The youth of today must be so pleased: They've FINALLY found something that'll piss off their hip, libertine elders.
Clark, your preferences are legit, but it's hard to see how they're offended by Patrick's design. Yes, he's a bit overfond of generic structural tags with class-based styling (that is, using [span class='title'] where an [h2] tag would be more appropriate), but it's still very user-stylable -- certainly moreso than HTML ever was in practice back in the "golden age".
A richly styled, highly laid-out site isn't incompatible with flexible markup and solid structure.
Nah, the glass is half full: Kerry can get a huge boost from the big "secret society" vote. According to Zogby, Dean's unfavorables are very high amongst secret society members, so having a strong secret society candidate is a big win for the Democrats in this key demographic.
DRM will either be invisible and mostly unbothersome for legitimate use, or it'll be gone. There might be a few years of awkwardness and confusion before that becomes clear, but it will. And note that Microsoft is in business for itself, not as part of some Hollywood consortium; if they think that they could make a few billion more if DRM weren't an issue, DRM won't be an issue.
(And I'll generously assume that people are misspelling my name out of inattention, rather than the misguided belief that long names are funny, and direct them toward the correct spelling in Patrick's entry.)
I'm not talking about Performas with tuner cards, here -- I'm talking about the real convergence that becomes possible with ubiquitous digital media and networks. As an example, look at Microsoft's CES-announced Windows Media Center Extender, which is a somewhat primitive stab at the goal. The idea is, you've got all sorts of digital media, and you want to be able to use it from everywhere, and you don't necessarily want computers everywhere. So, you set up your media server (with the big drives), put all your music, photos, videos, and what-not on there, and then you litter your house with specialized devices that use it.
You can TiVo all your TV on the server, and stream it (or a DVD) out to set-top boxes on any of your TVs (or to the TV itself, once the media streaming technology is standard and mature enough to be built-in); you can have all your music archived, and play it on any stereo system in the house; you can view your photos via a wireless electronic picture frame if you want, on the TV, or whatever. (And, of course, any computer can get in on the viewing action.)
And, once things are networked so thoroughly, it's a pretty quick hop to realize that the Internet is on that same network -- sitting at a friends' house, you don't need to say, "Remind me to bring you that CD next time I see you," you can quickly grab it right from your media server; ditto with showing off your vacation photos, or that great episode of the Simpsons they missed. And once your phone becomes a proper broadband Internet device, you'll be able to grab/stream a playlist to your phone/music player, too.
There are challenging issues to overcome here (not the least of which is how they're going to fit DRM-mania into it), but they're all overcomeable. And once they are overcome, the idea of not having a CD with you will seem very quaint and twencen.
Patrick:
I've expanded and clarified my comments.
Nastiness was not intended, and is explicitly disavowed; that was attempted humor via rhetorical excess.
Will Shetterly:
I continue to maintain, in the face of all sensible opinion, that Vanilla Ice and the Spice Girls are two of the pillars of modern pop music. I think someone once agreed with me, causing me to collapse in shock.
Erik:
I'm not saying Apple is doomed. I'm saying Apple missed a chance to be really big, the way they are with the iPod, but across the board and more-so. I could be wrong -- as I pointed out in Ginger's comments, my annual take for giving strategic direction to tech companies is $0 -- but that's my take.
(And while I have no desire to have a Windows vs. Mac debate, I'll say that I think XP's interface is the most user-friendly, get-stuff-done-oriented, and polished of any OS I've used.)
Do you know, every time I read Electrolite in Lynx (where there are no borders to make it obvious which comments belong to which posters), I always have to look twice to figure out who wrote what. Convention is a powerful force.
As far as I'm concerned, the question is and has always been, how the heck could Bush hope to win? He essentially tied with Gore, and that's back when people thought he was a moderate. Now that he's rather obviously not moderate (and more obviously not competent), he's going to lose support from the center. And I can't imagine anyone who voted for Gore saying, "You know, that Bush really is a great President," so he's not going to get offsetting gains.
Stefan: The documentaries are fine, but they don't have the goshwow jaw-dropping impact of the FOTR documentaries, because... well, it's basically the same movie-making process, so they have a lot less new to say. The most interesting ones, I think, were the Gollum one and the locations one.
If you use a relational DBMS, you get all sorts of things for free that you don't get with a plain text file or BerkeleyDB. Transactions, so that if something breaks while your vote's being recorded, your whole vote can be rolled back and you can try again safely.
I'm not saying that a RDBMS was definitely the best thing here, because I don't know enough about their requirements to even begin to speculate (neither does anyone here who hasn't developed this type of software), but I'm saying that on the face of it, it's not a dumb decision.
ACCESS, though... hoo boy. Access. Wow.
So, Erik, in the system you describe, how do you specify that on some pages, you can only vote for one candidate, and on others you can vote for multiple candidates? How do you handle straight party-line tickets (which some districts may have mandated)? How do you handle write-ins? How do you handle the half-dozen other exceptions that neither of us is aware of, but will certainly pop up when you try to deploy your machine?
Patrick: The data-collection and transmission problem is a subset of the broader problem you describe. Yes, you need to get all that data secured, audited, and so forth, but ALSO you need to present the ballot to the voters in a non-confusing way, collect the votes reliably, and so forth.
If you can't give the voters a UI (whether it be touch-screen, ATM-style, punch-card, Scantron or otherwise) that they can easily understand and use, and if you can't accurately store their votes, you sure as heck can't do much toward reaching that broader goal.
Erik, you're being ridiculously reductionist. Why flexible? Because every voting machine in every district needs to have different positions and different candidates (and, oh, if it's in California, you're legally bound to list them in a particular order that certainly isn't the one you hard-coded in).
And you need to group the candidates and specify how many in each group you can vote for (i.e., only one President, but three district judges), and you probably need to show their party affiliation, and allow a straight party ticket (in some precincts; in others it may be illegal to show that option) (and hey, there's another relationship: party to candidate, so you know who to tick off if the user votes a straight party-line).
You're ignoring all the details and complications that make software actually complex to develop, and pretending that all you're implementing is a pair of counters.
Erik,
In order for the voting machine to work, it needs to know: 1) what positions are being voted on, 2) who the candidates for that position are, and 3) which votes went for each candidate for each office.
There are several relationships here. You have a relationship of candidates to office (the system needs to know this in order to display the ballot properly); you have a relationship of votes to candidate and position (so that the system knows which candidate/position combination a vote was cast for). You don't NEED an RDBMS to manage those relationships, but they do exist, and using a RDBMS to capture them is more elegant than hacking up relations in plain text files.
The answer to "Why an RDBMS?" is "Why NOT an RDBMS?" It's almost always easier, more portable, and more flexible to write software that stores its data in a DBMS than in a flat-file.
But, man, Access.
It's been my experience that people who talk about how easy it is to support old OSes in new apps haven't had to do it. It's a pain in the ass; if you have to do it, you can, but if you can reasonably get away without doing so, you will. (Web developers, do you want to still write pages for Netscape 4? I thoughtn't.)
All I can say is, it's a damn good thing we have the party of responsible, fiscal conservatives in office right now. Between Republicans' long-held insistence on a balanced budget, hard-nosed realization that there aren't any free lunches, and absolute commitment to free trade, the US should be able to solve its problems in a sound fashion.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2004 | 9 |
| 2003 | 18 |
| 2002 | 1 |
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