Technical Thoughts

I came up with very much for a topic when surfing the net this week.
I could not decide on one to just list, so I went with a couple of them that deals with virtual worlds, DTV, Dvorak on AJAX, radio show about computers, and believe it or not TWit.tv.

Virtual World Anyone??
Second Life is to offer a passport to go to Active Worlds. Better save those Linden Dollars to get one! Active Worlds hosting is rather expensive. This World Servers Pricing List goes up to 4,000,000 sq. meters. I don’t know how much space that takes up on their server but with all the 3D capabilities it must be a lot! That is a big jump from Second Life land pricing.

I must have been the only one try Second Life in the computer lab because I went to get an upgrade and I’m not the administrator, so I spoke to Jim and Kevin?? I just wondered what it was like to have a 3D enviroment with an avatar. No, I could not get the name of Ed Balls on Second Life either darn it! That last name was not listed!

I don’t see how this is can be possible? Entropia Universe will create 10,000 jobs in China?
Here is the article. The Guardian. I know the US trades a lot with China, but I am skeptical about 10,000 jobs?

CRD is (Beijing Cyber Recreation District).This article tells more about China Plans Virtual World for Commerce Maybe Gary can find more information on this since he is in China, and if this is a job creator like they say it is for a virtual world?

We have a new tech standard coming up with Digital TV.

I don’t know if anybody knows this but soon your caveman analog TV will be
no good for rabbit ears. The FCC has forced everyone to go to DTV by Feb. 17 2009.

Anyone who doesn’t want to go from the old TV sets like myself will have to go to get a converter box. That is nice they give a $40 coupon for two boxes. In reality the cable or dish provider will furnish this. They better for the price they charge anymore. So much for the days of the rabbit ears, which reception never came in really good and someone had to stand with the foil paper on the antenna and not move!

Then I viewed another article about DTV from John Dvorak.

John Dvorak always tells it like it is!! If many of you have never heard of him he is a very good writer!

Then he had another article about AJAX and since we had learned about it in IST420, thought it should be posted.

He thinks AJAX is terrible.

He points out 6 things in this article as his laundry list:

1. Too often the drop-down menus are off-kilter. You click on something to find a drop-down menu appearing to the left or the right of where you’d expect it. When you move the cursor to the menu, you take it off the trigger button and the menu goes away before you can get to it.

2. Mismanagement of highlights. This is a common problem with Javascript and mapping the screen for highlighting. You run the pointer over one thing and another thing—the wrong thing—lights up.

3. Screens do not scale. Most AJAX implementations will not scale when you change the font size from smaller to larger. A worse situation is when some fonts scale and others do not, making a mess on the screen.

4. The forward and backward functions of the browser are often rendered useless by changes on a page that never actually change the page, making it hard to find something you were just looking at unless you remember the exact menu sequence.

5. Menu overload. Some AJAX sites have far too many confusing drop-down and pop-up menus scattered all over the screen, making it a nightmare to find what you are looking for. Site maps, which normally cut to the chase on many Web sites, can be useless on AJAX sites.

6. Commercial viability for site monetization is difficult. I don’t want to get too much into this, but let’s just say that the concept of page views does not work with AJAX since the person on the site rarely leaves the one master control page.

So why does anyone use AJAX? If you have some weird concept that requires a user to absolutely, positively remain on one master control page, for whatever reason, then AJAX is great—though I can see Flash working as well. But AJAX is terrible for general-purpose Web site design—worse than Flash ever was. Then again, my complaints may only stem from the fact that most implementations are done by people who simply cannot do it right. It also appears that the number who can do it right is minuscule.

Funny while writing this I got to listen for the first time to Kim Komando on 104.7.

I never knew they had an analog radio show about computers??

That made me think of TechTV which was somewhat like this radio show. So I looked it up on Google. I had always liked to watch G4 before with Leo Laporte when they had a different name as “Tech TV” and called “The Screen Savers”.
Leo is now called the “chief TWit” being on TWit.tv which is a podcast.
I find that a rather amusing name and title. LOL
But he always had a good sense of humor on Tech TV!

Can Election Machine Software be fixed?

I remember when I started to vote and they had the older voting machines. You would walk into the place to vote, sign your name on a paper and somebody gave you a ticket that you had voted. Then you would wait in line and somebody would escort you in front of the voting machine and pull a curtain around you. You had to pull a lever under a candidate to cast your vote. The vote was not really not registered until you pressed a red button and the curtain swung away setting you free like you had become the wizard of oz.

Ok bad joke about the wizard of oz, but what was really funny is that the government being non-uniformity. By this I am talking about punch ballots in Florida. I thought the voting in this country had the same large metal voting machines .

Voting machine closeup that many people voted on and not a punch card. What is wrong with just placing a piece of paper with an “X” and put it in a ballot box?

So now instead of using the old voting machines or placing an “X” on a piece of paper we have the New Electronic Voting Machines since the 2000 election got very messed up.

Has anyone ever thought the punch card system should have been replaced with the old metal voting machines in the first place?

So now in order to turn to a new electronic machine that will cost states and tax payer’s
3.8 billion! Here is a document from NY DRE (Direct Recording Electronic) or Optical Scan Costs. First NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) had to come up with guidelines. NIST guidelines paper

So here are places that did a study of the new voting machines and they say they are vulnerable to attacks.

Princeton Study

Here is the article of 24 pages that tells of it is not full proof.
Princton paper for review

This document comes from a study from the John Hopkins University.
An article about this article.

This paper was on the NIST website and tells how they are set up prior to elections and are paperless. I find it strange that our government has audits for large businesses and like to see a paper trail or audit trail for them, but no paper chase for elections.

They had a movie in which comedian Robin Williams played a presidential candidate in “Man of the Year”. There was a mistake in this parody about election machines. Could this really happen in real life?

Discover magazine has an article as well that tells about that it can be tampered with.

Now we have a government document that talks about an audit or paper trail on the one they use in that state.

This PBS article tells about errors that have occurred on what the government deems as a fit machine.

This article Officials assure voters electronic results are reliable
This is another article almost the same but from AOL

With anything in society there are good things and bad things that can be associated with them. Here is what can be considered the top ten list.

So what are your thoughts and opinions about this? Do you think these these machines are safe, or do you think there is possibility it could have been implemented to soon with possible bugs?