I'm one ofthe old dogs. I have to admit that App development and such is not my kind of things. But I do have experience. LOADS of it. When I see the fundamental mistakes by young "talented" programmers, it makes me cringe.

Just a few days ago, there was a kickoff meeting for a new project. This project needs multi-user support on the long run - everyone in the team admits that. And access control, with all its implications like "how to I check a password", "how do I store a password", "which kind of permission do I need to call this function". Which they never ever did before. None of them had ever heard of books like "Applied Cryprography". There is a copy here, on my shelf. Actually, it is my second book, the first was worn down due to heavy use. All they cared for was "Licence Management", but I'm not sure if they understand how this works properly. I offered them to ride piggyback on the existing licence management scheme I've implemented in my part of the system, but this was probably too unsexy, because it cannot add licences on the fly over the web, at least not "just so".

My experience tells me (and anyone who has been around for long enough) that any software that will need this kind of multiuser support needs to have this built-in from the very beginning. The very concepts of the software must be aware of the possibility that e.g. a call might fail for lack of permissions. Communication protocols must be designed in a way that they guarantee to a sufficient degree that one side has proper identification presented to the other side to be permitted to do this, and don't that. This is nothing that can be added lateron without SERIOUS headaches, problems, and, worst of all, risks. Windows9x was the living prrof of such a mistake.

Reply from the "young talent": Implementing multi-user is too time consuming at the moment, we will add it later. *FACEDESK*

Math, and its application, never was a strength of the economists. Nor was or is logical reasoning or application of scientific methods.

Ages ago, I made a fake economics whitepaper. It looked like the stuff I've seen in their libraries, the text was equally braindead, and it contained a lot of made-up formulas. The formulas were completely irrelevant (as was the text), but if anyone had followed the pattern to read the "input data" in the text before and actually pass it through the shown calculations, he would have noticed a) that the actual result did not match whatever was written in the text, and b) that all formulas resulted in an 8-digit number (with the decimal point in varying places) like 1991.0401 or 199104.01 (I'm no longer sure aboute the "1991" part, it could have been "1992" or "1993", don't care).

Of course this ended up in their library, along with a matching card in the index (they still had a paper-based index back then).

I actually got asked by someone if he could base his doctoral thesis on my "phenomenal" findings. I told him to do the math, and contact me again if he still considered this a good idea.

I built a C64 expansion card containing 256KB of EPROM and 256KB or RAM that I could use via bank switching. As I had no fancy layout tool back then, I had to draw the layout in a paint program (taking into account that the nine needle dot matrix printer had a 216x256 raster!), matching both sides manually, print it, find a photocopier that actually reduced the size by 50% without bending it totally out of shape (I learned the hard way that photocopiers back then had the habit of being a bit fish.eyed when it comes to resizing), make the PCB, and drill a gazillion holes with a hand-kranked drill. Most vias were placed wherver there were wired elements or sockets, but quite a few vias had to be made by soldering a bit of wire on both sides. A horrible hack job in retrospective, but it worked flawlessly from the beginning!

Yes, I am aware that pigeons are birds and therefor a different domain as mammals, and that there might be some differences in the biochemistry here, but I hope they work something out to get those flying rats under control.

The VW (and probably others, I don't believe that only VW cheated - What miracle did they all work in unison to be 30x better with emissions than VW?) problem is the engine, not the general "Car Intelligence". I believe that the VW scandal will lead to more electric cars in the future (not electic replacing diesel, but a shift where gasoline enters the diesel domain, while at the other end electric engines cut their margin of the gasoline market).

What will happen in the future, though, is that the certification authorities will want to see, examine and understand the source code. Which will not only prolong the certification, but also make it way more expensive. It will also force the car manufacturers to cleanly separate the engine control domain from the other control domains in the car, so they can limit the skope of openness to this one domain only.

Whether an Apple gaming console is any good or not is totally besides the point. If Apple builds and sells something, there are more than enought brainwashed idiots (AKA Apple disciples) standing in line on release date to buy it.

