Ah.... no, I don't think you quite got what he meant.
Without the Exchange Connector he would lose functionality with Ximian because IMAP/SMTP can't replicate what Exchange/Outlook do. With the Exchange Connector he regains that functionality. This isn't a limitation of Ximian's client as it is the data from Exchange - and there's a "fix" but it's proprietary and costs money. Can't exactly blame Ximian for getting payback on the really deeply mystic stuff.
Matter of fact there are backend servers out there, even free ones, that can replace Exchange. But it requires you to buy additional software for Outlook clients and it still isn't as integrated as Exchange/Outlook is -- but it's 98% there and about half the cost or less. This isn't too surprising, since you'd expect vendor software to work best with software from the same vendor.
You can, in fact, have your cake and eat it too, but right now there will still be crumbs here and there. Which, of course, is what this German Groupware order is all about.
If this means Barton sooner rather than later, I'm happy... although from what I've read Barton (166 MHz FSB, 512k cache) is still slated for Q1'03. Sigh.
Why? Because I'd like to get a Barton CPU for my next computer. I'm already in the waiting game for the NV30 and (to a much lesser extent) Serial ATA, so putting a better CPU on the list isn't a big deal.
Why not Hammer? Because I know better than to buy a first generation CPU with first generation motherboards. Barton is just a mild revision to a 4 year old CPU core, and the motherboards are now hitting their 6th generation (KT133, KT133A, KT266, KT266A, KT333, KT400).
For those who need the speed, power, and addressibility of a 64-bit chip this announcement sucks, but for those just looking for a faster current generation chip it's not entirely bad.
Re:How about the first use of "flame on"/"flame of
on
The First Smiley :-)
·
· Score: 2
In those days it was always followed with "Flame Off", though this has sadly gone by the wayside
Most likely because a lot of the flamers and trolls never actually stop.
too much emphesis on preventing fraud, as if voting fraud is somehow a new phenomenon unique to electronic voting
Of course it isn't, but the idea is that it might actually be viable to prevent fraud with electronic voting... although I suspect that, as geeks, we can't poke as many holes in an electronic system as you can in a paper system.
With proper security, however, the bar gets raised a lot higher.
I think the best system is still a card system
Well, perhaps... except that even with arrow systems you wind up with cards that are invalid because someone mismarked them, didn't mark hard enough, the graphite wears off with enough recounts, etc. And even with these systems the recounts never produce the same numbers, and they take a considerable amount of time.
Electronic systems have the potential of eliminating all of these issues (note trolls - I said potential, not absolute). The system will prevent you from entering a ballot that is invalid. You won't accidentilly vote for two different candidates in the same race - just not possible. And barring fraud (see above), the vote won't be questionable, it won't decay with recounts, and the recount will be nearly instantaneous (depending on how long system verification takes) and will add up the same every time (if it doesn't, you're in the land of fraud again).
Eventually we might be able to do online voting, which would be pretty nice if done properly (big if). Sure as hell won't get that with a paper ballot. Of course, 80% of the reason to go to Internet voting could be solved just by getting into the 20th Century (yes, 20th) and allowing voting for more than 12 hours on a single workday. Come on -- week long voting shouldn't be an issue. If it's a cost problem, then a Saturday would still be better than Tuesday.
That said, you're very right about Murphy's Law and KISS.
The SB added digital sound recording and playback. The AdLib was just a very cheap 8-bit MIDI synth, so it was fine if you wanted music, but useless if you wanted to do sound effects, speech, etc.
The original SB wasn't cheaper either -- it was actually a good bit more expensive. But the feature it added was worth the expense, and as the first ones out of the gate they set the standard for digital sound. It didn't become a moot point until late in the Win3.x/early Win95 days when the drivers got reliable enough (and DOS games started becoming rare enough) to use a single interface that utilized whatever card you had.
And even then some companies took forever to get it right -- Turtle Beach being notorious for issues with some of the earlier cards.
Which part of the statement where I said I owned both an SB Live and an SB64 (SB AWE64 to be technical) did you miss?
Which part of the statement in which I recommended a variety of sound cards, not just a TB (and, in fact, I recommended Hercules twice while only mentioning TB once)?
