The controversy surrounding the Florida recounts and the 2000 Presidential election still simmers.
And recently a number of prestigious computer scientists came out on record as cautioning against all of the possible problems with electronic voting.
And still I hear recently of some effort where electronic voting is being made available to mall shoppers in Orange County.
But, Georgia?!?
For those with short memories, Georgia was to the 1800 election as Florida was to the 2000 election.
The current issue of The Atlantic Monthly has an interesting article about how Thomas Jefferson, then VP and President of the Senate, recorder of the votes, and a candidate in the election, was put into a conflict of interest when evaluating "irregularities" associated with the electoral votes from Georgia.
But I was hoping to see a little more information about availability of the next performance jump of the Opteron to 2.40 GHz, apart from this old rumour.
It's "early 2004". I'm ready to buy a dual Opteron, but I want the best performance I can get.
Recall a recent story where the code security auding project for Linux shutdown due to lack of activity.
This kind of code release from MS is going to get orders of magnitude more auditing than Linux did. WinNT/2K will get up into the big leagues with OpenBSD as far as having been through a code security audit.
dark plot to wage cyber-war and steal confidential data from our computers."
...I wish that this sinister plot was met with terabytes/second of "confidential data" like, oh, free viagra offers, Nigerian 419 scams, Add 3 inches, etc...
So much for the careful dance Dell was supposed to do to avoid the wrath of Microsoft.
They're still dancing carefully.
Note Michael Dell doesn't express any particular enthusiasm about Linux even though he sees that it can only help him in negotiating better terms with Microsoft.
Dell also chants the MS friendly explanation of Linux sales which, besides being true, makes MS feel better: "Linux takes sales away from UNIX (i.e., Sun) more than Windows"
The IT marketplace wants commoditization of operating systems and applications just as they've become accustomed to seeing in the hardware arena.
These are the managers, not the techies. Do you really expect them to understand the numbers?
Good point.
Mangers only vaguely understand technology, but they're good at relating it to people and to risks.
As an earlier poster pointed out, when shown how a net connection provides high resolution streaming video, the response is likely to be "So what? My TV does that!"
The answer is to create some relevance.
Suggest to your PHB that instead of dropping his kids off at daycare that instead he use this remote-controlled car to do it. Strap his kids into the safety seats in back, adjust the cameras looking out the front and back, test the steering wheel, brake, accelerator controls over the network connection, and then let it rip with him at the controls.
He'll suddenly develop a intense, geek-like interest in terms like latency, bandwidth, keeping the link up, etc.
And if US$ 80K seems stiff, maybe you can sell off chunks of your BW to other business to help make the mortgage payment on it.
With the prime lending rate at 4%, that $80K is a little under $270/month, probably a lot less than what you're paying for space and other utilities already.
relativity popular in Australia, least in dense backpacker-esque areas
That's what I'd expect.
In large urban areas where broadband is available and cheap, home users can afford the same connection as the Cybercafe.
Travelers have need for broadband, but hotels are providing this. Backpackers, OTOH, might not have a hotel room. I wouldn't take my laptop backpacking, either, but that's me.
A conceivable market for Cybercafes is on the fringes of civilization, the outlying areas where broadband connections are still too expensive for individual homeowners. But you have to keep in mind that most people living in those areas aren't going to want to drive 20 miles to the cafe, either. And that the price of broadband will eventually come down in those areas, too.
Since ISP service by itself is becoming marginalized, why not setup Wi-Fi hotspots for businesses like hotels, restaurants, doctors' offices, etc.?
A dedicated Cybercafe is going to become as quaint as the idea of a separate place you would go to plug into the AC outlets to run appliances. It just doesn't make sense.
I realize that NASA's mission has become heavily weighted in symbolism and emotion and that this is the reality of 21st century politics.
But, as a member of the public, as a taxpayer, I would much rather that they pay for 50 select astronomers, geologists, physicists, engineers, chemists and biologists to come to a conference and ask them what kinds of space missions would be valuable from their perspective. Put the ideas in a ranked order, with costs and risks, and then let the administrators decide what they'd like to do.
As it stands now, there are some interesting projects that have made it through the cracks, but all the big money goes towards various make-work manned missions meant to whip up patriotic fervor, demonstrate international cooperation, or keep the inertia going with some large project that everyone is afraid to let die because of its size.
There's nothing wrong with pride in one's country (except that the emotion is often used as a tool by less honourable men), or with international cooperation. But please let those things be incidental to defining NASA's mission and not central.
If they got an average of 1.34 out of 5 that's really all the students need to know.
And the faculty, too!
I don't know what other's experiences have been at various colleges and universities, but I found that getting rated as an excellent well-liked teachers was almost like the kiss of death for any faculty member struggling to get tenure. The correlation is almost perfectly inverse. Really, I would get scared for any teacher that got the "Best Teacher Award".
