and anyone else that uses his technology that verifies e-mail is coming from the domain it claims.
Alacritech® Inc., the innovator of Dynamic TCP Offload(TM) data acceleration solutions that enable the highest performance and efficiency in networked systems, today announced a U.S. District Court granted Alacritech's motion for preliminary injunction to prevent Microsoft Corporation (Nasdaq: MSFT) from making, using, offering for sale, selling, importing or inducing others to use Microsoft's "Chimney" TCP offload architecture slated to be available in both the "Longhorn" version of the Windows® operating system and in the Scalable Networking Pack for Windows Server(TM) 2003.
Alacritech sued Microsoft in Federal District Court on August 11, 2004, alleging that Microsoft's existing and future operating systems containing the "Chimney" TCP offload architecture uses Alacritech's proprietary SLIC Technology® architecture. The suit is based on two of Alacritech's fundamental patents relating to scalable networking, U.S. Patent No. 6,427,171 and U.S. Patent No. 6,987,868, both entitled "Protocol Processing Stack for use with Intelligent Network Interface Device."
In April 2001, Intertrust initiated a lawsuit against Microsoft. The lawsuit ultimately accused Microsoft of infringing 11 of Intertrust's patents and almost 130 of the company's patent claims.
The lawsuit centered on accused products based on the following technologies:
DRM and product activation technologies.NET and related security technologies Trusted and reliable operating system technologies In bringing the patent infringement lawsuit, Intertrust believed that Microsoft's forward-going technology infrastructure significantly relied on Intertrust's inventions for DRM and trusted computing.
(Redwood Shores, CA, December 15, 2005) - Visto Corporation has filed a legal action against Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) for misappropriating Visto's intellectual property. The complaint ass
Google is the new 900lb elephant that's going to get away with a lot of things because of the exposure or money they can bring to people. I guess their do no evil mantra has some post scripts...:-(
"Historically arguments for metal-based processors have been that (1) since they're made out of superconductors, they generate much less heat than conventional processors (true); (2) for some technical reasons you can operate at clock speeds up to about 100 GHz without alot of problems (true); so if you want a really fast, really low power processor, here's a way to do it."
Ok, sure you've got a low power CPU but what about the massive amounts of energy expended to keep it at absolute zero? This doesn't sound very practical to me. Maybe a physicist can shed some light on recent cooling advances that I'm not aware of...
I find it very interesting that the Snapper corporation has benefited from the same advances in business production that Wal-Mart pioneered and has cut their own work force while increasing productivity but maintained their higher prices. I think I already know the answer to this question, but I have to ask - Is this more of a political "Wal-Mart suxors!!!111!!1" statement or did this actually *help* his business by removing his product from 3,800 retail stores?
I'm partial to Slackware, but I've tried Ubuntu and I have to admit that it's a very nice distro. I would recommend it for newbies or those who want a nice LiveCD with good hardware detection "out of the box".
At least have a working knowledge of C or C++, since most of the OSS tools you could be using were written in that. Then study networking-related technologies - Set up your own network at home with a variety of operating systems and experiment with tools and different network protocols. Read everything you can get your hands on. Convince a security company or ISP to allow you to intern which would give you some real-world experience. Get certified in some security areas to beef up your resume.
Every apply for a grocery store discount card? Ever wonder where those "pre-approved credit cards come from? Ever apply for a loan?
Sadly, nothing is personal... not your ethnicity, not your income level, not your educational background, not your browsing habits, not your spending habits, not your tv viewing habits, etc... Maybe this will wake enough people up to change the way data about our lives is traded and sold to anyone with some green.
I've purchased their CD's before as have a lot of my friends. In fact, most of my friends have purchased something from or donated money to an Open Source project at some time.
Maybe they can also do some other things like save some money on electricty by consolidating some servers and possibly get a better deal on hosting or communication lines from another provider? They should be looking at also cutting costs in addition to increasing donations. Sometimes, if increasing income isn't a very easy option, the organization could be streamlined in other ways.
This question is aimed at those who use this type of software heavily: how does the Mozilla option compare to some web-based solutions like, say, the calendaring option for the SquirrelMail project?
A lot of companies, mine included, use many different databases because some vendor software requires different things. We run IBM's DB2, Oracle, MySQL and MS SQL Server (I think we even have Sybase somewhere...). Most big companies are like that and it's very hard to standardize with a single database platform given the vast amounts of software a large company maintains.
The Internet, Google, Linux, Beowulf clusters, eBay, DVD's... there will always be another great invention/product/service that's right around the corner. If it were easy to see what the next great thing would be, every company would be a Google.
