Unless those trails are voter verified, nobody has any way to determine if the trail matches the actual votes cast by the voters.
This is the core problem with electronic voting.
We either need to put the actual vote on paper, or make sure the machine printed votes match voter intent, or the election cannot be trusted.
I still get to work with MCAD on SGI.
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And it's a damn cool envoronment to work in. I like multi-cpu systems feeding groups of users. All the admin complexity required for higher-end cad can be centralized in one place, right along with the data. For version control on large models, this works very well.
Users can run whatever they want on the desktop so long as they have a decent X server running.
These kinds of solutions are still competetive, per user, when second hand hardware is used, but support from the MCAD vendors, for this mode of computing is beginning to seriously wane. Just try calling support for an issue on a box like this --they have no clue.
I'm just rambling, I suppose.
If these guys would get off their arse and produce a Linux port, they might just find the market will still consider many advantages of multi-user computing, particularly when data management issues are factored into the equation.
Each one of them says the same thing however. Too many Linuxes, how do we support them all.
What they don't get is that they don't have to. They could pick one Linux, such as SuSE, for example. All they need to do is make sure their stuff runs solid on that particular Linux, then let their customers do what they want. Open OSes mean lots of choices. The fact that they are UNIXey means, multiple Linuxes can all work together to provide solutions to the end user, without them even knowing.
Maybe some day, once they have all been bitten by the whole win32 deal enough times, we might see this begin to happen...
Some of the Sun folks I know, have told me about some pretty cool stuff. (It's on Sparc, so I worry a little.) And I have the highest respect for Sun people. They love what they do and support their stuff like no other.
I suppose my post was a bit too much in the gloom and doom department.
Somewhere inside Sun there probably is some niche they can just nail to the wall. Probably a couple. Their success will depend on if and when they can come to consensus on whatever it is.
Sgi is doing exactly what you said. They do not make commidity hardware. Their stuff is so far from that...
Their Itanium machines are full, low latency, modular NUMA machines. Thousands of CPU's running on ONE OS IMAGE. Yep, run top and cpu(s) > 1000! When you purchase one of these, you get a small army of SGI folks on site to literally build your supercomputer, just the way you want it, tuned just for your problems.
You cannot get that any other way and that is the brilliance of Bishop's business vision. What he did was make SGI able to survive on that, because there will always be a market for that.
The modular part is cool too. If you want, you can break your computer into several computers. This is very important as the supercomputers age. They will be replaced with other supercomputers. However if you happened to buy an SGI supercomputer, the massive machine can be broken down into little computers to be used in lots of places, or sold to others as smaller units, or repurposed for other problems. Nobody offers that in the way SGI does.
I miss them in the lower tier markets though. SGI computers are a lot of fun to work with. This is why most people say SGI is dead, and for most of them, sadly, they are.
Anyway, your point is totally valid, but it just does not apply to SGI, that's all.
The SGI core vision is technical computing. In this area they are continuing to innovate, and quite nicely I might add, and make money. The really big players consider SGI for new projects.
Does this make them the money they used to make in their workstation heyday? No. They still make very powerful workstations, but only a small niche needs them and continues to buy them.
They are not dead however, just gone back to the world of big contracts, near impossible problems and non-disclosure. That's where they started. Most of us don't see that transpire for obvious reasons, but that means little about how SGI is doing.
The CAD world right now is stuck on parametric modeling kernels, with a couple of exceptions I-deas and Catia. These kernels cannot do very many operations in parallel. This means CAD is driven by raw, single CPU compute speed and system memory size. Non Intel UNIX systems have big memory, but fail in the raw compute area. (Most cad computations are integer, not fp) Sun, HP, IBM, SGI, can all handle very large models, but cannot easily recompute them.
Most CAD companes are pushing win32 systems right now because the compute is the best. Memory is a problem, but they program around that by giving users lots of management tools to let them better focus on the parts of the model that matter.
Linux, should be able to get the best of both worlds, but only one serious port exists: PTC Pro/Engineer.
There are plenty of people running CAD on Unix. I administer a few of these systems. They are great, but getting slower by the minute... The administrative advantages of UNIX make up for a lot, particularly when you can get many users on a single box, with data managment. (Like I-deas does) However, if raw compute is getting in the way, UNIX is not an option.
That kills Sun, for the most part.
On a side note: UGS, Dassaut, where are your frikin Linux ports!
About getting back to their [Sun's] roots...
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A few years ago, I attened an SGI conference in Las Vegas. Didn't lose too much that time either... Anyway, the point of this conference was to communicate the SGI vision going forward. This was right about the time SGI got done getting their ass kicked in the win32 / Intel space.
Sgi said they needed to return to their roots too, just like Sun is saying now. For SGI this meant, taking their best tech forward while cutting costs on everything else. Good message, seemed the right thing to do.
Well, how are they going to cut costs? Enter the chief scientist, an Asian GUY Goh, I believe. Very personable, very smart, very excited about --- Linux and OSS.
The SGI plan was very simple. Keep IRIX doing what it does best. At the same time, begin working on Linux. SGI learned they had to accept the community as a partner. This means if they submit something and it gets rejected, they either don't do it that way, or submit again, or maintain it as an add on, until the community catches up with them in that particular area. The idea being that either their solution would be accepted, or the community would evolve one that SGI could use.
(This does have to do with SUN, bear with me!)
So, SGI did go back to their roots, worked with the OSS community, and ended up once again able to do what they do best; namely, low latency, NUMA supercomputing. They are 2nd on the top 500 again, for now, and their flagship machine runs Linux!
