In the 70s a book called "The High Frontier" laid out this technology. The guy who wrote it had a lot of the patents on things like the technology for the european bullet trains and what-not.
Mr. Bill's luck with DOS was that the guy that wrote CPM wanted a vacation and said, "Talk to me in a month". This is where Bill hit the ground running. He got a license for QDOS that he regurgitated to IBM. Before the PC launched he acquired the complete rights to QDOS. He may have tried to sell DOS to IBM. Never heard anything about that.
... But what he did do was get IBM to agree to let him to sell his own version of DOS parallel to theirs. That is where the marketing genius bit comes in.
Read his book "The Road Ahead". I found the bit about why he thinks VHS beat Betamax to be very telling. The idea of "critical mass" really explains the career of Mr. Bill. I know he meant the book to show his glowing vision of the future, but if read with a critical eye it actually explains how dangerous he can be to a herd of raccoons...
Mr. Bill didn't luck out with DOS. What the product does isn't very important. How you release it into the world is important. The man is a marketing [evil] genius. He has a feel for which way people will jump and an understanding about how people select things. He knows that as a group consumers are raccoons. Give us something shiny and our eyes glaze over, we grab it, and we won't let go.
Obviously Zune is poop but watch how he markets it. He will probably strong arm some large distributors to put it in front of lots of raccoons and it will sell more then it should. Steve Jobs isn't bad at feeding raccoons either so I doubt that it will really make a dent in the iPod.
The place where you will see the raccoons go really nutso is Vista. The thing is unbelievably bereft of any real content but it is chock full of shiny things. Think of raccoons cross bred with lemmings... (it isn't a pretty picture)
Going out onto the web is like going out into the world. Anything and everything is there.
Do you let your kids head off into the world unsupervised? A child has no business being on a computer in an unsupervised location. No computer in their bedroom, etc...
It is robotics. Computer controlled actions and "emotions". It isn't artificial intelligence with voice recognition. Check out the Discovery Channel blip:
You are making the assumption that the Linux base used for a voting machine would be getting updates from the 'real world' distribution. There is nothing that says you have to use outside code after you start developing. In fact I can't imagine any project manager who would accept any outside code once the OS base had been selected.
Electronic voting machines are all about eliminating variables. The only variable in the system should be the the candidates.
The biggest objection to Microsoft is that you are working from code that is doing things that you don't know about. In addition Microsoft isn't going to give you an explanation either...
Someone here mentioned that HEX code wouldn't be more secure. If it was as large a bloated as a higher level language that might be true. The hole in that argument is that large monolithic code by its very nature has all sorts of hidden surprises. Small machine/assembler code programs don't have fat to hide surprises. Why do we need a huge fat GUI for a voting system? There are much easier and secure ways to do this.
The basic problem with every part of this is the logical flow of the overall voting process hasn't been analyzed in an open forum to break the problem down to the most basic, simple, and secure process.
It is nice when something comes along with information that you need but this technology won't come anywhere close to replacing a real book, manual, newspaper, or even a stack of printouts. It is mostly hype and is only a granular change from what is already available.
Here is the problem: Your eyes and brain are designed to gather and analyze an obscene quantity of information in a real 3D world. You can grab a 100 page manual (or some other quantity of printed material) and flip through it in a couple seconds and find where the info is that you need to examine in more detail. You can also read much faster from a plain paper page. You can't "skim" with any efficiency on any digital display.
Blind love of technology that makes us give up very well proven methods and technology is a real problem. A lot of the people reading this have never seen a card catalog in a library. The total replacement of card catalogs by search computers is one of the greatest losses to research in a library. Search engines are nice but the ability to flip extremely rapidly through the cards would yield serendipitous discoveries that are now lost with search engines. It is a great loss.
Until the technology arrives that allows epaper to be in the form of a multiple sheet book that you can flip through this is no replacement for paper. It is just another display. Ho hum...
Slashdot Mirror
They give them SOME of the info they need...
3 months before the OS releases in stores.
I'm sure that they can write a completely new release-ready product in 3 months. Plenty of time for coding, testing and maybe even a beta release...
Yeah, right.
Microsoft makes sure they have an advantage.
Like my sister always says...
"Happily Married... No kids!"
Like any ever actually called Microsoft for support...
..... brrrring ... brrrring
(much later...)
" Microsoft Helpdesk... please insert all cash for the first three minutes..."
