As a precinct chair, there is very little you can do, besides asking folks to report any suspicious behavior on the machine's part (displaying a selection other than what they selected, for example).
The real fraud, if it happens at all, happens quietly behind the scenes. The machine behaves exactly as it is supposed to but adds a number to the wrong tally. You can't check it later because there is no permanent record of what the voter saw on the screen before pressing "vote." The sole record is of that machine's final tally at the end of the day.
As others have said, the solution is: paper. Whatever they select on the screen, you ask the voter to print it out and read the paper. Then you stuff the paper in a locked box. You count the machine's tally (it's more cost-effective) but you now have a permanent record verified by the individual voters which you can audit in order to verify that the machine did as it claimed. Someone hacks the machine? No problem: just count the papers.
Clinton: Supports tax incentives to encourage broadband deployment in underserved areas, as well as financial support for state and local broadband initiatives.
Translation: Supports giving lots of money to Verizon and Comcast by cutting their taxes and instead raising yours.
McCain: Supports increased broadband access via competition rather than government regulation.
Translation: Supports letting the ILECs do whatever the heck they please. Naturally, anyone else who wants to spend the money deploying new wire can do so and compete (wink wink).
Obama: Supports re-defining broadband definition, reforming universal service, increased resources to bring broadband to schools and libraries.
Translation: Supports increasing the "universal service fee" portion of your telephone bill so that every schoolchild can have a laptop. Because that's what "broadband" really means.
I'm wrong am I? Tell me that in four years after you see what they actually do.
Here's the thing: a movie or a book (a story) costs $7. If you make the story the center of the game, the game is worth $7.
For it to be worth $50, you have to give me something I want to play over and over again. Story is a nice accent for a game, but keep it in its proper place. Put the game play first and make sure that when the game play conflicts with the story it's the story that loses.
The other thing is this: as a brilliant software architect, you are neither a brilliant writer nor a brilliant producer. Play it smart: play to your strengths.
Kerry's site was LAMP (perl) in 2004, as was the DNC's. The DNC's site is currently LAMP (php).
Both Obama and the DNC rely heavily on a company called Blue State Digital (based in Boston) for their LAMP-based systems. If you want to be in this election as a developer, that's the door to knock on right now.
I don't agree with the assertion that a physics major should be required to take a programming class.
There is little doubt that knowledge of computer programming would be valuable to any science or technology major. But it's one tool among many and depend on what they do with their degree, it's a tool that might go to waste.
As a CS major, my time an energy in college was wasted with several math courses that I hated and have never, I repeat never used. Had I gone in to a different kind of software development they would surely have been valuable. But I didn't. And I'll never get those hours back.
Requirements are for subjects that EVERY graduate will need. Not just some.
85 tons? So you're budgeting 350 watts of actual (not max or rated) draw per node plus an extra 15kw overhead? That sounds a little high to me.
Even if you're right on target, it's all in the shopping. If you go brand new, top of the line Lieberts, raised floor and all the frills you'll chew through half a mil easy. On the other hand, I once bought a nice redundant 3+3 ton data center A/C unit for $50 at auction. Datacenter A/C units sell for dirt at auctions because nobody bids on them. If you don't mind getting a little creative, all you have to do is look.
you don't seem to understand what kind of minimal funding we get for facilities and infrastructure.
Sure I do. Whoever's brainchild this was, he pulled together I don't know how many researchers and got the all to synchronize their proposals to pull together funding for this beast. Gave himself a nice pat on the back for his impressive effort at coordination and planning. He didn't bother to think about basic infrastructure and by the time anybody did, it was too late to secure funding for a room.
That's like the guy who secures funding for a bridge and forgets to buy the asphalt for the roads leading up to it.
Like I said elsewhere in the thread: you'd have been better off sacrificing a few machines in the cluster and spending the money improving the space instead. Reliable computing starts with reliable infrastructure. If you're running that close to the edge then you don't have reliable infrastructure.
Yes, it does. You're supposed to have about a 20% reserve slack on space and power cabling, and the "+1" of n+1 reserve for battery, hvac and generator systems. That covers instant failures of those systems, but it also covers maneuvering room when its time to upgrade.
If they're out of physical space (not just power and cooling) then the facility is way oversubscribed and they'll tend to suffer failures as a result. They should have taken some of the money spent on the machine and used it to improve the facility.
If they're not out of physical space then they could have built the cabinets ahead of time, powered them up one at a time to verify correct cabling, hardware operation and software installation and then rolled them off into a corner. On the cutover day you'd then need about 30 people to shutdown and roll the old equipment out, and then roll the new cabinets into their correct locations. And since you'd have already tested the individual cabinets, you'd have a much better chance of it all working right.