At the time, I thought: "uh Oh, there goes SGI..." You can say what you want about IRIX, but it does what it does very very well. Linux looked impossible at the time. But it worked, and worked very well for them. SGI lost a lot of smart people, but obviously kept the ones that mattered. There was one other significant thing: After the banquet, I got a chance to talk with Bishop. Very interesting fellow in that he is totally geeky, but has solid business sense, and a direct line to NASA... He told me SGI was going to commit to this new course no matter what. Half way was not going to cut it. SGI makes the lions share of its money making powerful systems that do things that are near-impossible to do. Anything else would only prolong the death spiral. That meant getting rid of the baggage in measured steps, then build again lean 'n mean.
So, now we look at Sun.
All of SGI was committed to doing one thing, well actually two: Building their Linux / Itanium platform while doing everything they can for IRIX / Mips. To this day, they have not deviated from this vision at all and it is now paying off, just like Bishop said it would.
Sun? Lots of infighting, no core vision to drive forward. Until they fix that, they are doomed to fail because nobody is going to pay for 'almost the greatest' solutions, which is what Sun is selling right now.**
**Please don't flame for that. Sun makes good stuff, but they don't have clear niches where they are the absolute best and where there are few to no alternative solutions.) Massive SGI NUMA, mixed with graphics, insane I/O, and big low latency memory machines solve a class of problems that nothing else solves. There are only a few players, none as mature as SGI is. Ok, back to my points...
Sun needs to cut the baggage. Carrying Solaris forward is not going to be the answer. The cool hardware features, redundancy, hot swap, etc... can be solved in other ways. That means Solaris really does not have anything the market must have and that's the key to this whole thing.
SGI realized this with IRIX. However, some bits were needed on the Linux side, such as their XFS filesystem. The few bits we are clamoring for, Sun wants to keep tight hold of and this is a mistake. The market is not going to rebuild onto Solaris, all the work done with Linux, just to get Java, or redundancy, for example. Instead, they are going to just figure out how to do it with Linux, just as they have everything else.
The SGI approach at least got their technology in wide us
I've got a big family. Food is a pretty big expense. Those cards save me a lot, so I use them.
Get a big freezer and some storage. Doing this has saved my family a *lot* of money over the years. We hit the sales hard at each store. The extra storage means we don't often run low on items and can wait for the sales.
I'm sure they just love my profile because it shows 90 percent or better deep discount items.
For the quickies, like milk and such, we also use the mom 'n pop stores. Their price is generally a bit higher, but they do know my name when I walk in. To me, that's worth a lot.
The tourist question is not so easy to answer. Getting other states to adopt this is going to be very tough. That means lots of drivers not paying the taxes. However, I really don't want to debate these questions, because they are not the real point.
The point is to ask the reps lots of questions. Demand responses, then ask more questions about those, all the while making it known that you are a voter and a voter that knows lots of other voters.
Elected officials rarely hear from more than a very small set of those they serve. When an issue gets loud and it consumes their time and staff resources, that issue gets far more consideration.
It's really the only check we have against industry lobby influences and budget constraints. If they think they can just get more money, they will.
Now, I am not always for the lowest tax, but the tax needs to have a clear need and be well invested for a return I can see. This also means existing taxes need to show this being true before new ones are acceptable.
There are a lot more questions that can be asked too. How about commercial vehicles? They do the most damage, how do they fit into this new tax? What to the companies think about this? Perhaps the lobby might be on the peoples side on this one, particularly if a stupid staffer goes on record saying the tax will have to apply to them too!
It's about noise. Make it and that goes a long way toward nipping stupid things like this in the bud, early before they get traction.
Those popping and draining sounds were caused by something. People just don't make that kind of stuff up.
All I am saying is that you might want to reconsider an opinion like that without some more data and direct observation...
Wouldn't it be horrible to have someone die from a statement like yours? My mother in law died from heart failure. Doctors dismissed her symptoms. (Yes, several of them over the period of about a year, leading up to the final straw.) She got up, started doing her paper route. Felt pains, thought it was heartburn. Destroyed all but 15 percent of her potential heart function.
Had the doctors erred on the side of caution, she would have done things differently.
They glow. Seriously, that's why I think they are cool. Anything that warms up has a nice feel to it. Old radios sound very interesting as they come to life. After the click of the power switch, first nothing, then a low hum that is replaced by subtle noise as it drops, then finally the audio creeps into the foreground. Soon after comes the smell of dust burning..
I had a chance to build some vacuum tube projects in the late 80s. (We had lots of tubes and nothing else to do.) Made a power supply for the older speakers that featured electromagnets on the back to revive an old tube radio.
It makes for a nice little life lesson too. The older ones are annoyed because, at that age they don't want to rock the boat. The younger ones just think it's cool to get to buy stuff.
God I hate retail, mostly because I refuse to take shit. Maybe I'll add some having kids at the retail/fast food store tales to my journal...
You hit the nail right on the head. I picked up on this a while ago and love it!
This is how it started for me:
Safeway ran a sale a while back on whole chickens. Now I have a big family, so this is worth doing because you get a lot from one chicken. Went to the store and literally filled a shopping cart full of them. Nothing posted anywhere said anything about limits. When I got to the checkout they said that was too many. (They had a ton of them and only a 2 day sale.) They had lots of new items in the store that day, along with the usual food demo people showing off expensive items.
Clearly they were thinking most people would grab a couple chickens along with a number of other items to balance out the sale. Clearly they were wrong. I've got a big freezer. BTW, if you have a family, this is probably one of the very best investments you can make. The food savings made possible pay for it in just a few months. By the time you don't need it anymore, you will literally save thousands.