As far as most universities are concerned, what matters more than teaching ability is how much research money the prof can bring in and how many publications he or she can crank out in respectable journals.
The supposed ideal is to have a faculty of good teachers that are simultaneously good publishers of research and bringers of funding, but often the quality of teaching will take second or third place to the other factors when tenure decisions are made about faculty.
Go to one of those kitchen/bath stores or sections in a department store. They have noise generators that mimic the sounds of running water, rain, surf, white noise, etc.
By playing a level of background noise, the annoying signal of your roommate's typing will be submerged and you can get some rest.
Never have I dealt with so much frustration in my life, before or since.
Obviously you've never tried to get an RMA on a shoddy product from $flybynightcomputerparts.com.
On my own dime (no toll free numbers here) I've painstakingly navigated down through deep call tree menus that ultimately transfered me into:
answering machines where no one ever calls back;
answering machines that are full;
busy signals;
dial tones;
I felt so burned it reminded me of the scene in an old 007 flick where Klaus Maria-Brandeur has to let go of his hands because the electric shock burn was too great.
It's not just lines of code per programmer. If it were they'd have fixes out pretty quickly.
It's the nature of those lines of code.
What kills MS in this regard is this: despite being able to hire more of the most capable programmers in the world than anyone else, their business model relies on there being extra non-trivial ties between applications, the OS, MSN, my Aunt Bertha's USB camera, a DLL from Portugal, etc.
OSS programmers have the luxury of making modular parts that interact in clear, contained ways that are more easily diagnosed.
The MS coder has to face what amounts to surgery on a plate of spaghetti with the constraint of not affecting any "important" noodles.
Of course, they do have the luxury of ignoring effects on third party non-MS code.
Sleazy lawyers are just like the rest of us - they'll take the path of least resistance.
Presented with some staggering insurmountable pile of scientific evidence (eg, odds of matching DNA), they'll search out for a Mark Fuhrman and suggest to the jury that there's "reasonable doubt".
One of the problems is MS's ever-changing document formats,
This is one of the two biggest reasons for continuing dominance of MS Office (the other being that the installed base of users are effectively pre-trained most closely to Word's UI.).
It's also a vulnerability.
Someone with clout needs to nail down any one single specification of.doc and how it is supposed to be displayed and printed.
Someone like EMCA or the U.S. federal government.
No, don't mandate use of open source software.
Yes, do insist that any application, open source or proprietary, store data files in a completely-specified open format.
so there is no real reason to think about the long term survival of the corporation either...
Quite so.
I've often thought the capital gains tax rate should be very high initially and very low in the long term. Something drastic like exp(-time/5 years), for example.
The main objective being to motivate shareholders and executives to think of the company's long term best interest and not just jack up earnings by cutting maintenance, R&D, selling the family jewels, etc.
One worrying development is just how much executives are motivated to sacrifice a company's long term health in order to meet earnings estimates put out by the Wall Street analysts.
If there were a similar way to make politicians or the public fiscally-minded, too, it would be nice. Something along the lines of "your share of this year's federal deficit is going onto your VISA card on April 15" would help shape things up in a hurry.
Your choice: pay more taxes, spend less, or lock yourself into an onerous debt. Most politicians are only too happy to give people less taxes, more spending and retire before the debt comes due.
The article is mostly a narrative of a large IT shop that is bringing open source into doing different parts of its business, with databases and desktops still living in the proprietary world.
The guy in charge is no zealot, just evaluating his options and doing what makes sense.
The bottom line is:
"Talk to your peers about open source as there is not really a downside," he said. "You can use it without risk and it won't cost you anything other than a bit of time. You'd be mad if you didn't try it."
those "wise" generals stuck to their grand vision.
They eventually did adapt.
The last major battle of the war in Petersburg was essentially reduced to trench warfare, a presage of what was going to happen in WW I on an even larger scale.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, then change the above post to "read/modify/submit" official documents, or otherwise interact with your government.
Wait just a minute. You're confusing me about this whole government thing.
I thought the public's API to government was read-only. You know, just like TV.
From what hear, working devices to write to government are pretty damn pricey.
The controversy surrounding the Florida recounts and the 2000 Presidential election still simmers.
And recently a number of prestigious computer scientists came out on record as cautioning against all of the possible problems with electronic voting.
And still I hear recently of some effort where electronic voting is being made available to mall shoppers in Orange County.
But, Georgia?!?
For those with short memories, Georgia was to the 1800 election as Florida was to the 2000 election.
The current issue of The Atlantic Monthly has an interesting article about how Thomas Jefferson, then VP and President of the Senate, recorder of the votes, and a candidate in the election, was put into a conflict of interest when evaluating "irregularities" associated with the electoral votes from Georgia.