I'm not saying that it's right at all. It's funny to see all of the other registrars fighting the exclusive.com contract when they would have done the same thing themselves.
FTA: Now, nineteen registrars, including GoDaddy and Network Solutions...
So would GoDaddy have turned down the same contract offer? Would Network Solutions have turned ICANN's offer down? Would ANY registrar have turned down this offer? Sounds like a bunch of sour grapes to me...
1) Pass a new law which prohibits [insert act/service/item/business]
2) Call up the people that do the [act/service/item/business] and set up some back room deals to overturn the law.
3) ???
4) Profit!
Lawmaking has become a very profitable occupation for our elected officials!
I've read several other articles that point to the impending split within the OSS community. We've got the fringe OSS purist element on one side and the business community on the other side. The fringe element doesn't want anything commercial tainting OSS and the business community wants OSS to play with commercial products and technologies.
I don't think it's a matter of right and wrong, but a battle of ideas between purist "ivory tower" types and the real-world that has legitimate needs for OSS and the business community to work together. Like I said before, if you think that businesses like IBM have purely altruistic motives for supporting Linux and OSS then you are sadly, sadly mistaken. Businesses have a responsibility to their shareholders to make money. Linux/OSS is a means to an end. But in the meantime, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
GPFS supports the current releases of AIX 5L and selected releases of Red Hat and SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server distributions. See the GPFS FAQ1 for a current list of tested machines and also tested Linux distribution levels.
I love this competition between AMD and Intel. They have been slugging it out producing excellent processors and actually being fairly responsive to consumer demands. Here's a brief description of the wars between the 2 companies over the last 10 years:
1) Floating point performance wars - Before AMD came out with the K6 processor, Intel had the floating point crown and neither AMD nor Cyrix could compete. Although AMD and Cyrix had inexpensive intel-compatible processors, most people used their cpu's for low-end desktops.
2) That all changed when AMD released the K6 processor with an excellent floating point unit. Then the war became a Mhz slugfest between AMD and Intel in which Cyrix was marginalized. Intel reached the 1000Mhz mark first with the P3 but AMD wasn't far behind with the Athlon.
3) AMD changed their approach with the Athlon focusing on P3 crushing performance regardless of the actual clock speed. Intel kept the Mhz focus with the P4.
4) AMD released the hugely successful 64-bit Athlon that dominated the P4 even though the 64-bit Athlon operated at a much slower clock speed. Intel lost much market share in the desktop and server market to the new 64-bit Athlon and the new 64-bit Opteron processors.
5) Intel finally realized that the educated consumer didn't care about raw Mhz anymore, they switched to their own performance number rating scheme.
6) The latest oil crisis hits the world and consumers become more energy conscious. Many computer enthusiast websites point out how much energy Intel processors demand and how little AMD processors demand in comparison. Intel and AMD respond by making their processors more energy efficient and cooler running.
7) Dual-core processors are released from both companies trying to squeeze more performance out of their aging cores. The Intel processors can't scale as well with multiple cores due to the already high energy and cooling demands of their processor cores. AMD gains further ground in this area.
And that's where we are today. AMD has seriously damaged Intel's marketshare with some excellent products. Intel is feverishly working on new products to get that marketshare back. The benefit is that we will see very good products from the 2 companies over the next 12 to 24 months.
... The Secret Service also investigates violations of laws relating to counterfeiting of obligations and securities of the United States; financial crimes that include, but are not limited to, access device fraud, financial institution fraud, identity theft, computer fraud; and computer-based attacks on our nation's financial, banking, and telecommunications infrastructure.
and also
Since 1984, our investigative responsibilities have expanded to include crimes that involve financial institution fraud, computer and telecommunications fraud, false identification documents, access device fraud, advance fee fraud, electronic funds transfers, and money laundering as it relates to our core violations.
These guys are spammers. If they've advertised p3nis enlargement pills, they've committed fraud and, according to the Secret Service they have jurisdiction over this area. Disclaimer: IANAL
I have a hardware giveaway that I draw every month on my site... It's a shameless attempt to attract new readers/members and I openly state that. No big deal. Lots of websites do the same thing. At least I giveaway good hardware that geeks like.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
If it weren't for Java I wouldn't have NeoOffice for my Mac. ;-)
Can someone please explain to me why an electronic voting machine is a Bad Thing(tm)? Just about everyone electronically manages their financial transactions and trusts ATM's, which are arguably more important and touch more people than the 50% (or less) that vote... If we can develop machines that accurately track billions of financial transactions every second, why can't we develop a machine that can count votes?