I asked how many was too many and the checker actually said they flag high percentage savings. Anything over about 30 percent savings needed to have an override by the manager, unless the dollar amount of the total purchase was less than about $100.00 or so, in which case they could "just let it go through". As if that's a favor to me! Anyway, I found out they also flag specific savings, meat being one of them. My cart was only meat and the chicken was about 60 percent discounted. Total red flag, no doubt about it.
Manager came over and said their policy was about 10 items at that discount rate. (After looking at what I wanted to purchase) I needed to go put the rest back and only buy 10. When I asked them to show me where they had that published, they said it was in their corporate operations manual and that it was not for consumers (read cash cows) to see. When I asked why they just did not specify the limit, he told me that depends on inventory at hand. WTF?!? Obviously they had plenty of chicken, so something else was at work here; namely, I was getting too good of a deal. Time to just get this thing done and go home.
I told them I was going to have to make lots of small purchases then. They got petty and said I would have to go through the line for each bundle of chicken. Busy day, pretty long lines, with mine getting pretty long in particular. The lady behind was pissed! (She did have two chickens that I could see along with a couple hundered dollars in non-sale items.)
Lined up the kids, handed them some cash, and began to pile all the chicken into little 10 unit piles. Might as well play ball right?
The look on the managers face was priceless! He actually said it was unfair to put him in a position to have to tell the kids no! I said simply, "then I suggest you don't."
After about 10 seconds, I heard a murmured "fuck it", followed by a hasty conversation with the checker. Soon we were on our way with the chicken, all in one transaction. I have a receipt with a 60 percent savings totalling over $100.00. The computer would not allow his override, another person had to come over and use theirs.
That happened right after they started their club card thing. Since then, I have been through the same deal many times with no regrets. We actually have two cards. Whenever I use that card, it gets flagged all the time, but the other one doesn't. I just know there it's stamped "non-preferred customer". The name on that card does not get any offers in the mail either.
Another pet peeve: Stores that fuck with the per-unit pricing to make more expensive items harder to distinguish. They will use some odd unit to make the mental math difficult combined with "sales" on the expensive ones that actually still cost more!
Sorry for the rant, but I'm with you all the way. All things being equal, they are quite happy to take your money. Seems fair enough to grab some of theirs as well.
for reading too much into your post. Didn't mean a flame --I am feeling very strongly right now about the matter. It's hard to trust US elections and the elected, for that matter, while this issue goes ignored and unresolved.
Half of what I wrote was for others who happen to read the thread. Sorry about that too. --BTW, thanks for the binaries suggestions. I am researching a paper on this topic right now. Working through the trust issues on those will be helpful.
The paper trail won't help, in almost all cases, because there is no record of what the voter actually did. --We only have a record of what the machine thought the voter did, or worse what somebody told the machine to record about the voter intent. This means we can find out if the electronic results differ from the audit, but we cannot know if the audit differs from what the voters actually did, and that is a big problem!
I suppose one could design a system where the voter could directly examine the paper log and compare it against their choices. Without this, the audit is simply a feel good, but useless feature.
Even with the audit, electronic records allow for wide scale manupulation that can have an effect on the election yet remain below the audit radar, unless we perform a lot of audits, so the manupulation simply moves to the timing and depth of the audits...
Nobody is reporting that and they should because it really matters.
Paper ballots, as I wrote above are a record of what the voter actually did. Using machines to count them is OK in that we can compare the machine count to the actual record knowing it comes directly from the voter.
My main problem lies in the fact that technology really does not get us anything we don't have with paper ballots now, other than independant voting for the disabled who need it. Time is not a factor. It takes time to work through State issues, but that time is spent considering the matters, not marking well made ballots. Counting is similar really. If we obtain a fast count, it is not a trustworthy one. Manual counts have problems, but so do electronic ones. The number of audits required to detect problems is high in either case. Why not just do it right using paper and time tested human means?
I just don't see the need to vote by proxy, which is what we are doing when we vote electronically, when we have the means to perform perfectly reasonable elections manually. The increased number of trust issues simply is not worth the time or money, given marginal returns at best.
For some reason, the election of 2000 got everyone thinking about corruption, which is a good thing. The fancy technology and dollars seem like your typical American fix these days. Then come the bonuses, the networks can tie in to the system and give "up to the minute official results", or some other crap.
Good for you and your solid manual system. I live in Oregon where we do mail in elections on paper ballots. It's cheap, works fast, and is trustworthy. The rest of the country seems hell bent on having only the best it seems.
My gut says this is a smoke screen for more subtle, sinister things. The worst is the reports of electronic voting working in other countries without any hassles. Since all of the people are using them, how would they know any better really? It's not like they can examine the historical records of the vote now can they? Democracy is what the US stands for, or used to anyway. Shouldn't we be reading the results of our extensive studies on the issue? Recommendations?
No, we spend a ton letting convicted felons build the machines we are supposed to trust our democracy to. Damn..
Our democratic process is built upon 4 core ideals, all of which must be adhered to in order for the people to trust the process. This trust is necessary for the long term stability of the nation in that growing doubt will eventually undermine the mutual agreement we all live by. Think of it as breach of contract. We respect our government because it is by the people and for the people right? (You may not actually respect it, but you get the idea;) Well, if the people cannot see their democracy in action and be assured it is untainted, would they feel obligated to continue acting as if it was?
If such a state exists and is allowed to remain unchecked, what we know as America today will erode until it becomes something less. We will no longer have a democracy.
These ideals are: Freedom, transparency, oversight, and anonymity.