Look at the iWatch - A nice attempt to look cool, but everyone ignored the fact that current technology (even Apples) cannot deliver what a useable smartwatch would need. Still, they sold quite a lot of them, until the market reality cought up and finally found that the concept is bonkers from the very beginning.

So if Apple builds a gaming console, of course hoards of idiots will queue on release night just because its Apple, not because its a useable product. As with the iWatch, they will be disappointed shortly after, as CandyCrush on a TV will not be the thing that would drive a console market. The top games and game development companies are already tied to real consoles with an existing market and infrastructure, so Apple would have to start from scratch in a market that will fight any newcomer tooth and nail.

TL;DR: Apple does not live of phones or consoles, but on idiots with too much money. Quality or common sense have long ceased to be arguments here.

Even with moders algorithms for remapping blocks, one of the points that keeps me laeving SSDs by the wayside is that they only have a limited number of erase cycles. The numbers have improved over the year, but it is still a kind of storage that has an upper limit of write accesses, making it undesirable for all those small fast writes (swap, database tables, filesystem transaction logs) where the speed would have made them really interesting. For me, the introduction of those flash drives has just replaced the problem of mechanical failure with another, IMHO unacceptable limitation.

Does anybody know how this new drive type rates in regarsd to write/erase cycle limitations?

If they ask you for your political opinion in the streets or on the phone, most likely the result will never see the light of day. Because the vast majority of polls are commissioned by political parties or candidates for their benefit, not yours or the public. They basically want to identify target groups and know if and how to spend campaign resources to turn around the target group in their direction. And they won't identify their customers, so you never know whether you are helping your preferred party or candidate, or people opposed to your opinion.

If your opinion is the one their customers like, chances are that your candidate will not show up in you area anyway because this would just be a waste time and money for the campaign. If it is the other way, they will pest you with more advertizing and get the candidate you oppose into town to shake hands, hug babies, and blatantly lie to the public.

So tell me again: How does the lack of quality of a political poll affect you personally?

The poll results you get presented in the news are a waste of time and money, anyway. The cheap and outdated method of sitting on ones ass and just calling landlines at random is a good way of getting an unreliable and biased result from the start. And the news channel will have different poll results to choose from and will present the one that manipulates you in their own political direction. Or do you really expect a professional, competent, and neutral presentation of unbiased political facts from a news network like e.g. FOX? If so, there is a bridge I would like sell to you, real cheap - I inherited it from my uncle, a Nigerian prince!

Most incidents and irregularities with paper votes are quite small-scale, and usually they can be resolved by re-examining the ballot paper. There might be some clearly invalid votes, but that is expected, either becasue the voter intended to do this or was incapable to cast a correct vote. Yes, with a good manipulation skill one can cast two votes into the ballot box insetad of one. But as the vote relies on a physical medium, manipulations are quite difficult, especially if you want to mass-shift an election. Dropping a thousand votes into a ballot box while fixing the voters list to account for them without anybody present taking offence (or even notice) is HARD. And this is just one voting station. One of the ideas behind electronic voting systems is that you can drop in or change a thousand votes without an election official noticing this.

There might be disputes over paper ballots, but there are and will increasingly be dispuded (and undisputed!) mistakes on electronic ballots on a much larger scale.

I've read the stuff from David Chaum, and it is bullshit. Sorry to be so harsh, but you'll lose secrecy if you want verifyability - this is part of his method, and he even states this so. So even in a perfect world, this would not work. It might give you a verifyable vote, but not a democratic one when compromizing a key factor. Sorry, David, but you'll need a spoonful of reality.

Many years ago our company was asked if we could develop electronic voting systems for elections (we do, in fact we invented electronic voting systems decades ago for conferences and audience interactions, so we basically were a logical choice). The customer intended to buy a complete electronic voting infrastructure for a whole country, so this was very tempting. I was tasked to research into this topic, and have examined this very thoroughly from every angle possible.

My conclusion: There is no, absolutely NO way to get the level of democratic voting quality from electronic ballot systems that is comparable to classic paper ballots. The risks are immense, the gain neglectable.

