-shrug-
I'd been thinking of defects, flaws, and other things that give Excel it's Look & Feel[tm], though, like the other comment ( wherever it is, I'm not going digging again ).. about a query that took over 20 minutes on Excel, but a minute or so on Linux: oughtn't they too be duplicated, even if one has to set an option for 'em ( like Stupidly-Bad Slowness Option, and Compromising Data-Integrity Option )?...
hmmm..
I seem to remember another discussion, here on/., where someone had a problem with Excel: they personally had switched to Linux/OSS, on their desktop, and they did a spreadsheet in their system, and their boss had a different result, so they went over every last thing, and discovered that the Excel version was rong...
I don't use Excel, so I'm stuck with the choice of gnumeric ( SuSE 8.2 pro installed the "stable" version, and it was obnoxious enough in interface & habits that I didn't like it -- now that I know-about the "development" version being good-enough for beta, by gnome's coding-standards, I'm downloading it to try compiling/running it ), KSpread, and OO.o's spreadsheet ( I don't much care for OO.o, as it's a resource-hog, and takes a very long time to start on my 5-year old machine, even with 320MB/K6-2 )... KSpread seems a tad unfinished, so I simply chose to work on stuff not needing spreadsheets for a few months...
Now I need one, and gnumeric 1.1.x awaits, so I'll dig into it ta see if I dig it, see..
I find the reports about bugs in Excel's accuracy to be probable, though, because MS cannot possibly code by test-first ( and end-up with the results they do ) XP-style, and almost all of the Excel users don't check the results with a different spreadsheet to see if the results are correct ( who backups their system? who checks their tools' integrity? who verifies anything ), and since it isn't OSS, bugs are more likely to remain long-term ( the stunning amount of serious, been-there-for-years vulnerabilities in windoze... )
Knowing gnome's coding-integrity standards ( not necessarily caring for the gtk interface, though: QT's much nicer to work-with ), knowing OSS's more effective in destroying & eradicating bugs, I'm not going to trust my future to MS-Excel, when gnumeric is an option. Period.
( thanks and generally-emanated hugs, for all gnumeric & gnome developers, eh? we gain vastly from this all, and appreciate it, though sometimes our griping-habit overrules wisdom & wellbeing )
What about imprecision, then?: good wholesome MS datacorruption...
Other posters ( flat pale people who hang 'round here, i believe ) state that real MS-Excel has significant errors in some operations ( in some uses ). Does gnumeric duplicate that?!?
Wine emulates SM-Windoze bugs, for compatibility, shouldn't we have a globally-broken work-means ( all software ) in order to comply with the Global Standard declared & ordered upon us, by the beeg boiz?
make certain that people have tangible ballots, that can be checked after.
make certain that the tangible vote is turned into an electronic vote in a way that is visible to the actual individual voter
( here we have ballot-cards that people "X", and put into slip-covers, and then hand them to the volunteers for sliding into the electronic counters.. it wouldn't cost much to change the counter so that it
a) had an only-narrowly-visible
( "polarizer", as-in polarizing the direction it can be seen-from, security-screen over the display )
display of the votes just cast, so that any tampered "counter" machine would have-to display what just got cast, but record differently, which makes it trickier, or if it malfunctioned, this could be reported by the person who just had their vote sabotaged
b) was made of discrete components ( including battery-backup, and redundancy ), and had clear sides ( slot where the vote-card was sucked through would be opaque, storage-pile of cast vote-cards was opaque, electronics was clear, no microprocessors, no program-code, all hardwired ), so that "different looking ones" would get flagged by anyone who noticed 'em, and so that no software trickery would be doable in them ( chip IDs visible, if any chips )
c) was able to correctly scan vote-cards no matter how they were entered, top-up, rotated, whatever
make certain that the names are visibly associated with the party of the candidate, for people who cannot remember names
make certain that the names are randomized so that no-one gets the 9% boost of having their name first on all the ballots (.. article I saw somewheres in the last few days, re, I think, Bush and some place in California )
make certain that test-ballots are run-through at intervals ( not fixed intervals, I want cheat-logic jammed ), and this done with the "polarizer" screens removed, for all to see whether it worked correctly or not, have one test-ballot for each candidate on the ballot, per machine, so as to not swing things one way or another
make certain that all software that does have to be run be open-source so it can be trusted by the population being controlled by the results of the election
( example of already used "leverageware".. engineered to prevent integrity from contaminating the voting "results" is Here. PLEASE Read!! )
make certain that no machine the system is dependent on can be infested by millions of worms, viruses, adware, sleazeware, etc. have: it all ( that needs an OS ) run on OpenBSD.
many eyes, "bugs" eradicated must be permanently in its design, not a bandaid slapped atop the system's surface somewheres, to look good...
having the counting done by volunteers, rather than by auto-counters, means more chance for fatigue or politics to interfere, and I trust the statistic that the vast majority of incidents in things like airplanes, trains, etc. is due to Human Error, so I'd prefer having a system that anyone who wanted to check the design of, could, and have it be As Simple As Possible, But No Simpler, and engineered to eradicate the significantest distorter... ... just a preference, if it's Germany, probably people'd be civil enough to have volunteers counting 'em work, but The Referendum, that happened awhile back here in Canada, had many places ignoring any ballots that didn't give the vote that the counters wanted ( gangs are gangs, no matter whether they're underground, organized-crime, corporate, or official: action speaks true ), and no I'm not getting into which side stomped-out the others' ballots, or if it was done by both sides, I'd prefer to see actual evidence before getting into that shoving-match+idiocy. ... from what I saw of the Florida ballot-stuff, I'd not trust ANYONE on the North American continent to count ballots correct
The beauty of this is:
each individual has to choose between Free Speech orPrivacy.
Anyone who chooses to exercise Free Speech becomes 0wned by whomever wants to profile&dossier 'em, and anyone who chooses to exercise Privacy has the right to not say anything.