Paper voting methods, combined with simple and time tested human factors, such as nobody being left alone and multiple parties present for counting, etc.. honor all 4 of these necessary bits. Their merits are time tested. Their problems are well known and can be reasonably addressed. History shows us they work.
If any one of them are not present, the process is subject to corruption which leads to doubt with obvious implications. History has also shown us that any potential for corruption will be exploited. As a race, we are bastards really.
Electronic records cannot be directly observed; thus transparency is violated. Ordinary people cannot observe and verify the process for themselves. Oversight is also comprimised in that electronic records, no matter their complexity, do not leave physical evidence we can examine later. Since these records require devices, that act as a proxy, to examine, we are forced to place our trust in the devices and their creators and anyone along the chain. Thats a lot of potential for doubt and corruption. How do you know it wasn't exploited in this last election?
Think I am crazy? Why not examine the record and put the matter to rest. Oh, wait... you can't because it's electronic! See the problem?
Electronic machines do reasonably adhere to anonymity. Enforcing their use violates freedom however. Allowing their use by segments of the population that would benefit would be ok, but only if people understand the differences in trust and are free to use either system. (Even this is subject to corruption.)
Contrast this with paper ballots. It's easy to make ballots that people and machines can both read while keeping error to a minimum. (No more than the error we see today with electronic means.) The act of casting a vote and creating the record of the vote is one act. There is no chain of trust between the voter and their record to be used for the tally.
The record of the vote cast is directly used to obtain the tally. (This is really important.)
When we create electronic records, we don't actually keep a record of what the voter did, we only create a record (if we even create that) of what the machine thought the voter did. Now one act becomes two. A chain of trust must be established and maintained between the voter and the record of their vote.
That's where the problem is. No matter how many checks and balances are placed within that chain of electronic trust, the chain remains and the potential for corruption exists. Remember, humans can easily see records marked on ballots --even if they are poorly made. No human can see the actual bits move within the machine that contain their votes and that's a big deal.
Read over your own post again. For each fix, you introduce another potential problem, but you miss the issue. It's not the type of code, nor how it is handled within the machine and the nature of the medium it is stored on.
An electronic record of the vote cannot be seen from vote cast through final tally. Additionally, the record does not exist in a physical form for later analysis.
I agree with the benefit these machines offer to the handicapped, and their use by them is ok. You know that handicapped people must always vote via proxy. They have no choice really, so a machine proxy is no different than a human one.
The rest of us do not have this limitation and should not be forced to trust a device and the flawed process it brings along with it. Harsh I know, but democracy is based on trust. Breaking that chain of trust will do damage to our nation for obvious reasons.
The electronic machines all suffer the same problem; namely, they seperate the act of casting the vote with the record of the vote with the machine being the proxy between the two. Manual methods make the cast vote the record of the vote too. One act, not two, no chain of trust to corrupt.
We cannot use electronic records for the democratic process because they cannot be directly examined by the people. In this, these machines are not a dream for democracy, but a trojan horse instead. (The gift being misplaced trust and false representation)
Sorry, but these issues are too important to ignore in favor of nifty features, like spoken ballots and multi-lingual ballots.
The language of the land happens to be English. We cannot expose our already delicate democratic process to corruption for these things because the trust we depend on is too important.
Besides, for all the money spent, methods could be employed that achieve these goals without having to deal with the foolish tradeoffs electronic records demand.
It comes down to this really. Does it make sense to weaken the very process our nation is built upon just to make things easier for a few people when the changes put everyone at risk, when satisfactory alternatives exist?
Anyone that really understands the trust problem inherent in the use of electronic voting machines cannot easily say yes to that question. Ordinary people cannot know what instructions the machine is following at election time. Ordinary people cannot see the actual record of their vote, nor can they know it matches their intent. None of us can determine if that electronic record has been changed, unless physical media is involved.
A fully electronic democratic process puts a proxy between the will of the people and their government with no accountability. That's not American and it will result in corruption at the expense of the people.
This is not the kind of world we want to be living in --think about it.
that Open Source is not going to be able to address.
The reality is that electronic records of the vote require the humans trust the machine. Open Source or closed, the binaries on the machine can not be directly examined, rendering the nature of the code used a moot point.
Voting by machine is voting by proxy. We must trust the proxy and cannot observe its operation. Subtle manupulations of the vote will go unnoticed, unless we keep paper records and perform mandatory audits.
This means the only electronic solution is one that records the vote on a ballot that both humans and machines can read. Those ballots can be machine counted and audited as we have always done.
What's the point really? Why not just use paper ballots and make them easy to use and read by both machines and humans and spend the money reforming the process to make it fast, taking humans into account.
Remember, there are plenty of old folks willing to do their civic duty. We can get fast and trustworthy results with a far smaller investment than we have made on electronic solutions to date.
This is not a hard conclusion to come to. The fact that it is ignored means those in power WANT IT TO BE THAT WAY.
It's wrong and we need to demand change continiously until we get it; otherwise, we lose our democracy.
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Unless those trails are voter verified, nobody has any way to determine if the trail matches the actual votes cast by the voters.
This is the core problem with electronic voting.
We either need to put the actual vote on paper, or make sure the machine printed votes match voter intent, or the election cannot be trusted.
And it's a damn cool envoronment to work in. I like multi-cpu systems feeding groups of users. All the admin complexity required for higher-end cad can be centralized in one place, right along with the data. For version control on large models, this works very well.
Users can run whatever they want on the desktop so long as they have a decent X server running.
These kinds of solutions are still competetive, per user, when second hand hardware is used, but support from the MCAD vendors, for this mode of computing is beginning to seriously wane. Just try calling support for an issue on a box like this --they have no clue.
I'm just rambling, I suppose.
