To be honest I've never voted in an election which didn't use Scantron ballots. I believe the voting devices are selected and allocated on a state-by-state basis though. The federal law mandates certain requirements the states must meet but leaves the implementation up to each individual one. I've lived in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Missouri, and Utah, and used Scantrons in each location. Maybe the computerized systems are used in more urban or wealthy districts?
I live in Canada, where the Olympics are broadcast by the CBC, which is a government-owned networks. I too was frustrated by there being commercials every two minutes. However, I got a stopwatch and timed how many commercials there were in an hour: there were 13 minutes, which is actually slightly less than "normal" television. My guess is that they have very frequent but short commercial breaks to better fit in between races, events, or whatever. Also, this makes sure that people who are just taking a few minutes to check in see atleast one commercial. Has anybody made any observations about NBC- do they really have more commercials than other TV?
Now I just wish Canada would win a medal: frankly, it is embarrassing that tiny little Georgia which is in the middle of a freaking war is currently beating us.
You replied: OK, I'm going to send you a list using XML.
The only thing you have proved here is that your blind hatred for XML makes you unable to read and parse what is posted.
When arguing against the evils of a standardised format which there are proper parsers for everywhere, failing to parse stuff yourself is probably not on the list of things you want to do.
http://blog.johnath.com/2008/08/05/ssl-question-corner/
An especially pertinent point from his post:
"Several CAs accepted by all major browsers sell certificates for less than $20/yr, and StartSSL, in the Firefox 3 root store, offers them for free."
The author has a shallow understanding of OS and no clue about directions in research.
But, you know, people keep watching the crappy coverage, and Olympic officials are raking in the exclusive-contract bucks, and the athletes seem happy to perform for cheap, so it's hard to see how the Olympics will change.
Cars are a good example. Lots of people can do basic maintenance on their car. They get frustrated when they have to go to a mechanic to find out what the "check engine" light is complaining about this time. They buy the Chilton's or Haynes' car repair manuals. On the more extreme end they do a complete engine rebuild, or even assemble a kit car from publicly available reference designs.
Cars are getting more complex and computerized though. I hear complaints about how much harder they are becoming to service. And the example given in the interview of the proprietary software in engine management chips is real. Racers will completely replace the ECU controlling fuel injection and engine timing with one which is programmable.
My parents' generation takes for granted that they can do these things with their cars. But with my generation we changed from the grease monkeys to the hackers, and the freedom to tinker has to come with us. For most people a car is just a tool to get from point A to point B. But we are all poorer when the hobbyists and amateurs don't have the freedom to tinker with, explore, and hack their own computers and cars.
Except that it's not. One of the reason the classic web servers are so amazingly fast with static files is that they, along with the operating systems they run on, have spend significant time trying to optimize this process. For linux, for example, look at the sendfile(2) system call, or the TCP_CORK socket option. These were expressly designed to permit a userspace program to get a file through the kernel and onto the wire with as few CPU cycles and memory copies as possible.
One of the most frustrating things about the Web 2.0 crowd (from the perspective of curmudgeons like me) is that they really don't have a clue about any of this complexity. They just figure that they'll stuff everything into a DJango/Rails/whatever request and scale up later. Then when they run into trouble, they end up turning to tools like Apache as black boxes and designing Rube Goldberg apparatii around them when they really should be looking at the problem more directly.
Really, folks: those low level APIs are your friends. They're not nearly as scary as they look. Even if you end up with an off-the-shelf solution, knowledge of this stuff can only be good for you.
Innovation is great for delivering new and better products, but it doesn't help much for allowing you to fix problems in the code you're using, avoid vendor lockin,or any of the other problems that free software can help solve.
I agree that it is important to keep practicality in mind, but I think it is also important to keep in mind that pretty much any philosophy you choose will have different tradeoffs involved.
So anything that basically "mixes" the sun will cause more heat to be emitted. No sun spots=no mixing, and all the heat remains trapped.
I think that after trapping heat for so long, the sun gets hotter and generates more sun spots because of all the extra energy. The sun spots bleed it out, and the cycle continues.
I mean I could understand the point, if the current system was infallible. But its not, so why not make the whole process easier on your average voter?
More importantly, ME! I'm not going to go vote, because I don't feel like standing for an hour in line, just to cast a ballot in a state where the result is already pre-determined because of demographics. I mean if you think about it, your vote only matters if you live in the 4-5 swing states, all others will go Democrat/Republican no matter what you do.
I wouldn't be so sure about that.
XSLT happens to be my pet peeve. I simply can't understand how anyone would have ever looked at that problem ("how to turn a source data document into a presentation format" -- something that has been solved sanely a thousand times by obscure technologies like "scripts", or "PHP") and decided that the best way to handle it was a turing-complete pattern matching language written in XML itself! I mean, it looks more like a torture device than a programming language...
Sounds like HA should be your #1 priority. DRBD + Heartbeat is a one solution but non-trivial to setup. There are some high-end hosting providers (BlueLock, Terremark) that offer VMWare HA configurations.
Sounds like VCS should be #2 - checkout cvsdude.com (no affiliation but we've used them and they're good)
Cheers
Note also that there are other technologies with pervasively available parsers, like JSON, which don't share any of XML's warts.
That is basically incorrect in terms of their business model: in order to have Redhat Linux, you have to pay money for it, and pay it on a subscription basis, so it's not "call support when I need help", it's "pay for it on an ongoing basis and call support when I need it", so really it's in their interests to make it simpler and easier.
Also, OSX is built on top of a number of open source products, including GCC, created a number of years ago by one Mr. Stallman, back when he still wrote code.
If you abandon the notion of timeslots, a protocol like Bittorrent is quite capable of supporting a weekly or daily TV show. Instead of timeslots, you just have channels which contain series. People subscribe to series, which show up in their app or TV appliance like they do in Tivo. This could be supported using RSS. The big issue is ease of use. If someone could put all of these technologies together, such that a "channel" or a "station" for video shows on the web was as easy to set up as a website, and easy to connect to for a user, you'd see an explosion of such sites, which happened with web sites and low quality video snippets (YouTube).
Web protocols which can support P2P live streaming as well as Bittorrent supports download would be the final ingredient of TV's demise.
Flatly: there isn't that much innovation in REST. It's a good idea that can be expressed in a few short sentences. It doesn't deserve books, and it doesn't deserve the priesthood that has grown up around it. When sane ideas start to smell like heavyweight frameworks, they've outlived their usefulness.
And if its 1 address, 1 SSN, 1 password at least the person will need a little bit more info to fix it. If they steal your mail they'll still need to know your date of birth and the social security #. And sure thats possible for 1-2 people, but do you realize how hard it would be to do it on the massive scale?
I mean lets face it, voting is a pain in the ass, you usually end up voting when its rush hour, and you have to wait a long time to cast your vote. Something like 40% of the eligible voters even bother to vote. Shouldn't it be a priority to make voting easier?
What about the user-base? Don't we have a responsibility to them also? Without them we can't be successful, and we should own them some responsibility to ensure that the tools/product/web-site they've been using remains useful for them.
More (and better) traffic from you guys than Techcrunch yesterday. Thank you.
When I was a financial analyst I had tons of "stuff" and really it just caused me stress and worry. I liked the idea of having stuff instead of the "stuff itself". I think that's a PG quote. To each his own though.