I wonder, in this Majority Rule ( and all others must Obey & Conform & Belong ) world, whether "free speech" will win, or whether "privacy" will win...
... keeping-in-mind that no individual has as much capability to make a meaning known ( or to do-so as a means of suppressing competing meaning ) as does a marketing-department, and .. also that Total Information Awareness programs, whether called STASI or Satan, or any other label
( humour is: "satan" means Accuser, and TIA + Patriot-II exists so that authority can accuse without having to have correct information, and without you having the right to see the basis for your accusation, and without you having the right to defend yourself in level-playing-field and without anyone, anywhere having the right to know you've been accused/convicted/disappeared.. read the link. ) .. depends entirely on no-one having valid privacy...
20-25% is a little low, I'd say: anyone who is neurologically ill ( NOT "mentally ill", it's someone's nervous-system, not only-someone's-mind that's differently-functioning or distorted, and assuming blame onto someone's mind&meanings because you don't want to know that nervous-systems can get sick? fraud and bogosity!! ), and poor,..
isn't going to have a chance at good treatment, and fighting neurological-wrongness AND holding-together one's conventional life and holding-together 1.5 jobs.. just isn't going to happen, so neurologically-ill are drastically more likely to end-up on the streets. ( Good Riddance!!, some clamour, protecting pretense and appearance that is Perfect and Right... )
Of course, malnutrition can cause neurological-illness that was hidden, to manifest, in anyone who'd been borderline... as can systematic abuse by "community"...
As for forcefully medicating?
Offer lethal-injection, every time you forcefully medicate someone, and you'll save more money, and make your "community" Nicer[tm], simply because it's so murderous to be medicated-against-one's-will with brain/mind-modifying/damaging chemicals
( in this province NO-ONE who's been diagnosed "schizophrenic", by any doctor, has the legal right to refuse being-medicated, or has the right to a second opinion, or the right to decide one's own affairs, for the rest of one's life, forever... someone may be allowed to refuse, or may not be, but it's no-longer a right -- this is actually a formalization of the previous regime, where some were held-down and injected, if they didn't cooperate, but.. that wasn't permitted into public knowledge... ) that sooner-or-later we'll chose the lethal-injection just for relief from abuse ( and you can say "See: it was Their Choice, we didn't make them choose! we just gave-them what they wanted" while grumbling that it took sooo long to pressure 'em/us into accepting ).
( BTW: real schizophrenia, being born with bits of brain missing, including social-place-awareness, and, in child-onset-schizophrenia, losing more-than 1/10th of one's brain in a kind of "brain-fire" or cell-death-cascade that starts in one's parietal tissue, is bad-enough that with care/help 10% of such slaughter their-own lives to escape the every-damn-second abuse that schizophrenia is. If someone is under continuous abuse, then adding a little more, like obliterating their basic human person-ness, can help put-em-under, make 'em choose to try becoming eternally-gone, much easier than a little abuse could put-a-healthy+robust-someone-under )
Beautiful-quote from a doctor, from the social-place-awareness link: "The ability to recognise emotions is what makes us human, it is an essential attribute lost in schizophrenia."
Which declares, of course, that schizophrenics, not having this, aren't human.
Beauty, eh?
#define sarcasm
Think of the money everyone ( who counts )'ll save!!
Think of how we would be Putting Them Out Of Our^H^H^H Their Misery!!
Think of the convenience, the not having "schizos" anywhere among The Community's Beautiful And Perfect Pretense!!
The program could be extended to depressives, bipolars, multiple-personality-disorder people, non-Christians, people-with-unsightly-teeth, people-from-the-Middle-East
( like the crazy/commie Jew that "Jesus" is modelled-on, keeping-in-mind that the original person was Jewish, and NO Christian considers Jewishness right... obviously the original-person was fundamentally wrong!! ), .. People who don't have proper clothing-sense, .. People who don't have proper pretenses or manners! .
There are many different "symbol"-type fonts, numerous code-pages,... ... and if one doesn't live in MS-Windows, and hasn't seen MS-Windows for a couple of years, how is one to know MS-Windows CodePage(whatever) "symbol" font on sight, then?
Sorry to yump into this, but once I were into typesetting, and the assumptions in "Yes, dimwit, it is the Symbol font. The Symbol font consists primarily of Greek letters." are a tad, ah, assumptive, IYSWIM
My first reaction to such a comment is Which "symbol" font?.. From what font-foundry?
Ah, but once their claims are filed in court, perhaps someone could publish a web-site with all the filed documents ( indexed ) online, like wikipedia.org, except with us contributing to it by linking to the original source.
being Divisor & Konqueror, if you see what I mean: attacking it fractally.
This way, the IBM lawyers would have only to check ( much of the time ) what the attacked open-source community had given them, rather than having to do all the leg-work, and since the information-fishing would be done by the people in the stuff, it'd be more likely to be without weak-points, not-to-mention quick enough to keep-up with the profusely manufactured attack..
A network ( neural-net ) is harder to take-out than a digital-sequential logic, eh?
AMD simply doesn't DARE make AMD64 chips in volume until MS releases an AMD64 version of their OSs, and delaying the SP that coincides with AMD64-capability-in-MS-Windows means knocking-out a, what, a half-billion bottom-line $$ from AMD?
.. and yeah, I realize Gentoo's doing it on their own, but it must burn MS to see Linux gaining ground on kit that MS didn't authorize, and this'll hurt AMD deeply more than it'll give-ground to Linux, IF AMD obeys and doesn't release quantity AMD64 processors until MS allows it to...
And No, I don't believe for an instant that that could be the primary motivation, but it could have been an internal-to-MS political tipping-point, since that is the way authority-politics works...
SCO's 'Shell' Game, boosting their stocks for their siblings in the holding-company, for their temporary benefit, and for the holding-company, of course....