Even that is bad. They have fiber-optic links connecting the campus buildings. If they don't, they need them and should have spent some of the money upgrading their campus infrastructure. With a fiber ring, they could have (temporarily) distributed the cabinets around the campus, bringing the machine up to full power. Then once the researchers sign off on it, the old one is powered down and moved out. Next, you move the new cabinets from their temporary housings back to the vacated room, one at a time. This is straightforward for clusters: you just remove those nodes for maintenance.
But that's only if you're desperate to keep the cost low. For 800 machines, we're talking about at most 40 cabinets here, 4 rows of 10 plus hvac, power and batteries. That's a room a little over 30'x30' with two air conditioners and a battery system. Skip the genset; you can live without it during two months of overlap until the old genset becomes available. Skip the raised floor and other stuff that isn't critical, shop carefully and buy the battery system used and you can put it together for well under $100k. Each of the 800 machines costs at least $5000, so for the price of 20 of the machines you can build a whole new room to house them.
And for a multi-million dollar system, you should damn well be prepared to improve the space in which it will be housed.
I'm just sayin': it looks to me like a primo example of "work harder not smarter." There are other ways this could have been done than by having 200 folks play rack-and-stack at the same time. The breakage from this is gonna be out of sight.
built in a single day to keep science and engineering researchers from facing a lengthy downtime
Sounds like poor planning to me. The correct way to keep science and engineering researchers from facing a lengthy downtime: don't turn off the old computer until the new one is running and tested.
I transferred to a different school halfway through. One school was top 10. The other was still a good sci/tech school but not top 10. I found that the material covered was identical but the tests at the lower-ranked school were substantially easier. You could learn the same things if you knew how to learn, but the grade at the lower ranked school meant a lot less.
Beyond the first job, the specific school ceased to matter. The requirement generalized to, "A CS or similar technical degree from an accredited college." Every so often I do run into someone who also cares about BS versus BA but it's rare.
And, as other posters have noted: it's not good to be the biggest fish in the pond. Brilliant peers will inspire you to do better yourself. There's also an old saw about: it's not what you know, it's who you know. Brilliant peers will go places and they'll take your call 10 years from now when you're looking for your third job.
Security ethics is a two-way street. I've seen reasonable risks downplayed when they shouldn't be but I've also had to argue with an auditor about "failed" checklist items whose security implications were clearly understood and very obviously addressed elsewhere in the system's overall architecture.
Classic television occupied two frequency bands: VHF and UHF. There was no need to phase them both out at the same time. The Pols needlessly forced a flag day and they deserve to be criticized for their ignorance.
Thing is, I spent the last couple years playing this game. I started with a dozen 36-gig scsi disks that had bad sectors on them. I did thorough tests abandoned the whole gigabyte where the bad sectors were found and software-raid-5'd partitions from multiple drives, skipping those bad parts.
Guess what? It didn't work out. The bad zones spread and they spread faster than the the raid software could detect the new failure and rebuild onto the spare.
I quite enjoyed the experiment, but these were on my home servers. I wouldn't dream of doing this in a production environment. When the raid controller kicks the drive for -any- reason, it's back to the manufacturer for warranty replacement. The data is far to valuable to play games with it.
They've integrated the controller and drive into devices that consume 3U of space in a rackmount computer cabinet. So now you can't upgrade a drive, you can only replace a module. Brilliant.
The only thing this is likely to disrupt is Xiotech's cashflow.
And yet it is the published rule per RFC 2821 section 3.7:
'If an SMTP server has accepted the task of relaying the mail and later finds that the destination is incorrect or that the mail cannot be delivered for some other reason, then it MUST construct an "undeliverable mail" notification message and send it to the originator of the undeliverable mail (as indicated by the reverse-path).'
You can't complain about others breaking the rules and then cherry pick which ones you're going to follow. Well, you can I suppose, but it would make you a hypocrite.
As someone whose ass was saved by Network Solutions' lockdown, let me tell you the lockdowns are a Really Good Thing.
Hackers can break in to your account. It can happen even when you're being careful. A lockdown means that you have time to track down a real human being and get it reversed before the domain is transferred to some registrar in China whose support reps don't even speak English.
Slashdot Mirror
As a precinct chair, there is very little you can do, besides asking folks to report any suspicious behavior on the machine's part (displaying a selection other than what they selected, for example).
The real fraud, if it happens at all, happens quietly behind the scenes. The machine behaves exactly as it is supposed to but adds a number to the wrong tally. You can't check it later because there is no permanent record of what the voter saw on the screen before pressing "vote." The sole record is of that machine's final tally at the end of the day.