It just seems strange to me they're so vilified. Is it the companies that are developing them that you don't like? I mean, voter fraud will always exist as long as there are politicians that do things like driving bus loads of homeless people that vote for dead people and then drive to another polling station to vote again.
If someone could explain this anti-voting machine phenomenon, I'd appreciate it.
I'm sure there's a patent troll somewhere that owns the IP to the algorithm you just posted - Automated Method of Determining Customer Rate Increase
From his article, "The Coming Divide"
x _users.html
"There is in fact a coming divide that will hit the Linux community like a freight train. The battle lines have already been drawn, and companies that support Linux, such as Canonical, will eventually find themselves fiercely pitted against companies like Linspire, who only a short time ago, entered into an agreement of cooperation."
http://www.madpenguin.org/cms/?m=show&id=7988
From my article, "The Coming Linux Storm"
"The Linux community is heading for a clash between three disparate groups with very different goals and agendas. We've already seen some light skirmishes between them already. Sometimes these groups will align for the purposes of advancing their own views, but for the most part, these three groups will either destroy Linux as we know it or have to learn how to get along."
http://www.openaddict.com/the_three_types_of_linu
I dunno.. just smacks of something I wrote 5 months ago...
I thought I'd do a quick Google search and see if good ol' Microsoft has ever "appropriated" any code themselves. In just a few minutes, I found eight instances where Microsoft lost court battles over the code they stole. Here you go:
.NET and related security technologies
As a response to Digital Research's DR-DOS 6.0, which bundled SuperStor disk compression, Microsoft opened negotiations with Stac Electronics, vendor of the most popular DOS disk compression tool, Stacker. Stac was unwilling to meet Microsoft's terms for licensing Stacker and withdrew from the negotiations. In the due diligence process, Stac engineers had shown Microsoft some Stacker source code. However, Microsoft chose to license Vertisoft's DoubleDisk instead of Stacker.[2]
Soon, MS-DOS 6.0 was released, including the Microsoft DoubleSpace disk compression utility program. Stac successfully sued Microsoft for patent infringement regarding the compression algorithm used in DoubleSpace. This resulted in the release of MS-DOS 6.21, which had disk-compression removed. Shortly afterwards came version 6.22, with a new version of the disk compression system, DriveSpace, rewritten to avoid the infringing code.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS
A new patent battle is brewing -- this time over Microsoft's (Quote) claim over Caller ID for E-Mail.
F. Scott Deaver, owner of Failsafe Designs, says Microsoft is guilty of the "outright theft" of his product name and intellectual property (IP), and will seek legal and financial redress from the Redmond, Wash., software giant and anyone else that uses his technology that verifies e-mail is coming from the domain it claims.
http://www.internetnews.com/security/article.php/3 393891
Alacritech® Inc., the innovator of Dynamic TCP Offload(TM) data acceleration solutions that enable the highest performance and efficiency in networked systems, today announced a U.S. District Court granted Alacritech's motion for preliminary injunction to prevent Microsoft Corporation (Nasdaq: MSFT) from making, using, offering for sale, selling, importing or inducing others to use Microsoft's "Chimney" TCP offload architecture slated to be available in both the "Longhorn" version of the Windows® operating system and in the Scalable Networking Pack for Windows Server(TM) 2003.
Alacritech sued Microsoft in Federal District Court on August 11, 2004, alleging that Microsoft's existing and future operating systems containing the "Chimney" TCP offload architecture uses Alacritech's proprietary SLIC Technology® architecture. The suit is based on two of Alacritech's fundamental patents relating to scalable networking, U.S. Patent No. 6,427,171 and U.S. Patent No. 6,987,868, both entitled "Protocol Processing Stack for use with Intelligent Network Interface Device."
http://www.alacritech.com/html/041305Alacritech_Gr anted_PI.shtml
In April 2001, Intertrust initiated a lawsuit against Microsoft. The lawsuit ultimately accused Microsoft of infringing 11 of Intertrust's patents and almost 130 of the company's patent claims.