( yes I know that spouting falsity for sake of stock-value-manipulation is a right, in capitalism, but having the market's PEOPLE clued-in to information is also a right, some believe... )
Agreed, but I'm damned if I can figure-out how they do so when it's available without hard-drive, though...
Actually, it's the screen that'd do it for me: 1400x1050 is really nice...
( and the ability to choose the drive: Seagate for quiet, Samsung for cheap, Hitachi Deskstar for performance or Western Digital for huge... yeah... )
Replying to yer subject: because the thought of isolationism ( giving-up on cooperation ) vs cooperation/coopetition ( out-waiting incooperation ) is something I'm gonna have to think about fer awhile...
Re:Prefer multiple benchmarks, or your own 'proble
on
Examining Benchmarking
·
· Score: 1
Here's a nice example of how benchmarking can give non-applicable "information":
Say one's got a system that acts as a file-server, NAS, or something, and one backs-it-up using DVD-RW's, and one's victi^H^H^H^H^H users complain about the system being intermittently hammered, whenever you're doing the backup, calling-up some program to tell you how many context-switches are happening would show you that when you've got the DVD-RW loopbacked, and are diffing ( niced to 19 ) the ISO with the DVD-RW, you're sustaining more than 5000 context-switches / second...
Benchmarks don't usually context-switch between multiple programs that way ( or at least I've never 'eard of such ), so one's OWN benchmarks HAVE to include all the strange things one's own tools do, AND one has to actually check what one's tools actually do, to know what to check for/with...
( good rule, that: Check What Is, Rather Than What Is "Known". )
A dual-CPU'd be better for this case, obvaneously, but.. .. as for why I said DVD-RW rather than DVD-R? organic-dyes die MUCH quicker than eutetic metal's crystallization-pattern, so DVD-R's I consider less long-term reliable ( organic-dye ) than the -RW +RW type discs, which record the information in the crystallization ( annealling is blanking, I gather ) of the metal-layer. More expensive, sure, but if it isn't going to rot on me data...
I'd dearly like to see a benchmark-suite that tested each "corner" condition it could, gave one a chart showing systematically the results, gave one a comparison-graph comparing the current system to the best/worst in comparable-systems for that test, and encouraged clear knowledge of what the corner-cases are, as well as the balances/interrelationships... ... instead of these damn "benchmarks" that show how well a system will perform.. synthetic-benchmark-99, which isn't particularly useful. iometer-runs, bonnie++, for streaming-media I suppose hdparm -t, diffing a pair of ISO images ( does the context-switching happen only when one is a loopbacked ISO and the other's on a SCSI device? hmm.. ), discovering what the actual hdparm and smartctl settings are on that drive ( just because one told a setting to be set doesn't mean it actually got set, eh? )... systematicness & rigour..
Happy Happy Joy Joy!!
the meaning assumed into 'FUD' is different ( more boring, less harm-motivation ) from the meaning we assume into the actual terms ...and that sort of trouble happens whenever the essence of a term is thrown away for a label that assumes its own meaning, like the term originally meaning "Sons Of God", in Genesis, got replaced, by ?Jews or ?Christians, with Angels, because the new term, without the original meaning, was nicer ( I'm not what anyone could call Christian, BTW )
Here's a search that shows the change-in-meaning in the term, from the original books to the newer books in the bible, and don't expect any Christian to accept the original meaning, mind...
Gospel.com search, Amplified Bible ( translation more than 'interpretation' ), 'sons of god'
Interesting how totally different the original meaning seems to've been compared with the later meaning...
Check out the Illuminati books by Robert Anton Wilson, for a perfect example of Mass Media's Mass NonThink-Pushing of "terrorism"... Amazon.com search for Robert Anton Wilson
He used the word FNORD instead of Terrorism, but its function was to activate Fear Uncertainty Doubt and induce a hypnotic-reaction of non-awareness among persons in/among The Masses...
Actually, when one considers how murderously obliterative such conditioning is, in deforming our survival / community-condition, it seems more evil than anything else ( either evil, if deliberate, or wrong, if perfectly unconscious ), depending, of course, on one's definitions...
Companies in competition in a market put-up bond, that they can retrieve after 7 years, at the beginning ( however measured, fiscal or calendar ) of this year.
Next-year, they put-up bond that they can retrieve 7 years from then, and so-on.
( based-on what, though?.. company-division-size? to contribute-to diversity and eradicate single-point-of-failure, or to suppress smaller companies and maximize the "bottom-line" for the incumbent+established special-interest-group? region-market-ownership? to cause the dominant market-players to pay more than the smaller-players? probably I'd prefer that one, but I cannot imagine it being implemented to reduce single-point-of-failure and reduce hierarchy, perhaps I'm too old...
This makes certain that they've invested recently, and that their investment means-something to them
( rather than being a big once-only write-off )...
Actually, though, I think regulated-competition is better than regulated monopoly or short-term-capital-predation ( which even competes against the context in-which its long-term existence supposedly is to be... ), but implementing regulated-competition without simultaneously implementing open-sourcing of the regulations and the audits and the compliance is bogus, or meaningless...
"Let The Market Decide" can only work if the market is informed, and it is against gettable-profit to allow informed market, so choose whether short-term capital-profit or enduring surviving is more significant, and choose The Rules based on that: if enduring surviving is more significant, then cause the market to have good/valid, current information, freely, and don't allow the market to be 0wned by marketing BS, organized suppression ( corporate special-interest-group, political special-interest-group, ANY sig ), etc...
Contrarily, if A Quick Buck means more than enduring survival ( perhaps because you prefer the predator-lifestyle, and figure that with the knives/guns/Hummers/fuel you've stockpiled away YOU can control others -- in civil collapse ), then contribute to the brittleness, the kind-of-regulation that is going to break so you can make the world exist only as you permit:
. . . the two modes are mutually-exclusive, and I'd simply prefer a bit of honesty in people's commitment, no matter what that commitment be, so we can deal truly with each-other...