As others have said, the solution is: paper. Whatever they select on the screen, you ask the voter to print it out and read the paper. Then you stuff the paper in a locked box. You count the machine's tally (it's more cost-effective) but you now have a permanent record verified by the individual voters which you can audit in order to verify that the machine did as it claimed. Someone hacks the machine? No problem: just count the papers.
Clinton: Supports tax incentives to encourage broadband deployment in underserved areas, as well as financial support for state and local broadband initiatives.
Translation: Supports giving lots of money to Verizon and Comcast by cutting their taxes and instead raising yours.
McCain: Supports increased broadband access via competition rather than government regulation.
Translation: Supports letting the ILECs do whatever the heck they please. Naturally, anyone else who wants to spend the money deploying new wire can do so and compete (wink wink).
Obama: Supports re-defining broadband definition, reforming universal service, increased resources to bring broadband to schools and libraries.
Translation: Supports increasing the "universal service fee" portion of your telephone bill so that every schoolchild can have a laptop. Because that's what "broadband" really means.
I'm wrong am I? Tell me that in four years after you see what they actually do.
Here's the thing: a movie or a book (a story) costs $7. If you make the story the center of the game, the game is worth $7.
For it to be worth $50, you have to give me something I want to play over and over again. Story is a nice accent for a game, but keep it in its proper place. Put the game play first and make sure that when the game play conflicts with the story it's the story that loses.
The other thing is this: as a brilliant software architect, you are neither a brilliant writer nor a brilliant producer. Play it smart: play to your strengths.
Kerry's site was LAMP (perl) in 2004, as was the DNC's. The DNC's site is currently LAMP (php).
Both Obama and the DNC rely heavily on a company called Blue State Digital (based in Boston) for their LAMP-based systems. If you want to be in this election as a developer, that's the door to knock on right now.
Go right ahead. Keep adding requirements until the BS degree program takes 5 years and the student has almost no elective courses.
Oh, that's right, you already have.
I don't agree with the assertion that a physics major should be required to take a programming class.
There is little doubt that knowledge of computer programming would be valuable to any science or technology major. But it's one tool among many and depend on what they do with their degree, it's a tool that might go to waste.
As a CS major, my time an energy in college was wasted with several math courses that I hated and have never, I repeat never used. Had I gone in to a different kind of software development they would surely have been valuable. But I didn't. And I'll never get those hours back.
Requirements are for subjects that EVERY graduate will need. Not just some.
EVDO or GPRS card for the computer. EVDO will get around 300kbps -- more than enough for web and webmail.
You can also hide the satellite dish: http://www.dish-rock.com/newrock.htm
low gravity induced bone degradation
http://www.ironsky.net/site/?page_id=10
Story
Towards the end of World War II the staff of SS officer Hans Kammler made a significant breakthrough in anti-gravity.
[...]
Add to that at least 85 tons of air conditioning
85 tons? So you're budgeting 350 watts of actual (not max or rated) draw per node plus an extra 15kw overhead? That sounds a little high to me.
Even if you're right on target, it's all in the shopping. If you go brand new, top of the line Lieberts, raised floor and all the frills you'll chew through half a mil easy. On the other hand, I once bought a nice redundant 3+3 ton data center A/C unit for $50 at auction. Datacenter A/C units sell for dirt at auctions because nobody bids on them. If you don't mind getting a little creative, all you have to do is look.
you don't seem to understand what kind of minimal funding we get for facilities and infrastructure.
Sure I do. Whoever's brainchild this was, he pulled together I don't know how many researchers and got the all to synchronize their proposals to pull together funding for this beast. Gave himself a nice pat on the back for his impressive effort at coordination and planning. He didn't bother to think about basic infrastructure and by the time anybody did, it was too late to secure funding for a room.
That's like the guy who secures funding for a bridge and forgets to buy the asphalt for the roads leading up to it.
if you would like to come convince Purdue's Board of Trustees along with our CIO to give us that money, we would be happy to
;)
No thanks. I was in my element at the DNC, but university politics are deadly.
Like I said elsewhere in the thread: you'd have been better off sacrificing a few machines in the cluster and spending the money improving the space instead. Reliable computing starts with reliable infrastructure. If you're running that close to the edge then you don't have reliable infrastructure.
Full != Oversubscribed.
Yes, it does. You're supposed to have about a 20% reserve slack on space and power cabling, and the "+1" of n+1 reserve for battery, hvac and generator systems. That covers instant failures of those systems, but it also covers maneuvering room when its time to upgrade.
Sounds to me like you've never had to upgrade servers in an already overloaded data center. ;-)
Sure I have. I solved the problem by moving to a data center that wasn't overloaded.
When you're installing that expensive a piece of hardware, you don't try to fit it to the environment; you fit the environment to it.
If they're out of physical space (not just power and cooling) then the facility is way oversubscribed and they'll tend to suffer failures as a result. They should have taken some of the money spent on the machine and used it to improve the facility.