The lawsuit centered on accused products based on the following technologies:
DRM and product activation technologies
Trusted and reliable operating system technologies
In bringing the patent infringement lawsuit, Intertrust believed that Microsoft's forward-going technology infrastructure significantly relied on Intertrust's inventions for DRM and trusted computing.
http://www.intertrust.com/main/ip/settlement.html
(Redwood Shores, CA, December 15, 2005) - Visto Corporation has filed a legal action against Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) for misappropriating Visto's intellectual property. The complaint ass
Google is the new 900lb elephant that's going to get away with a lot of things because of the exposure or money they can bring to people. I guess their do no evil mantra has some post scripts... :-(
"Historically arguments for metal-based processors have been that (1) since they're made out of superconductors, they generate much less heat than conventional processors (true); (2) for some technical reasons you can operate at clock speeds up to about 100 GHz without alot of problems (true); so if you want a really fast, really low power processor, here's a way to do it."
Ok, sure you've got a low power CPU but what about the massive amounts of energy expended to keep it at absolute zero? This doesn't sound very practical to me. Maybe a physicist can shed some light on recent cooling advances that I'm not aware of...
Those are a few things I can think of. HTH.
Sadly, nothing is personal... not your ethnicity, not your income level, not your educational background, not your browsing habits, not your spending habits, not your tv viewing habits, etc... Maybe this will wake enough people up to change the way data about our lives is traded and sold to anyone with some green.
Maybe they can also do some other things like save some money on electricty by consolidating some servers and possibly get a better deal on hosting or communication lines from another provider? They should be looking at also cutting costs in addition to increasing donations. Sometimes, if increasing income isn't a very easy option, the organization could be streamlined in other ways.
I'm not saying that it's right at all. It's funny to see all of the other registrars fighting the exclusive .com contract when they would have done the same thing themselves.
So would GoDaddy have turned down the same contract offer? Would Network Solutions have turned ICANN's offer down? Would ANY registrar have turned down this offer? Sounds like a bunch of sour grapes to me...
2) Call up the people that do the [act/service/item/business] and set up some back room deals to overturn the law.
3) ???
4) Profit!
Lawmaking has become a very profitable occupation for our elected officials!
I don't think it's a matter of right and wrong, but a battle of ideas between purist "ivory tower" types and the real-world that has legitimate needs for OSS and the business community to work together. Like I said before, if you think that businesses like IBM have purely altruistic motives for supporting Linux and OSS then you are sadly, sadly mistaken. Businesses have a responsibility to their shareholders to make money. Linux/OSS is a means to an end. But in the meantime, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
GPFS supports the current releases of AIX 5L and selected releases of Red Hat and SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server distributions. See the GPFS FAQ1 for a current list of tested machines and also tested Linux distribution levels.
1) Floating point performance wars - Before AMD came out with the K6 processor, Intel had the floating point crown and neither AMD nor Cyrix could compete. Although AMD and Cyrix had inexpensive intel-compatible processors, most people used their cpu's for low-end desktops.
2) That all changed when AMD released the K6 processor with an excellent floating point unit. Then the war became a Mhz slugfest between AMD and Intel in which Cyrix was marginalized. Intel reached the 1000Mhz mark first with the P3 but AMD wasn't far behind with the Athlon.
3) AMD changed their approach with the Athlon focusing on P3 crushing performance regardless of the actual clock speed. Intel kept the Mhz focus with the P4.
4) AMD released the hugely successful 64-bit Athlon that dominated the P4 even though the 64-bit Athlon operated at a much slower clock speed. Intel lost much market share in the desktop and server market to the new 64-bit Athlon and the new 64-bit Opteron processors.
5) Intel finally realized that the educated consumer didn't care about raw Mhz anymore, they switched to their own performance number rating scheme.
6) The latest oil crisis hits the world and consumers become more energy conscious. Many computer enthusiast websites point out how much energy Intel processors demand and how little AMD processors demand in comparison. Intel and AMD respond by making their processors more energy efficient and cooler running.
7) Dual-core processors are released from both companies trying to squeeze more performance out of their aging cores. The Intel processors can't scale as well with multiple cores due to the already high energy and cooling demands of their processor cores. AMD gains further ground in this area.
And that's where we are today. AMD has seriously damaged Intel's marketshare with some excellent products. Intel is feverishly working on new products to get that marketshare back. The benefit is that we will see very good products from the 2 companies over the next 12 to 24 months.
and also
Since 1984, our investigative responsibilities have expanded to include crimes that involve financial institution fraud, computer and telecommunications fraud, false identification documents, access device fraud, advance fee fraud, electronic funds transfers, and money laundering as it relates to our core violations.
These guys are spammers. If they've advertised p3nis enlargement pills, they've committed fraud and, according to the Secret Service they have jurisdiction over this area. Disclaimer: IANAL
Read for yourself: http://www.ustreas.gov/usss/mission.shtml
I thought the new cpu was a G5 replacement.