And as-for an example, published years-ago, of how others have already clued-in to the fractal-nature of The Answer, dig Christopher Alexander's -- A Pattern Language ( Daily Pattern: you get to read the book, in random-pattern-order, in 254 days, or so ).
Ach, final thought, ere:
I realized, partly because of all this ( we were downed, downtown Here[tm], here, for oh, a day or so ), that the Vertically Integrated Rules-Based Monopoly can work fine UNLESS something breaks, then much/all breaks.. the Horizontally Meshed Adaptive Diversity is costlier, when everything is going right, but it doesn't catastrophically fail the way the hierarcy/rule/conservative system does
( no I do not mean to say that the lateral/fractal/parallel system is "liberal": belonging-for-its-own-sake is "liberal", the structure I'm thinking-of, by not-merely-permitting everyone-autonomy, but requiring it simply happens to be perpendicular to conservation-of-privilege/position/rights among the established interests/entities, that's all... given enough dimensions, there are multiple "perpendiculars" to any given choice... )
I keep hearing about this Witten guy, as being the only one who 'lives-in' string-theory, and Martin Rees seems ultra-sharp..., but a straight-forward book on super-symmetric string ( branes, actually ) theory ( aka Brane Theory, or M-Theory ) is Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe.
I'd heard, though, somewheres, that there IS a singularity ( single-brane ) in the black-hole ( or rather, it IS the object in the bottom of the event-horizon/gravity-well ), and that's what happens when things go to the 'other way' of expressing things around Planck's constant, or Planck's law, or something...
Branes that have less mass than ~Planck's whatever~ express as things that appear to us as 'particles' with electro-magnetic interactions, and all, but branes that have more mass than ~Planck's whatever~ express only Mass, Spin, and Charge, and being of effectively-infinite ( or actually-infinite? ) density, only their Mass and Spin matter, or maybe their Charge isn't valid anymore, or something: it's been awhile since I read that stuff, sorry, but these are the ideas involved in what I'd read, anyways...
Also, I'd heard that there were possibility of multiple time-dimensions in M-theory, but that no-one had decided/discovered which number of 'em worked right... 1, 2, n...
IIRC they show the watts, mAh's, and minutes ( digicam-type load ) for a LOT of cells, including the anemic 'alkaline' cells.
The Nexcells are the most cost-effective, it seems, though I gather the Maha 100-minute charger is with Maha batteries amazing, I also gather that a given charger can be gentle with one kind of cells and destroy another, apparently similar kind.
Once an item is under consideration, put the application up on the 'net, and ANYONE who knows of prior-art can prove such exists BEFORE any granting-of-patent, thereby unscrambling the mix, as it were.
And if that doesn't make the patent-granting-judgement tastier to us all, then nothing will.
This idea itself can't be patented by anyone now, because of prior art, So There, Nyaa Nyaa Nyaa. : P
PS - this is actually the same idea as opensourcing even the spiciest space-exploration project, so that idiocy like the IsThisPunchingThroughTheAtmosphereYet sensors being hid behind a truss so they wouldn't know if they were or not, while Mars is coming-up and hitting them... wouldn't be so likely to happen, but... ... permitting open-source and open-accountability, while it does reduce VERY COSTLY bugs, is offensive to Institutional Mentality, so I'm not expecting to see it happen in the west, unless integrity gets valued enough...
Yes it is cheaper to the national economy to fix patent-bugs before implementing them, than it is to implement them and then fix them, same as with any system.
As for 'aren't supposed to patent the idea, you patent the execution'...... the execution is either an idea, or it is an instantiation of an idea, and TTBOMK, the patent-office doesn't have tonnes of space for instantiations there, so it's a 'grey' area, worked upon by grey-suited masses, mumbling away...
'when Bovines achieve lunar orbit' happened YEARS ago, so-long ago we now only have the reports:
'when the cow jumped over the moon'
Already Been Done.[tm]
============
Of course, the target's being dead ( no longer moving ) doesn't mean it isn't still changing/transforming/metamorphose-ing...
( external vs internal moving: see Institutional CEO for an example of such things, also 'fossilization'... )
That the 'cradles'
( term used in the TV program, or wherever-it-was that I years-ago got told this )
were placed-on each of the four long-sides of a block, and then rope wrapped 'round the sticks/rods holding the end-pieces of the cradles
( the quarter-rounds that were at each end of the block )
together, and the entire block rolled
( requiring only 5 people, rather than 60-150, which is what using small logs beneath a block would have required ),
was figured-out YEARS ago, and broadcast.
Perhaps the title should read:
Canadian Discovers Idea Broadcast Years Ago By American TV!
idiocy.
Idiocy that information has to be discovered again and again and again because of fractioning, of not-indexing ( it's proprietary, you aren't allowed to index it, publically ), of non-translation ( significant in science, the Yugoslavs have a saying 'Discovering Hot Water' for it... others already published, but it wasn't accessible in their info-sources... )...
Slashdot Mirror
.. the comment I referred to, earlier...,
but the example you showed me might well be "optimized" rather than calculated, eh?
-shrug- .. about a query that took over 20 minutes on Excel, but a minute or so on Linux: oughtn't they too be duplicated, even if one has to set an option for 'em ( like Stupidly-Bad Slowness Option, and Compromising Data-Integrity Option )?... /., where someone had a problem with Excel: they personally had switched to Linux/OSS, on their desktop, and they did a spreadsheet in their system, and their boss had a different result, so they went over every last thing, and discovered that the Excel version was rong...
I'd been thinking of defects, flaws, and other things that give Excel it's Look & Feel[tm], though, like the other comment ( wherever it is, I'm not going digging again )
hmmm..