If they're not out of physical space then they could have built the cabinets ahead of time, powered them up one at a time to verify correct cabling, hardware operation and software installation and then rolled them off into a corner. On the cutover day you'd then need about 30 people to shutdown and roll the old equipment out, and then roll the new cabinets into their correct locations. And since you'd have already tested the individual cabinets, you'd have a much better chance of it all working right.
Even that is bad. They have fiber-optic links connecting the campus buildings. If they don't, they need them and should have spent some of the money upgrading their campus infrastructure. With a fiber ring, they could have (temporarily) distributed the cabinets around the campus, bringing the machine up to full power. Then once the researchers sign off on it, the old one is powered down and moved out. Next, you move the new cabinets from their temporary housings back to the vacated room, one at a time. This is straightforward for clusters: you just remove those nodes for maintenance.
But that's only if you're desperate to keep the cost low. For 800 machines, we're talking about at most 40 cabinets here, 4 rows of 10 plus hvac, power and batteries. That's a room a little over 30'x30' with two air conditioners and a battery system. Skip the genset; you can live without it during two months of overlap until the old genset becomes available. Skip the raised floor and other stuff that isn't critical, shop carefully and buy the battery system used and you can put it together for well under $100k. Each of the 800 machines costs at least $5000, so for the price of 20 of the machines you can build a whole new room to house them.
And for a multi-million dollar system, you should damn well be prepared to improve the space in which it will be housed.
I'm just sayin': it looks to me like a primo example of "work harder not smarter." There are other ways this could have been done than by having 200 folks play rack-and-stack at the same time. The breakage from this is gonna be out of sight.
So what you're saying is that it's poorly planned AND underfunded?
built in a single day to keep science and engineering researchers from facing a lengthy downtime
Sounds like poor planning to me. The correct way to keep science and engineering researchers from facing a lengthy downtime: don't turn off the old computer until the new one is running and tested.
I transferred to a different school halfway through. One school was top 10. The other was still a good sci/tech school but not top 10. I found that the material covered was identical but the tests at the lower-ranked school were substantially easier. You could learn the same things if you knew how to learn, but the grade at the lower ranked school meant a lot less.
Beyond the first job, the specific school ceased to matter. The requirement generalized to, "A CS or similar technical degree from an accredited college." Every so often I do run into someone who also cares about BS versus BA but it's rare.
And, as other posters have noted: it's not good to be the biggest fish in the pond. Brilliant peers will inspire you to do better yourself. There's also an old saw about: it's not what you know, it's who you know. Brilliant peers will go places and they'll take your call 10 years from now when you're looking for your third job.
Security ethics is a two-way street. I've seen reasonable risks downplayed when they shouldn't be but I've also had to argue with an auditor about "failed" checklist items whose security implications were clearly understood and very obviously addressed elsewhere in the system's overall architecture.
Classic television occupied two frequency bands: VHF and UHF. There was no need to phase them both out at the same time. The Pols needlessly forced a flag day and they deserve to be criticized for their ignorance.
Thing is, I spent the last couple years playing this game. I started with a dozen 36-gig scsi disks that had bad sectors on them. I did thorough tests abandoned the whole gigabyte where the bad sectors were found and software-raid-5'd partitions from multiple drives, skipping those bad parts.
Guess what? It didn't work out. The bad zones spread and they spread faster than the the raid software could detect the new failure and rebuild onto the spare.
I quite enjoyed the experiment, but these were on my home servers. I wouldn't dream of doing this in a production environment. When the raid controller kicks the drive for -any- reason, it's back to the manufacturer for warranty replacement. The data is far to valuable to play games with it.
The odds of the soft fail savings catching up to the difference in economy of scale are not good.
They've integrated the controller and drive into devices that consume 3U of space in a rackmount computer cabinet. So now you can't upgrade a drive, you can only replace a module. Brilliant.
The only thing this is likely to disrupt is Xiotech's cashflow.
NOT a viable solution.
And yet it is the published rule per RFC 2821 section 3.7:
'If an SMTP server has accepted the task of relaying the mail and later finds that the destination is incorrect or that the mail cannot be delivered for some other reason, then it MUST construct an "undeliverable mail" notification message and send it to the originator of the undeliverable mail (as indicated by the reverse-path).'
You can't complain about others breaking the rules and then cherry pick which ones you're going to follow. Well, you can I suppose, but it would make you a hypocrite.
As someone whose ass was saved by Network Solutions' lockdown, let me tell you the lockdowns are a Really Good Thing.
Hackers can break in to your account. It can happen even when you're being careful. A lockdown means that you have time to track down a real human being and get it reversed before the domain is transferred to some registrar in China whose support reps don't even speak English.