"Why must I be surrounded by frickin' idiots?"
"So it uses air to keep the disc rigid... Does it suck or blow?"
It's interchangeable. New technology generally sucks and blows...
The difference is the "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" was a Sci-Fi book. (A very good book but it is still fiction.)
e -Apogee/dp/189652267X
The "High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space" by Gerard K. O'Neill is a non-fiction detailed explination of how to commercially exploit space. http://www.amazon.com/High-Frontier-Colonies-Spac
In the 70s a book called "The High Frontier" laid out this technology. The guy who wrote it had a lot of the patents on things like the technology for the european bullet trains and what-not.
"Actually he did luck out with MS DOS. ..."
... But what he did do was get IBM to agree to let him to sell his own version of DOS parallel to theirs. That is where the marketing genius bit comes in.
Mr. Bill's luck with DOS was that the guy that wrote CPM wanted a vacation and said, "Talk to me in a month". This is where Bill hit the ground running. He got a license for QDOS that he regurgitated to IBM. Before the PC launched he acquired the complete rights to QDOS. He may have tried to sell DOS to IBM. Never heard anything about that.
Read his book "The Road Ahead". I found the bit about why he thinks VHS beat Betamax to be very telling. The idea of "critical mass" really explains the career of Mr. Bill. I know he meant the book to show his glowing vision of the future, but if read with a critical eye it actually explains how dangerous he can be to a herd of raccoons...
Mr. Bill didn't luck out with DOS. What the product does isn't very important. How you release it into the world is important. The man is a marketing [evil] genius. He has a feel for which way people will jump and an understanding about how people select things. He knows that as a group consumers are raccoons. Give us something shiny and our eyes glaze over, we grab it, and we won't let go.
Obviously Zune is poop but watch how he markets it. He will probably strong arm some large distributors to put it in front of lots of raccoons and it will sell more then it should. Steve Jobs isn't bad at feeding raccoons either so I doubt that it will really make a dent in the iPod.
The place where you will see the raccoons go really nutso is Vista. The thing is unbelievably bereft of any real content but it is chock full of shiny things. Think of raccoons cross bred with lemmings... (it isn't a pretty picture)
Going out onto the web is like going out into the world. Anything and everything is there.
Do you let your kids head off into the world unsupervised? A child has no business being on a computer in an unsupervised location. No computer in their bedroom, etc...
It is robotics. Computer controlled actions and "emotions". It isn't artificial intelligence with voice recognition. Check out the Discovery Channel blip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tlqvdAaQNE
You are making the assumption that the Linux base used for a voting machine would be getting updates from the 'real world' distribution. There is nothing that says you have to use outside code after you start developing. In fact I can't imagine any project manager who would accept any outside code once the OS base had been selected.
Electronic voting machines are all about eliminating variables. The only variable in the system should be the the candidates.
The biggest objection to Microsoft is that you are working from code that is doing things that you don't know about. In addition Microsoft isn't going to give you an explanation either...
Someone here mentioned that HEX code wouldn't be more secure. If it was as large a bloated as a higher level language that might be true. The hole in that argument is that large monolithic code by its very nature has all sorts of hidden surprises. Small machine/assembler code programs don't have fat to hide surprises. Why do we need a huge fat GUI for a voting system? There are much easier and secure ways to do this.
The basic problem with every part of this is the logical flow of the overall voting process hasn't been analyzed in an open forum to break the problem down to the most basic, simple, and secure process.
It is nice when something comes along with information that you need but this technology won't come anywhere close to replacing a real book, manual, newspaper, or even a stack of printouts. It is mostly hype and is only a granular change from what is already available.
Here is the problem: Your eyes and brain are designed to gather and analyze an obscene quantity of information in a real 3D world. You can grab a 100 page manual (or some other quantity of printed material) and flip through it in a couple seconds and find where the info is that you need to examine in more detail. You can also read much faster from a plain paper page. You can't "skim" with any efficiency on any digital display.
Blind love of technology that makes us give up very well proven methods and technology is a real problem. A lot of the people reading this have never seen a card catalog in a library. The total replacement of card catalogs by search computers is one of the greatest losses to research in a library. Search engines are nice but the ability to flip extremely rapidly through the cards would yield serendipitous discoveries that are now lost with search engines. It is a great loss.
Until the technology arrives that allows epaper to be in the form of a multiple sheet book that you can flip through this is no replacement for paper. It is just another display. Ho hum...