I seem to remember another discussion, here on
I don't use Excel, so I'm stuck with the choice of gnumeric ( SuSE 8.2 pro installed the "stable" version, and it was obnoxious enough in interface & habits that I didn't like it -- now that I know-about the "development" version being good-enough for beta, by gnome's coding-standards, I'm downloading it to try compiling/running it ), KSpread, and OO.o's spreadsheet ( I don't much care for OO.o, as it's a resource-hog, and takes a very long time to start on my 5-year old machine, even with 320MB/K6-2 )... KSpread seems a tad unfinished, so I simply chose to work on stuff not needing spreadsheets for a few months...
Now I need one, and gnumeric 1.1.x awaits, so I'll dig into it ta see if I dig it, see..
I find the reports about bugs in Excel's accuracy to be probable, though, because MS cannot possibly code by test-first ( and end-up with the results they do ) XP-style, and almost all of the Excel users don't check the results with a different spreadsheet to see if the results are correct ( who backups their system? who checks their tools' integrity? who verifies anything ), and since it isn't OSS, bugs are more likely to remain long-term ( the stunning amount of serious, been-there-for-years vulnerabilities in windoze... )
Knowing gnome's coding-integrity standards ( not necessarily caring for the gtk interface, though: QT's much nicer to work-with ), knowing OSS's more effective in destroying & eradicating bugs, I'm not going to trust my future to MS-Excel, when gnumeric is an option. Period.
( thanks and generally-emanated hugs, for all gnumeric & gnome developers, eh? we gain vastly from this all, and appreciate it, though sometimes our griping-habit overrules wisdom & wellbeing )
What about imprecision, then?: good wholesome MS datacorruption...
Other posters ( flat pale people who hang 'round here, i believe ) state that real MS-Excel has significant errors in some operations ( in some uses ). Does gnumeric duplicate that?!?
Wine emulates SM-Windoze bugs, for compatibility, shouldn't we have a globally-broken work-means ( all software ) in order to comply with the Global Standard declared & ordered upon us, by the beeg boiz?
make certain that people have tangible ballots, that can be checked after.
make certain that the tangible vote is turned into an electronic vote in a way that is visible to the actual individual voter
( here we have ballot-cards that people "X", and put into slip-covers, and then hand them to the volunteers for sliding into the electronic counters .. it wouldn't cost much to change the counter so that it
a) had an only-narrowly-visible
( "polarizer", as-in polarizing the direction it can be seen-from, security-screen over the display ) display of the votes just cast, so that any tampered "counter" machine would have-to display what just got cast, but record differently, which makes it trickier, or if it malfunctioned, this could be reported by the person who just had their vote sabotaged
b) was made of discrete components ( including battery-backup, and redundancy ), and had clear sides ( slot where the vote-card was sucked through would be opaque, storage-pile of cast vote-cards was opaque, electronics was clear, no microprocessors, no program-code, all hardwired ), so that "different looking ones" would get flagged by anyone who noticed 'em, and so that no software trickery would be doable in them ( chip IDs visible, if any chips )
c) was able to correctly scan vote-cards no matter how they were entered, top-up, rotated, whatever
make certain that the names are visibly associated with the party of the candidate, for people who cannot remember names
make certain that the names are randomized so that no-one gets the 9% boost of having their name first on all the ballots ( .. article I saw somewheres in the last few days, re, I think, Bush and some place in California )
make certain that test-ballots are run-through at intervals ( not fixed intervals, I want cheat-logic jammed ), and this done with the "polarizer" screens removed, for all to see whether it worked correctly or not, have one test-ballot for each candidate on the ballot, per machine, so as to not swing things one way or another
make certain that all software that does have to be run be open-source so it can be trusted by the population being controlled by the results of the election ( example of already used "leverageware" .. engineered to prevent integrity from contaminating the voting "results" is Here. PLEASE Read!! )
make certain that no machine the system is dependent on can be infested by millions of worms, viruses, adware, sleazeware, etc. have: it all ( that needs an OS ) run on OpenBSD.
many eyes, "bugs" eradicated must be permanently in its design, not a bandaid slapped atop the system's surface somewheres, to look good...
having the counting done by volunteers, rather than by auto-counters, means more chance for fatigue or politics to interfere, and I trust the statistic that the vast majority of incidents in things like airplanes, trains, etc. is due to Human Error, so I'd prefer having a system that anyone who wanted to check the design of, could, and have it be As Simple As Possible, But No Simpler, and engineered to eradicate the significantest distorter...
... just a preference, if it's Germany, probably people'd be civil enough to have volunteers counting 'em work, but The Referendum, that happened awhile back here in Canada, had many places ignoring any ballots that didn't give the vote that the counters wanted ( gangs are gangs, no matter whether they're underground, organized-crime, corporate, or official: action speaks true ), and no I'm not getting into which side stomped-out the others' ballots, or if it was done by both sides, I'd prefer to see actual evidence before getting into that shoving-match+idiocy.
... from what I saw of the Florida ballot-stuff, I'd not trust ANYONE on the North American continent to count ballots correct
The beauty of this is:
each individual has to choose between Free Speech or Privacy.
Anyone who chooses to exercise Free Speech becomes 0wned by whomever wants to profile&dossier 'em, and anyone who chooses to exercise Privacy has the right to not say anything.
I wonder, in this Majority Rule ( and all others must Obey & Conform & Belong ) world, whether "free speech" will win, or whether "privacy" will win...
... keeping-in-mind that no individual has as much capability to make a meaning known ( or to do-so as a means of suppressing competing meaning ) as does a marketing-department, and
.. also that Total Information Awareness programs, whether called STASI or Satan, or any other label
.. depends entirely on no-one having valid privacy...