If these guys would get off their arse and produce a Linux port, they might just find the market will still consider many advantages of multi-user computing, particularly when data management issues are factored into the equation.
Each one of them says the same thing however. Too many Linuxes, how do we support them all.
What they don't get is that they don't have to. They could pick one Linux, such as SuSE, for example. All they need to do is make sure their stuff runs solid on that particular Linux, then let their customers do what they want. Open OSes mean lots of choices. The fact that they are UNIXey means, multiple Linuxes can all work together to provide solutions to the end user, without them even knowing.
Maybe some day, once they have all been bitten by the whole win32 deal enough times, we might see this begin to happen...
Some of the Sun folks I know, have told me about some pretty cool stuff. (It's on Sparc, so I worry a little.) And I have the highest respect for Sun people. They love what they do and support their stuff like no other.
I suppose my post was a bit too much in the gloom and doom department.
Somewhere inside Sun there probably is some niche they can just nail to the wall. Probably a couple. Their success will depend on if and when they can come to consensus on whatever it is.
Sgi is doing exactly what you said. They do not make commidity hardware. Their stuff is so far from that...
Their Itanium machines are full, low latency, modular NUMA machines. Thousands of CPU's running on ONE OS IMAGE. Yep, run top and cpu(s) > 1000! When you purchase one of these, you get a small army of SGI folks on site to literally build your supercomputer, just the way you want it, tuned just for your problems.
You cannot get that any other way and that is the brilliance of Bishop's business vision. What he did was make SGI able to survive on that, because there will always be a market for that.
The modular part is cool too. If you want, you can break your computer into several computers. This is very important as the supercomputers age. They will be replaced with other supercomputers. However if you happened to buy an SGI supercomputer, the massive machine can be broken down into little computers to be used in lots of places, or sold to others as smaller units, or repurposed for other problems. Nobody offers that in the way SGI does.
I miss them in the lower tier markets though. SGI computers are a lot of fun to work with. This is why most people say SGI is dead, and for most of them, sadly, they are.
Anyway, your point is totally valid, but it just does not apply to SGI, that's all.
The SGI core vision is technical computing. In this area they are continuing to innovate, and quite nicely I might add, and make money. The really big players consider SGI for new projects.
Does this make them the money they used to make in their workstation heyday? No. They still make very powerful workstations, but only a small niche needs them and continues to buy them.
They are not dead however, just gone back to the world of big contracts, near impossible problems and non-disclosure. That's where they started. Most of us don't see that transpire for obvious reasons, but that means little about how SGI is doing.
The CAD world right now is stuck on parametric modeling kernels, with a couple of exceptions I-deas and Catia. These kernels cannot do very many operations in parallel. This means CAD is driven by raw, single CPU compute speed and system memory size. Non Intel UNIX systems have big memory, but fail in the raw compute area. (Most cad computations are integer, not fp) Sun, HP, IBM, SGI, can all handle very large models, but cannot easily recompute them.
Most CAD companes are pushing win32 systems right now because the compute is the best. Memory is a problem, but they program around that by giving users lots of management tools to let them better focus on the parts of the model that matter.
Linux, should be able to get the best of both worlds, but only one serious port exists: PTC Pro/Engineer.
There are plenty of people running CAD on Unix. I administer a few of these systems. They are great, but getting slower by the minute... The administrative advantages of UNIX make up for a lot, particularly when you can get many users on a single box, with data managment. (Like I-deas does) However, if raw compute is getting in the way, UNIX is not an option.
That kills Sun, for the most part.
On a side note: UGS, Dassaut, where are your frikin Linux ports!
A few years ago, I attened an SGI conference in Las Vegas. Didn't lose too much that time either... Anyway, the point of this conference was to communicate the SGI vision going forward. This was right about the time SGI got done getting their ass kicked in the win32 / Intel space.
Sgi said they needed to return to their roots too, just like Sun is saying now. For SGI this meant, taking their best tech forward while cutting costs on everything else. Good message, seemed the right thing to do.
Well, how are they going to cut costs? Enter the chief scientist, an Asian GUY Goh, I believe. Very personable, very smart, very excited about --- Linux and OSS.
The SGI plan was very simple. Keep IRIX doing what it does best. At the same time, begin working on Linux. SGI learned they had to accept the community as a partner. This means if they submit something and it gets rejected, they either don't do it that way, or submit again, or maintain it as an add on, until the community catches up with them in that particular area. The idea being that either their solution would be accepted, or the community would evolve one that SGI could use.
(This does have to do with SUN, bear with me!)
So, SGI did go back to their roots, worked with the OSS community, and ended up once again able to do what they do best; namely, low latency, NUMA supercomputing. They are 2nd on the top 500 again, for now, and their flagship machine runs Linux!
At the time, I thought: "uh Oh, there goes SGI..." You can say what you want about IRIX, but it does what it does very very well. Linux looked impossible at the time. But it worked, and worked very well for them. SGI lost a lot of smart people, but obviously kept the ones that mattered. There was one other significant thing: After the banquet, I got a chance to talk with Bishop. Very interesting fellow in that he is totally geeky, but has solid business sense, and a direct line to NASA... He told me SGI was going to commit to this new course no matter what. Half way was not going to cut it. SGI makes the lions share of its money making powerful systems that do things that are near-impossible to do. Anything else would only prolong the death spiral. That meant getting rid of the baggage in measured steps, then build again lean 'n mean.
So, now we look at Sun.
All of SGI was committed to doing one thing, well actually two: Building their Linux / Itanium platform while doing everything they can for IRIX / Mips. To this day, they have not deviated from this vision at all and it is now paying off, just like Bishop said it would.