The electronic system is in no way verifyable by the average voter or voting administrator. Anybody can look into a ballot box before the vote starts and see that it is empty, people can watch over the whole thing to verify that everybody casts only one vote, and wittnesses and recounts can see that every vote from the box is counted for the right candidate. But nobody can do this in an electronic voting system. Yes, they can click on a button and the system tells them "0 votes in ballot box", but they cannot verify this. The voters cann press "A", and the machine tells you that your vote was cast for "A", thankyouverymuch, but internally it could just drop the vote or count it for "B" or "C". Nobody could check this. At the end, the machine would display some numbers for A, B, and C, and you have to believe them.

And this is just the logic part of the problem. On top of that there is the question of technical reliability and user errors. There have been voting systems with touchscreens that needed to be calibrated before use, and there have been several cases where mis-calibration led to votes being cast for the wrong candidate/party (just as an example, whoever knows a technical system will know thousand ways it could fail). How does the system cope with a power loss during voting? Has the vote you just cast been counted or not? And what about the ease of vote? You and I can cope with "press candidate button, verify choice, press submit button", but an astonishing number of people can not (anyone who ever did tech support will not be that surprised).

All the key requirements to a democratic vote cannot be established simultaneously with an electronic voting system: Verifyability, integrity, secrecy. Yes, you can do a lot in the realm of integrity (like they do in Vegas for the one-armed bandits), but the stakes are way higher and so is the temptation to fix the game in a way that will go undetected even by the toughest inspection (and you cannout tough-inspect every electronic ballot box after every election!). And if you want a really reliable system, you will loose the secrecy factor. If you want secrecy, the verifyability and integrity will go down the drain. It is in fact worse than the business classic "Iron Triangle" (Fast, Good, Cheap, pick any two), it is more or less a "pick one". And for a true democratic vote, you will need all three.

The only advantages that an electronic ballot system can give are the results seconds after the closing of the ballot station and no problematic votes where people have to decide whether a vote is valid or not. Thats why the politicians LOVE electronic voting - it gives them nice results in time for the evening news. But do you really want to sell away the integrity of the last democratic instrument left for the citizens for saving a few man-hours in each ballot station? And I'd rather wait for the morning paper with the final results from a paper-based, democratically obtained election result than seeing grinning polititians congratulating themselves in the evening news, claiming their win from a quite doubtful, error- and manipulation-prone process.

In the end, I had a long and intense talk with our company founder and CEO and could convince him that electronic voting is a bad idea for democracy, and he communicated this very result to the customer. And as the customers intention was to have a democratially sound election system, he agreed.

Well, definitely not before we stop voting electronically. It is simply impossible for an electronic voting system to fulfil all criteria of a democratic votoing process.

I once was tasked with designing a good, democratic voting system. I've analysed the problem in depth and my conclusion was that an electronic election that is up to democratic standards is not possible at all. I managed to convince our CEO and the project was scrapped.

In no way an average person can verify the integrity of an electronic voting process. Maybe a few handful of people could, if they would get access to the source code and complete build environment, but it is a tedious process, and errors will be missed. Complete mathematical verification of a system is hard even without having a graphical user interface. And even if the code is correct, errors, user failures of election officials as well as voters, and fraud will happen. And between the werification of a sample machine in a lab and being able to verify that any machine in the field has not been tampered with is an unsurmountable gap. Keep in mind - this is just the implementation site of things. The logical part is a REAL mess. Anonymity, accountability, verifyability kick each others in the you-know-what regardless from where you start - a lot of requirements are simply mutually exclusive when implemented electronically that, on the other hand, are easy and inherent in a paper ballot.

America spends billions on political advertising, but they want to save a few man-hours per polling station every other year while endangering the democratic principles of the election process while opening the door wider than ever before for errors and fraud. And the electronic fraud is harder to spot, verify and correct than any attempt on fixing a paper ballot. Every idiot can spot an urn that is already half filled when the poll starts. Try do this reliable on an electronic vorting system.