Every buyer likes prices cuts. Me, too.
But I was hoping to see a little more information about availability of the next performance jump of the Opteron to 2.40 GHz, apart from this old rumour.
It's "early 2004". I'm ready to buy a dual Opteron, but I want the best performance I can get.
Probably both figures are right, just ripped out of context.
IIRC, there are 20-30 steps involved in the overall process.
Each individual step in the process absolutely must have 98-99% yield.
Meanwhile, the overall process has a yield more like (0.98)^20 = 0.66
Or something like that./p
It's a trick for getting a free security audit.
Recall a recent story where the code security auding project for Linux shutdown due to lack of activity.
This kind of code release from MS is going to get orders of magnitude more auditing than Linux did. WinNT/2K will get up into the big leagues with OpenBSD as far as having been through a code security audit.
But I wonder how patches will be handled?
dark plot to wage cyber-war and steal confidential data from our computers."
...I wish that this sinister plot was met with terabytes/second of "confidential data" like, oh, free viagra offers, Nigerian 419 scams, Add 3 inches, etc...
So much for the careful dance Dell was supposed to do to avoid the wrath of Microsoft.
They're still dancing carefully.
Note Michael Dell doesn't express any particular enthusiasm about Linux even though he sees that it can only help him in negotiating better terms with Microsoft.
Dell also chants the MS friendly explanation of Linux sales which, besides being true, makes MS feel better: "Linux takes sales away from UNIX (i.e., Sun) more than Windows"
The IT marketplace wants commoditization of operating systems and applications just as they've become accustomed to seeing in the hardware arena.
These are the managers, not the techies. Do you really expect them to understand the numbers?
Good point.
Mangers only vaguely understand technology, but they're good at relating it to people and to risks.
As an earlier poster pointed out, when shown how a net connection provides high resolution streaming video, the response is likely to be "So what? My TV does that!"
The answer is to create some relevance.
Suggest to your PHB that instead of dropping his kids off at daycare that instead he use this remote-controlled car to do it. Strap his kids into the safety seats in back, adjust the cameras looking out the front and back, test the steering wheel, brake, accelerator controls over the network connection, and then let it rip with him at the controls.
He'll suddenly develop a intense, geek-like interest in terms like latency, bandwidth, keeping the link up, etc.
It's probably because of nomenclature.
A geek might say "aye-eee" but the nontechies will probably say "eksplorer".
Shoot, some of them run IE and call it "netskape".
I think commercials have made for a rather successful business model for television, which is as pervasive as ever
That's an understatement.
More than just another business model, advertising driven television has become an overwhelmingly pervasive force in modern cultures.
And it's not necessarily a good thing; just a very successful phenomena in terms of establishing its existence.
And if US$ 80K seems stiff, maybe you can sell off chunks of your BW to other business to help make the mortgage payment on it.
With the prime lending rate at 4%, that $80K is a little under $270/month, probably a lot less than what you're paying for space and other utilities already.
relativity popular in Australia, least in dense backpacker-esque areas
That's what I'd expect.
In large urban areas where broadband is available and cheap, home users can afford the same connection as the Cybercafe.
Travelers have need for broadband, but hotels are providing this. Backpackers, OTOH, might not have a hotel room. I wouldn't take my laptop backpacking, either, but that's me.
A conceivable market for Cybercafes is on the fringes of civilization, the outlying areas where broadband connections are still too expensive for individual homeowners. But you have to keep in mind that most people living in those areas aren't going to want to drive 20 miles to the cafe, either. And that the price of broadband will eventually come down in those areas, too.
Since ISP service by itself is becoming marginalized, why not setup Wi-Fi hotspots for businesses like hotels, restaurants, doctors' offices, etc.?
A dedicated Cybercafe is going to become as quaint as the idea of a separate place you would go to plug into the AC outlets to run appliances. It just doesn't make sense.
I realize that NASA's mission has become heavily weighted in symbolism and emotion and that this is the reality of 21st century politics.
But, as a member of the public, as a taxpayer, I would much rather that they pay for 50 select astronomers, geologists, physicists, engineers, chemists and biologists to come to a conference and ask them what kinds of space missions would be valuable from their perspective. Put the ideas in a ranked order, with costs and risks, and then let the administrators decide what they'd like to do.
As it stands now, there are some interesting projects that have made it through the cracks, but all the big money goes towards various make-work manned missions meant to whip up patriotic fervor, demonstrate international cooperation, or keep the inertia going with some large project that everyone is afraid to let die because of its size.
There's nothing wrong with pride in one's country (except that the emotion is often used as a tool by less honourable men), or with international cooperation. But please let those things be incidental to defining NASA's mission and not central.