( humour is: "satan" means Accuser, and TIA + Patriot-II exists so that authority can accuse without having to have correct information, and without you having the right to see the basis for your accusation, and without you having the right to defend yourself in level-playing-field and without anyone, anywhere having the right to know you've been accused/convicted/disappeared.. read the link. )
Perfectly Brilliant.
ha hAaa!
And keep this description of SCO, and their holding-company's, Shell-Game in mind whilst doing-so.
( REALLY dig that link before complaining to SEC: it's gooood, if one isn't SCO, to see that concise and clear description of their doings posted openly )
Man, oh, man...
20-25% is a little low, I'd say: anyone who is neurologically ill ( NOT "mentally ill", it's someone's nervous-system, not only-someone's-mind that's differently-functioning or distorted, and assuming blame onto someone's mind&meanings because you don't want to know that nervous-systems can get sick? fraud and bogosity!! ), and poor, .. .. just isn't going to happen, so neurologically-ill are drastically more likely to end-up on the streets. ( Good Riddance!!, some clamour, protecting pretense and appearance that is Perfect and Right... )
isn't going to have a chance at good treatment, and fighting neurological-wrongness AND holding-together one's conventional life and holding-together 1.5 jobs
Of course, malnutrition can cause neurological-illness that was hidden, to manifest, in anyone who'd been borderline... as can systematic abuse by "community"...
As for forcefully medicating?
Offer lethal-injection, every time you forcefully medicate someone, and you'll save more money, and make your "community" Nicer[tm], simply because it's so murderous to be medicated-against-one's-will with brain/mind-modifying/damaging chemicals .. that wasn't permitted into public knowledge... ) that sooner-or-later we'll chose the lethal-injection just for relief from abuse ( and you can say "See: it was Their Choice, we didn't make them choose! we just gave-them what they wanted" while grumbling that it took sooo long to pressure 'em/us into accepting ).
( in this province NO-ONE who's been diagnosed "schizophrenic", by any doctor, has the legal right to refuse being-medicated, or has the right to a second opinion, or the right to decide one's own affairs, for the rest of one's life, forever... someone may be allowed to refuse, or may not be, but it's no-longer a right -- this is actually a formalization of the previous regime, where some were held-down and injected, if they didn't cooperate, but
( BTW: real schizophrenia, being born with bits of brain missing, including social-place-awareness, and, in child-onset-schizophrenia, losing more-than 1/10th of one's brain in a kind of "brain-fire" or cell-death-cascade that starts in one's parietal tissue, is bad-enough that with care/help 10% of such slaughter their-own lives to escape the every-damn-second abuse that schizophrenia is. If someone is under continuous abuse, then adding a little more, like obliterating their basic human person-ness, can help put-em-under, make 'em choose to try becoming eternally-gone, much easier than a little abuse could put-a-healthy+robust-someone-under )
Beautiful-quote from a doctor, from the social-place-awareness link:
"The ability to recognise emotions is what makes us human, it is an essential attribute lost in schizophrenia."
Which declares, of course, that schizophrenics, not having this, aren't human.
Beauty, eh?
#define sarcasm
Think of the money everyone ( who counts )'ll save!!
Think of how we would be Putting Them Out Of Our^H^H^H Their Misery!!
Think of the convenience, the not having "schizos" anywhere among The Community's Beautiful And Perfect Pretense!!
The program could be extended to depressives, bipolars, multiple-personality-disorder people, non-Christians, people-with-unsightly-teeth, people-from-the-Middle-East
.. People who don't have proper clothing-sense,
.. People who don't have proper pretenses or manners!
( like the crazy/commie Jew that "Jesus" is modelled-on, keeping-in-mind that the original person was Jewish, and NO Christian considers Jewishness right... obviously the original-person was fundamentally wrong!! ),
.
There are many different "symbol"-type fonts, numerous code-pages,...
... and if one doesn't live in MS-Windows, and hasn't seen MS-Windows for a couple of years, how is one to know MS-Windows CodePage(whatever) "symbol" font on sight, then?
Sorry to yump into this, but once I were into typesetting, and the assumptions in "Yes, dimwit, it is the Symbol font. The Symbol font consists primarily of Greek letters." are a tad, ah, assumptive, IYSWIM
My first reaction to such a comment is Which "symbol" font? .. From what font-foundry?
Ah, but once their claims are filed in court, perhaps someone could publish a web-site with all the filed documents ( indexed ) online, like wikipedia.org, except with us contributing to it by linking to the original source.
being Divisor & Konqueror, if you see what I mean: attacking it fractally.
This way, the IBM lawyers would have only to check ( much of the time ) what the attacked open-source community had given them, rather than having to do all the leg-work, and since the information-fishing would be done by the people in the stuff, it'd be more likely to be without weak-points, not-to-mention quick enough to keep-up with the profusely manufactured attack..
A network ( neural-net ) is harder to take-out than a digital-sequential logic, eh?
... or maybe they're punishing AMD for assisting Linux? ( SuSE Enterprise and Gentoo ( near the top of the page ) )
AMD simply doesn't DARE make AMD64 chips in volume until MS releases an AMD64 version of their OSs, and delaying the SP that coincides with AMD64-capability-in-MS-Windows means knocking-out a, what, a half-billion bottom-line $$ from AMD?
And No, I don't believe for an instant that that could be the primary motivation, but it could have been an internal-to-MS political tipping-point, since that is the way authority-politics works...
SCO's 'Shell' Game, boosting their stocks for their siblings in the holding-company, for their temporary benefit, and for the holding-company, of course....
( yes I know that spouting falsity for sake of stock-value-manipulation is a right, in capitalism, but having the market's PEOPLE clued-in to information is also a right, some believe... )
Agreed, but I'm damned if I can figure-out how they do so when it's available without hard-drive, though...
Actually, it's the screen that'd do it for me: 1400x1050 is really nice...