Sun? Lots of infighting, no core vision to drive forward. Until they fix that, they are doomed to fail because nobody is going to pay for 'almost the greatest' solutions, which is what Sun is selling right now.**
**Please don't flame for that. Sun makes good stuff, but they don't have clear niches where they are the absolute best and where there are few to no alternative solutions.) Massive SGI NUMA, mixed with graphics, insane I/O, and big low latency memory machines solve a class of problems that nothing else solves. There are only a few players, none as mature as SGI is. Ok, back to my points...
Sun needs to cut the baggage. Carrying Solaris forward is not going to be the answer. The cool hardware features, redundancy, hot swap, etc... can be solved in other ways. That means Solaris really does not have anything the market must have and that's the key to this whole thing.
SGI realized this with IRIX. However, some bits were needed on the Linux side, such as their XFS filesystem. The few bits we are clamoring for, Sun wants to keep tight hold of and this is a mistake. The market is not going to rebuild onto Solaris, all the work done with Linux, just to get Java, or redundancy, for example. Instead, they are going to just figure out how to do it with Linux, just as they have everything else.
The SGI approach at least got their technology in wide us
I've got a big family. Food is a pretty big expense. Those cards save me a lot, so I use them.
Get a big freezer and some storage. Doing this has saved my family a *lot* of money over the years. We hit the sales hard at each store. The extra storage means we don't often run low on items and can wait for the sales.
I'm sure they just love my profile because it shows 90 percent or better deep discount items.
For the quickies, like milk and such, we also use the mom 'n pop stores. Their price is generally a bit higher, but they do know my name when I walk in. To me, that's worth a lot.
The tourist question is not so easy to answer. Getting other states to adopt this is going to be very tough. That means lots of drivers not paying the taxes. However, I really don't want to debate these questions, because they are not the real point.
The point is to ask the reps lots of questions. Demand responses, then ask more questions about those, all the while making it known that you are a voter and a voter that knows lots of other voters.
Elected officials rarely hear from more than a very small set of those they serve. When an issue gets loud and it consumes their time and staff resources, that issue gets far more consideration.
It's really the only check we have against industry lobby influences and budget constraints. If they think they can just get more money, they will.
Now, I am not always for the lowest tax, but the tax needs to have a clear need and be well invested for a return I can see. This also means existing taxes need to show this being true before new ones are acceptable.
There are a lot more questions that can be asked too. How about commercial vehicles? They do the most damage, how do they fit into this new tax? What to the companies think about this? Perhaps the lobby might be on the peoples side on this one, particularly if a stupid staffer goes on record saying the tax will have to apply to them too!
It's about noise. Make it and that goes a long way toward nipping stupid things like this in the bud, early before they get traction.
That's all.
All it's going to take to bury this one is a quick call to your representative, or a letter.
Ask a bunch of questions:
who will pay for the devices?
What about shared cars?
Does travel outside the state count?
How about the tourists?
Rental cars?
and on and on and on.
It will die the same death Oregons proposal did.
Could you see your vote and verify it was the vote you cast on that little ticker tape?
If you cannot see your vote being recorded on the tape, then the tape is no good really because it does not actually record what you did.
The tape contains a record of what the machine decided to record. It may or may not be based on what you, the voter, actually did.
The only acceptable systems are those that leave a voter verified paper trail. Without that, no trustworthy recount is possible...
He seems like a smart guy with no reason to lie.
Those popping and draining sounds were caused by something. People just don't make that kind of stuff up.
All I am saying is that you might want to reconsider an opinion like that without some more data and direct observation...
Wouldn't it be horrible to have someone die from a statement like yours? My mother in law died from heart failure. Doctors dismissed her symptoms. (Yes, several of them over the period of about a year, leading up to the final straw.) She got up, started doing her paper route. Felt pains, thought it was heartburn. Destroyed all but 15 percent of her potential heart function.
Had the doctors erred on the side of caution, she would have done things differently.
Something to think about, that's all.
Wonder if old computers will be held in the same regard years from now....
Lets just make sure all the votes get counted ok?
cool.
They glow. Seriously, that's why I think they are cool. Anything that warms up has a nice feel to it. Old radios sound very interesting as they come to life. After the click of the power switch, first nothing, then a low hum that is replaced by subtle noise as it drops, then finally the audio creeps into the foreground. Soon after comes the smell of dust burning..
I had a chance to build some vacuum tube projects in the late 80s. (We had lots of tubes and nothing else to do.) Made a power supply for the older speakers that featured electromagnets on the back to revive an old tube radio.
Tubes forever!
namely, Asscroft...
It makes for a nice little life lesson too. The older ones are annoyed because, at that age they don't want to rock the boat. The younger ones just think it's cool to get to buy stuff.
God I hate retail, mostly because I refuse to take shit. Maybe I'll add some having kids at the retail/fast food store tales to my journal...
I'm with you all the way. Electronic voting, in its current form is very dangerous. No matter who is in the winning seat, it needs to be fixed.
What the current winner doesn't do about this issue will say a lot.
You hit the nail right on the head. I picked up on this a while ago and love it!
This is how it started for me:
Safeway ran a sale a while back on whole chickens. Now I have a big family, so this is worth doing because you get a lot from one chicken. Went to the store and literally filled a shopping cart full of them. Nothing posted anywhere said anything about limits. When I got to the checkout they said that was too many. (They had a ton of them and only a 2 day sale.) They had lots of new items in the store that day, along with the usual food demo people showing off expensive items.