> A working implementation needs to be patented.
And he tried that. The patent was refused because people said it was physically impossible. So he has to rely on trade secrets.

If the naysayers weren't so adamant about this being impossible, there would be a patent. And a patent is supposed to contain sufficient information to replicate and validate a technology. Everybody with sufficient knowledge and cash could easily proof or disproof the claims.

Who would be harmed by awarding Rossi a patent on what he claimed? If it is a fake, he would own a patent on something that does not work. If anybody falls for that, tough luck, but there are always people who buy bridges from someone.

If Rossi has something real, sticking with the trade secret is a smart move, regardless of the naysayers claims.

Now I've read the report and I've read the (nearly all completely negative) high-scoring posts. What strikes me is that almost anyone complaining obvously hasn't read and understood the report. Some quite obviously only read a few pages, if any, and most complainers and fraud-callers haven't made it to the appendix. Applying knee-jerk reactions to potential findings is not a proven and accepted scientific method.

Some claim that this would be an "energy from nothing"-machine - nobody said that. The scientists in the report stated in the report that the change in the isotopic distribution was more than enough to account for the surplus energy.

Some claim that they should have used DC, or that there must have been hidden wires somewhere. This claim came up after the first report, and in this second report the scientists took this possibility into account (measuring whether there is a DC offset anywhere). To me it looks like this and the double measurements they undertook are more than sufficient to give confidentiality into the data provided.

Some claim that the output heat should have been measured in a calometric bomb. But so far, in the tests about this kind of device (and similar ones from other sources - yes, there is not only a Mr. Rossi in this field), they "only" measured infrared and calculated radiation and convection energy. So if several different groups who have the one or other level of expertise in calorimetric measurements use IR instead of the calorimetric bomb, might it be that they had a reason to do this (and no, I'm mot saying that they are into the supposed "fraud"). The calorimetric bomb has its limits, and, beyond these limits, you have to rely on different, proven methods, which they did.

Some claim that it couldn't have happened because no radiation was found, as current theories require radiation to be present. Just like people once claimed that the sun could only burn for 5000 years, as there was absolutely no way for any reaction being able to provide that much power (they considered the suns' mass to be made up of burning coal). It took humanity some years to find out about that "nucelar power" thing that couldn't be explaind by the old theories.

Some claim that he only did that to trick investors to pay money for it. But he already HAS a large investor backing him, there is no need for more. And I doubt that the invester would hant to share him or his invention.

And no, this is NOT the same as Pons/Fleischman. Anyone claiming this is doing bullshit big time as he has not understand (or even read) a single page on the topic. Pons/Fleischman was about energy surplus while doing electrolysis of (heavy) water with palladium cathodes, and failed to reproduce because some key factors were incompletely presented. Mr. Rossis Ni/Cu reactor is something entirely different. Putting it in the same cathegory of "its fraud because we fail to understand it, and we don't want to understand it because it must be fraud" is not really a good scientific approach.

So, please keep the whole thing rational. If you think that this is all fraud, just show where the scientists in this experiment made mistakes. So far, all I've seen is quarterback-level reasoning along the lines of "I don't understand thingy, thingy is wrong". Get your acts together, act like engineers and scientists, or just shut up.

I consider those forums an advantage. Before I purchase a product, I can look into the forums and see whether there is trouble ahead or not.
I see if the product has its issues or not, and I see if support is active or passive - something I can hardly check with traditional support options where first class support is always promised in bright colors, but not always delivered (no more Canon products in my house, thankyouverymuch!).
Sometimes there are even highly dedicated people from the community who enjoy helping people for fun. I don't know whether that asian guy in the SiLabs forums is still around, but he gave good and well.thought advice even for complicated problems. In the end, I go such a forum to have a problem solved. If the support comes from an official source or from another customer (if he has proven trustworthy, of course) does not always matter.

Having a good suupport is crucial for tech business, whether companies realize this or not. Last year I bought a stack of GPU cards for a project from ASUS, had trouble, needed support and support failed, I returned them and bought the Gigabyte version (with the same chip). That was a los for one company and win for another directly related to the quality of support.