( and the ability to choose the drive: Seagate for quiet, Samsung for cheap, Hitachi Deskstar for performance or Western Digital for huge... yeah... )
Replying to yer subject: because the thought of isolationism ( giving-up on cooperation ) vs cooperation/coopetition ( out-waiting incooperation ) is something I'm gonna have to think about fer awhile...
Home Power Magazine
Here's a nice example of how benchmarking can give non-applicable "information":
Say one's got a system that acts as a file-server, NAS, or something, and one backs-it-up using DVD-RW's, and one's victi^H^H^H^H^H users complain about the system being intermittently hammered, whenever you're doing the backup, calling-up some program to tell you how many context-switches are happening would show you that when you've got the DVD-RW loopbacked, and are diffing ( niced to 19 ) the ISO with the DVD-RW, you're sustaining more than 5000 context-switches / second...
Benchmarks don't usually context-switch between multiple programs that way ( or at least I've never 'eard of such ), so one's OWN benchmarks HAVE to include all the strange things one's own tools do, AND one has to actually check what one's tools actually do, to know what to check for/with...
( good rule, that: Check What Is, Rather Than What Is "Known". )
A dual-CPU'd be better for this case, obvaneously, but ..
.. as for why I said DVD-RW rather than DVD-R? organic-dyes die MUCH quicker than eutetic metal's crystallization-pattern, so DVD-R's I consider less long-term reliable ( organic-dye ) than the -RW +RW type discs, which record the information in the crystallization ( annealling is blanking, I gather ) of the metal-layer. More expensive, sure, but if it isn't going to rot on me data...
I'd dearly like to see a benchmark-suite that tested each "corner" condition it could, gave one a chart showing systematically the results, gave one a comparison-graph comparing the current system to the best/worst in comparable-systems for that test, and encouraged clear knowledge of what the corner-cases are, as well as the balances/interrelationships...
... instead of these damn "benchmarks" that show how well a system will perform .. synthetic-benchmark-99, which isn't particularly useful. iometer-runs, bonnie++, for streaming-media I suppose hdparm -t, diffing a pair of ISO images ( does the context-switching happen only when one is a loopbacked ISO and the other's on a SCSI device? hmm.. ), discovering what the actual hdparm and smartctl settings are on that drive ( just because one told a setting to be set doesn't mean it actually got set, eh? )... systematicness & rigour..
Happy Happy Joy Joy!!
Comparable to the DeskNote is the AOpen Deskbook 1945 ( actually, it looks much better: 1400x1050 screen, cheaper RAM, avail without CPU/HD/RAM, etc.
Yeah, but to be kosher, we'd have to name it "PowerEdit 1900", rather than "PowerEdit 2000", eh? or the Accuracy-In-Marketing Police will get us...
FEAR, UNCERTAINTY, DOUBT ( hypnosis/trance/conditioning )
the meaning assumed into 'FUD' is different ( more boring, less harm-motivation ) from the meaning we assume into the actual terms
...and that sort of trouble happens whenever the essence of a term is thrown away for a label that assumes its own meaning, like the term originally meaning "Sons Of God", in Genesis, got replaced, by ?Jews or ?Christians, with Angels, because the new term, without the original meaning, was nicer ( I'm not what anyone could call Christian, BTW )
Here's a search that shows the change-in-meaning in the term, from the original books to the newer books in the bible, and don't expect any Christian to accept the original meaning, mind... Gospel.com search, Amplified Bible ( translation more than 'interpretation' ), 'sons of god'
Interesting how totally different the original meaning seems to've been compared with the later meaning...
Check out the Illuminati books by Robert Anton Wilson, for a perfect example of Mass Media's Mass NonThink-Pushing of "terrorism" ...
Amazon.com search for Robert Anton Wilson He used the word FNORD instead of Terrorism, but its function was to activate Fear Uncertainty Doubt and induce a hypnotic-reaction of non-awareness among persons in/among The Masses...
Actually, when one considers how murderously obliterative such conditioning is, in deforming our survival / community-condition, it seems more evil than anything else ( either evil, if deliberate, or wrong, if perfectly unconscious ), depending, of course, on one's definitions...
How about a "rolling bond", then:
Companies in competition in a market put-up bond, that they can retrieve after 7 years, at the beginning ( however measured, fiscal or calendar ) of this year. .. company-division-size? to contribute-to diversity and eradicate single-point-of-failure, or to suppress smaller companies and maximize the "bottom-line" for the incumbent+established special-interest-group? region-market-ownership? to cause the dominant market-players to pay more than the smaller-players? probably I'd prefer that one, but I cannot imagine it being implemented to reduce single-point-of-failure and reduce hierarchy, perhaps I'm too old...
Next-year, they put-up bond that they can retrieve 7 years from then, and so-on.
( based-on what, though?
This makes certain that they've invested recently, and that their investment means-something to them
( rather than being a big once-only write-off )...
Actually, though, I think regulated-competition is better than regulated monopoly or short-term-capital-predation ( which even competes against the context in-which its long-term existence supposedly is to be ... ), but implementing regulated-competition without simultaneously implementing open-sourcing of the regulations and the audits and the compliance is bogus, or meaningless...
"Let The Market Decide" can only work if the market is informed, and it is against gettable-profit to allow informed market, so choose whether short-term capital-profit or enduring surviving is more significant, and choose The Rules based on that: if enduring surviving is more significant, then cause the market to have good/valid, current information, freely, and don't allow the market to be 0wned by marketing BS, organized suppression ( corporate special-interest-group, political special-interest-group, ANY sig ), etc...
Contrarily, if A Quick Buck means more than enduring survival ( perhaps because you prefer the predator-lifestyle, and figure that with the knives/guns/Hummers/fuel you've stockpiled away YOU can control others -- in civil collapse ), then contribute to the brittleness, the kind-of-regulation that is going to break so you can make the world exist only as you permit:
. . . the two modes are mutually-exclusive, and I'd simply prefer a bit of honesty in people's commitment, no matter what that commitment be, so we can deal truly with each-other...