Clearly they were thinking most people would grab a couple chickens along with a number of other items to balance out the sale. Clearly they were wrong. I've got a big freezer. BTW, if you have a family, this is probably one of the very best investments you can make. The food savings made possible pay for it in just a few months. By the time you don't need it anymore, you will literally save thousands.
I asked how many was too many and the checker actually said they flag high percentage savings. Anything over about 30 percent savings needed to have an override by the manager, unless the dollar amount of the total purchase was less than about $100.00 or so, in which case they could "just let it go through". As if that's a favor to me! Anyway, I found out they also flag specific savings, meat being one of them. My cart was only meat and the chicken was about 60 percent discounted. Total red flag, no doubt about it.
Manager came over and said their policy was about 10 items at that discount rate. (After looking at what I wanted to purchase) I needed to go put the rest back and only buy 10. When I asked them to show me where they had that published, they said it was in their corporate operations manual and that it was not for consumers (read cash cows) to see. When I asked why they just did not specify the limit, he told me that depends on inventory at hand. WTF?!? Obviously they had plenty of chicken, so something else was at work here; namely, I was getting too good of a deal. Time to just get this thing done and go home.
I told them I was going to have to make lots of small purchases then. They got petty and said I would have to go through the line for each bundle of chicken. Busy day, pretty long lines, with mine getting pretty long in particular. The lady behind was pissed! (She did have two chickens that I could see along with a couple hundered dollars in non-sale items.)
Lined up the kids, handed them some cash, and began to pile all the chicken into little 10 unit piles. Might as well play ball right?
The look on the managers face was priceless! He actually said it was unfair to put him in a position to have to tell the kids no! I said simply, "then I suggest you don't."
After about 10 seconds, I heard a murmured "fuck it", followed by a hasty conversation with the checker. Soon we were on our way with the chicken, all in one transaction. I have a receipt with a 60 percent savings totalling over $100.00. The computer would not allow his override, another person had to come over and use theirs.
That happened right after they started their club card thing. Since then, I have been through the same deal many times with no regrets. We actually have two cards. Whenever I use that card, it gets flagged all the time, but the other one doesn't. I just know there it's stamped "non-preferred customer". The name on that card does not get any offers in the mail either.
Another pet peeve: Stores that fuck with the per-unit pricing to make more expensive items harder to distinguish. They will use some odd unit to make the mental math difficult combined with "sales" on the expensive ones that actually still cost more!
Sorry for the rant, but I'm with you all the way. All things being equal, they are quite happy to take your money. Seems fair enough to grab some of theirs as well.
examine the record. Both of your points of view are perfectly valid positions to take.
The optical scan questions can be answered with an examination of the ballots --no problem, one of you will be proven right.
Too bad the electronic machines did not actuall keep a record of the voters actions, like paper ballots do. They leave the issue almost unprovable.
You an say what you want about sour grapes... the number of issues on both sides stinks of an untrustworthy election.
Given the record of lies and manupulation our current administration has shown us, there is clearly reason to question the election results.
for reading too much into your post. Didn't mean a flame --I am feeling very strongly right now about the matter. It's hard to trust US elections and the elected, for that matter, while this issue goes ignored and unresolved.
Half of what I wrote was for others who happen to read the thread. Sorry about that too. --BTW, thanks for the binaries suggestions. I am researching a paper on this topic right now. Working through the trust issues on those will be helpful.
The paper trail won't help, in almost all cases, because there is no record of what the voter actually did. --We only have a record of what the machine thought the voter did, or worse what somebody told the machine to record about the voter intent. This means we can find out if the electronic results differ from the audit, but we cannot know if the audit differs from what the voters actually did, and that is a big problem!
I suppose one could design a system where the voter could directly examine the paper log and compare it against their choices. Without this, the audit is simply a feel good, but useless feature.
Even with the audit, electronic records allow for wide scale manupulation that can have an effect on the election yet remain below the audit radar, unless we perform a lot of audits, so the manupulation simply moves to the timing and depth of the audits...
Nobody is reporting that and they should because it really matters.
Paper ballots, as I wrote above are a record of what the voter actually did. Using machines to count them is OK in that we can compare the machine count to the actual record knowing it comes directly from the voter.
My main problem lies in the fact that technology really does not get us anything we don't have with paper ballots now, other than independant voting for the disabled who need it. Time is not a factor. It takes time to work through State issues, but that time is spent considering the matters, not marking well made ballots. Counting is similar really. If we obtain a fast count, it is not a trustworthy one. Manual counts have problems, but so do electronic ones. The number of audits required to detect problems is high in either case. Why not just do it right using paper and time tested human means?
I just don't see the need to vote by proxy, which is what we are doing when we vote electronically, when we have the means to perform perfectly reasonable elections manually. The increased number of trust issues simply is not worth the time or money, given marginal returns at best.
For some reason, the election of 2000 got everyone thinking about corruption, which is a good thing. The fancy technology and dollars seem like your typical American fix these days. Then come the bonuses, the networks can tie in to the system and give "up to the minute official results", or some other crap.
Good for you and your solid manual system. I live in Oregon where we do mail in elections on paper ballots. It's cheap, works fast, and is trustworthy. The rest of the country seems hell bent on having only the best it seems.
My gut says this is a smoke screen for more subtle, sinister things. The worst is the reports of electronic voting working in other countries without any hassles. Since all of the people are using them, how would they know any better really? It's not like they can examine the historical records of the vote now can they? Democracy is what the US stands for, or used to anyway. Shouldn't we be reading the results of our extensive studies on the issue? Recommendations?
No, we spend a ton letting convicted felons build the machines we are supposed to trust our democracy to. Damn..