And, know what, they don't all work perfectly. If they did there wouldn't be the complaints. Do they work "well enough" for most people? Sure. But so does onboard sound. If you're going to buy a soundcard at this point, you should take the time to learn what's out there and why it's even worth buying one. Otherwise you're just throwing your money down the toilet.
Well, every PC built in the past 3 or 4 years is... and, frankly, if your main PCs are older than that you're not likely to be reading ArsTechnica or something about a BIOS tweaking guide.
But like most 'BIOS' guides I've read, this gives alot of info on 'tweaks', with little mention of the damage that the wrong settings can do
Obviously a problem... I haven't read the article yet (didn't feel like it this morning, and it's toast now), but they should really mark the settings that are potentially dangerous. Screwing around with your RAM timings, CPU clock, etc. can release the magic smoke awfully quickly.
There's also a disproportionate amount of Soundblaster-bashing going on here
Not really. Creative Labs has long made the worst hardware they could get away with, and did so thanks to having created the original standard for PC sound. They've never been high quality cards, and have often caused problems with other hardware and software. Go talk to someone who tried putting an SB Live in a dual processor NT4 system about it for example.
Frankly, if you're looking for a new soundcard then there's little reason to buy Creative. For general use (games/music) both Hercules and Turtle Beach make better cards for less. For games alone, Hercules or Philips are better (Philips mentioned purely due to QSound). If you're talking about just playing music, doing a home theater PC, or mid to high end audio then a more expensive card that does real 24/96 or 24/192 audio is preferred - M-Audio and many others fit the bill here.
I do think that the incompatibility bit is somewhat overstated (I don't have any problems with my SB Live or my much older SB64 ISA), although SB's are notoriously bad about sharing PCI IRQs and the like, but the poor sound quality and total lack of compliance to industry standards are not. The digital out on the Live series doesn't comply to any spec known to man -- its voltage is roughly 10x the allowed spec. Even the Audigy continues to resample everything to 48 KHz, which plays hell with CD Audio, and their claims of 96 KHz sampling rates are deceptive at best (only applies to the digital outputs, and only sometimes at that).
I don't think anyone's proposing the idea of Epson engaging in a continued, willful violation.
From the parent post:
They can always refuse to accept the GPL, in whoich case it is a simple copyright violation. In that case, the worst that can happen is that they have to pay damages
Which just isn't how copyright law works, at least in the US (and anyone else who agrees to international copyright law).
That's all I was responding to... and it's quite clear that Epson isn't going to do this.
Spitzak said it properly here. They don't have to release the source. They merely have to stop violating the license, and one of those methods is to remove the software from distribution.
Frankly, it's entirely possible that the GPL was misunderstood -- since there are disagreements as to exactly what it means in some cases (such as dynamic linking). A library could've been used without the senior developer or project manager realizing that it was GPL and not LGPL.
Did they violate it? Yup. And they're doing the right thing. Sorry you have an issue with that.
Then someone comes along on a payroll, sees much money for no work, grabs your work and changes the credits. This is more like what happened here
You have absolutely no idea what "happened here". In fact, the FSF has stated that Epson is doing the right thing and has actually gone well beyond what is required to work toward a fix. Frankly, they could've just stonewalled (like virtually every other violator has done) or said "fine, we'll just pull it and say screw it". Instead they admitted to an inadvertant mistake (and yes, they happen -- if you don't think so, then you clearly have no experience with large companies and real world coding), publicly admitted to it, and are actively trying to remedy the situation and continue providing the software.
Quite frankly, your attitude is exactly what Microsoft portrays when demonizing the GPL. As a software developer I sure as hell wouldn't touch GPL'd software with a 10 foot pole if it meant that a mistake would mean giving up my core business logic. Hell, I wouldn't even develop for Linux because of the attitude associated with it.
Fortunately, the vast majority of people seem to actually comprehend the GPL and see Epson as doing the Right Thing. So there's still hope for the non-frothing Linux advocates.
You can't just pay damages and continue to violate copyright. The first thing any judge would do is grant an injunction against your continued distribution of the violating material.
Heck, it's even possible the Judge would make you responsible for stopping other people's distribution of it too, which would make your legal fees skyrocket as you started suing every Tom, Dick, and Harry who mirrored your software.