And as-for an example, published years-ago, of how others have already clued-in to the fractal-nature of The Answer, dig Christopher Alexander's -- A Pattern Language ( Daily Pattern: you get to read the book, in random-pattern-order, in 254 days, or so ).
Ach, final thought, ere:
I realized, partly because of all this ( we were downed, downtown Here[tm], here, for oh, a day or so ), that the Vertically Integrated Rules-Based Monopoly can work fine UNLESS something breaks, then much/all breaks.. the Horizontally Meshed Adaptive Diversity is costlier, when everything is going right, but it doesn't catastrophically fail the way the hierarcy/rule/conservative system does
( no I do not mean to say that the lateral/fractal/parallel system is "liberal": belonging-for-its-own-sake is "liberal", the structure I'm thinking-of, by not-merely-permitting everyone-autonomy, but requiring it simply happens to be perpendicular to conservation-of-privilege/position/rights among the established interests/entities, that's all... given enough dimensions, there are multiple "perpendiculars" to any given choice... )
Speaking of their stock...
Dig This
Hear Hear!!
I keep hearing about this Witten guy, as being the only one who 'lives-in' string-theory, and Martin Rees seems ultra-sharp..., but a straight-forward book on super-symmetric string ( branes, actually ) theory ( aka Brane Theory, or M-Theory ) is Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe.
I'd heard, though, somewheres, that there IS a singularity ( single-brane ) in the black-hole ( or rather, it IS the object in the bottom of the event-horizon/gravity-well ), and that's what happens when things go to the 'other way' of expressing things around Planck's constant, or Planck's law, or something ...
Branes that have less mass than ~Planck's whatever~ express as things that appear to us as 'particles' with electro-magnetic interactions, and all, but branes that have more mass than ~Planck's whatever~ express only Mass, Spin, and Charge, and being of effectively-infinite ( or actually-infinite? ) density, only their Mass and Spin matter, or maybe their Charge isn't valid anymore, or something: it's been awhile since I read that stuff, sorry, but these are the ideas involved in what I'd read, anyways...
Also, I'd heard that there were possibility of multiple time-dimensions in M-theory, but that no-one had decided/discovered which number of 'em worked right... 1, 2, n...
Damn! Brilliant.
It Is Already There ( unlike the sticky-tape theory ), and it isn't likely to run away, either.
IWIHTOT ( I wish... )
Remembering to remove the magnets before putting the case back, though, yeah, that can be a problem...
Oh, wait! What about them new piezo speakers, that don't have magnets on 'em...
hmm..
Ah HA! just bring one's OWN magnets, and put 'em in the computer for sticking screws on! Goody goody .. I love magnets...
For high-drain devices, use Ni-MH Batteries ( Nickel Mental-Hospital? hmm.. )
http://www.imaging-resource.com/ACCS/BATTS/BATTS.H TM
IIRC they show the watts, mAh's, and minutes ( digicam-type load ) for a LOT of cells, including the anemic 'alkaline' cells.
The Nexcells are the most cost-effective, it seems, though I gather the Maha 100-minute charger is with Maha batteries amazing, I also gather that a given charger can be gentle with one kind of cells and destroy another, apparently similar kind.
http://www.thomas-distributing.com/batteries.htm
Make the prior-art search open-sauce:
Once an item is under consideration, put the application up on the 'net, and ANYONE who knows of prior-art can prove such exists BEFORE any granting-of-patent, thereby unscrambling the mix, as it were.
And if that doesn't make the patent-granting-judgement tastier to us all, then nothing will.
This idea itself can't be patented by anyone now, because of prior art, So There, Nyaa Nyaa Nyaa.
: P
PS - this is actually the same idea as opensourcing even the spiciest space-exploration project, so that idiocy like the IsThisPunchingThroughTheAtmosphereYet sensors being hid behind a truss so they wouldn't know if they were or not, while Mars is coming-up and hitting them... wouldn't be so likely to happen, but ...
... permitting open-source and open-accountability, while it does reduce VERY COSTLY bugs, is offensive to Institutional Mentality, so I'm not expecting to see it happen in the west, unless integrity gets valued enough...
Yes it is cheaper to the national economy to fix patent-bugs before implementing them, than it is to implement them and then fix them, same as with any system.
As for 'aren't supposed to patent the idea, you patent the execution'... ... the execution is either an idea, or it is an instantiation of an idea, and TTBOMK, the patent-office doesn't have tonnes of space for instantiations there, so it's a 'grey' area, worked upon by grey-suited masses, mumbling away...
'when Bovines achieve lunar orbit' happened YEARS ago, so-long ago we now only have the reports:
'when the cow jumped over the moon'
Already Been Done.[tm]
============
Of course, the target's being dead ( no longer moving ) doesn't mean it isn't still changing/transforming/metamorphose-ing...
( external vs internal moving: see Institutional CEO for an example of such things, also 'fossilization'... )
That the 'cradles'
( term used in the TV program, or wherever-it-was that I years-ago got told this )
were placed-on each of the four long-sides of a block, and then rope wrapped 'round the sticks/rods holding the end-pieces of the cradles
( the quarter-rounds that were at each end of the block )
together, and the entire block rolled
( requiring only 5 people, rather than 60-150, which is what using small logs beneath a block would have required ),
was figured-out YEARS ago, and broadcast.
Perhaps the title should read:
Canadian Discovers Idea Broadcast Years Ago By American TV!
idiocy.
Idiocy that information has to be discovered again and again and again because of fractioning, of not-indexing ( it's proprietary, you aren't allowed to index it, publically ), of non-translation ( significant in science, the Yugoslavs have a saying 'Discovering Hot Water' for it... others already published, but it wasn't accessible in their info-sources... )...