Peace
Here's the deal:
;) Well, if the people cannot see their democracy in action and be assured it is untainted, would they feel obligated to continue acting as if it was?
Our democratic process is built upon 4 core ideals, all of which must be adhered to in order for the people to trust the process. This trust is necessary for the long term stability of the nation in that growing doubt will eventually undermine the mutual agreement we all live by. Think of it as breach of contract. We respect our government because it is by the people and for the people right? (You may not actually respect it, but you get the idea
If such a state exists and is allowed to remain unchecked, what we know as America today will erode until it becomes something less. We will no longer have a democracy.
These ideals are: Freedom, transparency, oversight, and anonymity.
Paper voting methods, combined with simple and time tested human factors, such as nobody being left alone and multiple parties present for counting, etc.. honor all 4 of these necessary bits. Their merits are time tested. Their problems are well known and can be reasonably addressed. History shows us they work.
If any one of them are not present, the process is subject to corruption which leads to doubt with obvious implications. History has also shown us that any potential for corruption will be exploited. As a race, we are bastards really.
Electronic records cannot be directly observed; thus transparency is violated. Ordinary people cannot observe and verify the process for themselves. Oversight is also comprimised in that electronic records, no matter their complexity, do not leave physical evidence we can examine later. Since these records require devices, that act as a proxy, to examine, we are forced to place our trust in the devices and their creators and anyone along the chain. Thats a lot of potential for doubt and corruption. How do you know it wasn't exploited in this last election?
Think I am crazy? Why not examine the record and put the matter to rest. Oh, wait... you can't because it's electronic! See the problem?
Electronic machines do reasonably adhere to anonymity. Enforcing their use violates freedom however. Allowing their use by segments of the population that would benefit would be ok, but only if people understand the differences in trust and are free to use either system. (Even this is subject to corruption.)
Contrast this with paper ballots. It's easy to make ballots that people and machines can both read while keeping error to a minimum. (No more than the error we see today with electronic means.) The act of casting a vote and creating the record of the vote is one act. There is no chain of trust between the voter and their record to be used for the tally.
The record of the vote cast is directly used to obtain the tally. (This is really important.)
When we create electronic records, we don't actually keep a record of what the voter did, we only create a record (if we even create that) of what the machine thought the voter did. Now one act becomes two. A chain of trust must be established and maintained between the voter and the record of their vote.
That's where the problem is. No matter how many checks and balances are placed within that chain of electronic trust, the chain remains and the potential for corruption exists. Remember, humans can easily see records marked on ballots --even if they are poorly made. No human can see the actual bits move within the machine that contain their votes and that's a big deal.
Read over your own post again. For each fix, you introduce another potential problem, but you miss the issue. It's not the type of code, nor how it is handled within the machine and the nature of the medium it is stored on.
An electronic record of the vote cannot be seen from vote cast through final tally. Additionally, the record does not exist in a physical form for later analysis.
I agree with the benefit these machines offer to the handicapped, and their use by them is ok. You know that handicapped people must always vote via proxy. They have no choice really, so a machine proxy is no different than a human one.
The rest of us do not have this limitation and should not be forced to trust a device and the flawed process it brings along with it. Harsh I know, but democracy is based on trust. Breaking that chain of trust will do damage to our nation for obvious reasons.
The electronic machines all suffer the same problem; namely, they seperate the act of casting the vote with the record of the vote with the machine being the proxy between the two. Manual methods make the cast vote the record of the vote too. One act, not two, no chain of trust to corrupt.
We cannot use electronic records for the democratic process because they cannot be directly examined by the people. In this, these machines are not a dream for democracy, but a trojan horse instead. (The gift being misplaced trust and false representation)
Sorry, but these issues are too important to ignore in favor of nifty features, like spoken ballots and multi-lingual ballots.
The language of the land happens to be English. We cannot expose our already delicate democratic process to corruption for these things because the trust we depend on is too important.
Besides, for all the money spent, methods could be employed that achieve these goals without having to deal with the foolish tradeoffs electronic records demand.
It comes down to this really. Does it make sense to weaken the very process our nation is built upon just to make things easier for a few people when the changes put everyone at risk, when satisfactory alternatives exist?
Anyone that really understands the trust problem inherent in the use of electronic voting machines cannot easily say yes to that question. Ordinary people cannot know what instructions the machine is following at election time. Ordinary people cannot see the actual record of their vote, nor can they know it matches their intent. None of us can determine if that electronic record has been changed, unless physical media is involved.
A fully electronic democratic process puts a proxy between the will of the people and their government with no accountability. That's not American and it will result in corruption at the expense of the people.
This is not the kind of world we want to be living in --think about it.
that Open Source is not going to be able to address.
The reality is that electronic records of the vote require the humans trust the machine. Open Source or closed, the binaries on the machine can not be directly examined, rendering the nature of the code used a moot point.
Voting by machine is voting by proxy. We must trust the proxy and cannot observe its operation. Subtle manupulations of the vote will go unnoticed, unless we keep paper records and perform mandatory audits.
This means the only electronic solution is one that records the vote on a ballot that both humans and machines can read. Those ballots can be machine counted and audited as we have always done.
What's the point really? Why not just use paper ballots and make them easy to use and read by both machines and humans and spend the money reforming the process to make it fast, taking humans into account.
Remember, there are plenty of old folks willing to do their civic duty. We can get fast and trustworthy results with a far smaller investment than we have made on electronic solutions to date.
This is not a hard conclusion to come to. The fact that it is ignored means those in power WANT IT TO BE THAT WAY.
It's wrong and we need to demand change continiously until we get it; otherwise, we lose our democracy.
Imagine a power spike! --Ouch!