If they got an average of 1.34 out of 5 that's really all the students need to know.
And the faculty, too!
I don't know what other's experiences have been at various colleges and universities, but I found that getting rated as an excellent well-liked teachers was almost like the kiss of death for any faculty member struggling to get tenure. The correlation is almost perfectly inverse. Really, I would get scared for any teacher that got the "Best Teacher Award".
As far as most universities are concerned, what matters more than teaching ability is how much research money the prof can bring in and how many publications he or she can crank out in respectable journals.
The supposed ideal is to have a faculty of good teachers that are simultaneously good publishers of research and bringers of funding, but often the quality of teaching will take second or third place to the other factors when tenure decisions are made about faculty.
I find the problem with a real quiet sleeping environment is that very slight noises, anything abnormal will wake me up.
For several years I've used a noise generator or sound conditioner.
Go to one of those kitchen/bath stores or sections in a department store. They have noise generators that mimic the sounds of running water, rain, surf, white noise, etc.
By playing a level of background noise, the annoying signal of your roommate's typing will be submerged and you can get some rest.
Never have I dealt with so much frustration in my life, before or since.
Obviously you've never tried to get an RMA on a shoddy product from $flybynightcomputerparts.com.
On my own dime (no toll free numbers here) I've painstakingly navigated down through deep call tree menus that ultimately transfered me into:
- answering machines where no one ever calls back;
- answering machines that are full;
- busy signals;
- dial tones;
I felt so burned it reminded me of the scene in an old 007 flick where Klaus Maria-Brandeur has to let go of his hands because the electric shock burn was too great.It's not just lines of code per programmer. If it were they'd have fixes out pretty quickly.
It's the nature of those lines of code.
What kills MS in this regard is this: despite being able to hire more of the most capable programmers in the world than anyone else, their business model relies on there being extra non-trivial ties between applications, the OS, MSN, my Aunt Bertha's USB camera, a DLL from Portugal, etc.
OSS programmers have the luxury of making modular parts that interact in clear, contained ways that are more easily diagnosed.
The MS coder has to face what amounts to surgery on a plate of spaghetti with the constraint of not affecting any "important" noodles.
Of course, they do have the luxury of ignoring effects on third party non-MS code.
And they do get paid more than OSS coders.
sleazy lawyers will wow clueless jury members
Sleazy lawyers are just like the rest of us - they'll take the path of least resistance.
Presented with some staggering insurmountable pile of scientific evidence (eg, odds of matching DNA), they'll search out for a Mark Fuhrman and suggest to the jury that there's "reasonable doubt".
One of the problems is MS's ever-changing document formats,
This is one of the two biggest reasons for continuing dominance of MS Office (the other being that the installed base of users are effectively pre-trained most closely to Word's UI.).
It's also a vulnerability.
Someone with clout needs to nail down any one single specification of .doc and how it is supposed to be displayed and printed.
Someone like EMCA or the U.S. federal government.
No, don't mandate use of open source software.
Yes, do insist that any application, open source or proprietary, store data files in a completely-specified open format.
Oh sure, W spends $500B and it goes on my credit card (at 10%, no less) - that's fair! If I'm going to pay for the deficit, then I get a veto too.
Transposition error.
You don't get a veto, you get a vote.
so there is no real reason to think about the long term survival of the corporation either...
Quite so.
I've often thought the capital gains tax rate should be very high initially and very low in the long term. Something drastic like exp(-time/5 years), for example.
The main objective being to motivate shareholders and executives to think of the company's long term best interest and not just jack up earnings by cutting maintenance, R&D, selling the family jewels, etc.
One worrying development is just how much executives are motivated to sacrifice a company's long term health in order to meet earnings estimates put out by the Wall Street analysts.
If there were a similar way to make politicians or the public fiscally-minded, too, it would be nice. Something along the lines of "your share of this year's federal deficit is going onto your VISA card on April 15" would help shape things up in a hurry.
Your choice: pay more taxes, spend less, or lock yourself into an onerous debt. Most politicians are only too happy to give people less taxes, more spending and retire before the debt comes due.
So, does google collect links like these?
The article is mostly a narrative of a large IT shop that is bringing open source into doing different parts of its business, with databases and desktops still living in the proprietary world.
The guy in charge is no zealot, just evaluating his options and doing what makes sense.
The bottom line is:
back to the old netscape naming conventions:
Ah, the good old days.
They ought to just name the browser something like Mozayik.
Either that, or just continue the high adventure stuff with a name like DeepSpaceProbe.
those "wise" generals stuck to their grand vision.
They eventually did adapt.
The last major battle of the war in Petersburg was essentially reduced to trench warfare, a presage of what was going to happen in WW I on an even larger scale.