As for damages, it's very much unknown if you'd get any. In the US you have to have filed for copyright in order to secure damages -- otherwise all you can get is an injunction to stop further violations. Of course, if the company ignores that injunction then they're in contempt of court, which does have hefty damages associated with it. But you won't see any of that money.
Uh... when was the last time you actually watched BattleBots?
Sure, the wedges are hardpressed to actually hurt another bot, but wedges rarely go the distance. Spinners and bladebots destroy them. Hell, just watch any match that involves Hazard, Son of Wyachi, or Warhead and you'll get to watch the other bot running around desperately trying to keep some of its parts together.
A couple days I think. The issue was that the request for retesting was submitted and didn't occur for 2-3 days, followed by another week to disappear from the list.
I can understand that it's not entirely desirable to immediately test, since less-than-honest types could "fix" the server, have it de-listed, and then remove the fix. But an immediate test followed by 2-3 retests at random intervals would be a better alternative methinks.
When your business gets blackholed and you're unable to send email to large portions of the net, I'm sure you'll think that "2 weeks" is an entirely reasonable time period. Thankfully our primary domain wasn't the one blackholed (as it didn't have an open relay).
Certainly they limited the damage your company did to the rest of the Internet by passing along all that spam while the relay was open
Nice theory, except that mail logs show that no spam was forwarded through the open relay until it appeared on the black hole list. This was a domain that had been setup for at least a year and wasn't used anywhere except for a domain registration and private, customer-only email use.
First off, he's right. A black hole list has the potential for abuse, and there need to be some checks to make sure they're not abused as such.
Second, once you're listed on a black hole, it can be hell to get off. My company had a secondary domain that was used for customer emails. It was, indeed, an open-relay due to misconfiguration. Eventually it got blackholed and our admins realized the mistake they'd made and set out to fix it. They did fix it eventually, but by that time the server was being slammed by spammers trying to use it as an open-relay. And on top of that trying to get the black hole list to remove the domain was difficult - it took well over two weeks, while the black hole-ing occurred in under a day. Eventually the entire domain was just dropped, since even with the open relay closed the spammers were still abusing the hell out of our pipe.
That said, as best I can tell the author of the article barely even tried to remedy the situation. Yes, the black hole system forged a header to hit his open relay. Duh. So do spammers. If they could do it, so could (and will) others, and that's why you're black holed. But I'm sure he could've contacted the people running the black hole to find out what he could do to fix the problem. Instead it looks like he just wants to take them to court.
Finally, black holes/black lists/spam filters/etc. aren't solving the problem. The bandwidth is still being chewed up, and as is pointed out in the article, the block lists act like honeypots for the spammers - everytime a new site is added the spammers find a new site to spam from. Sure, if you participate in the black hole you won't deliver the spam, but the bandwidth has already been sucked up from the backbones, and you're still using CPU power to deny the spam. As much as I'd like to see lawyers stay the hell away from the Net, I don't see any other way to stop spam than to make it illegal. It may be that most of the relays are foreign, but most of the spammers are in the US or another Western country. Anti-spam laws could significantly help.
I was in NYC over the Labor Day weekend and thought the Metrocard machines were cool... didn't understand why the hell people would be waiting in line. Got a day pass for my wife and one for myself in less time than it took the cashier to deal with one person -- and paid via credit card at that.
Actually, I'd pseudo-jump on you for the "100% uptime" requirement, not the 100% reliability.
The caveat there is that it doesn't have to have 100% uptime as in "24/7", but 100% uptime for a specified duration (generally 1 week, after which it can be serviced).
But with that said, yes, this is an application where 100% reliability is required. Unless, of course, you don't mind being that.00000001% whose vote is misinterpreted.
And how are you validating that you're storing what was voted for?
You're not. And so a hack to the firmware, software, or a few other places could subvert the data.
The Why is because this has to be right. It's the core function of the government and one of the only ways that the people can express their decision making abilities.
And, frankly, hanging chads would be nothing in comparison to a firmware virus that changed 10% of the votes to a particular political party or candidate. To say that you'd be betting your reputation on it is an understatement.
Well, a few years ago virtually every ATM ran OS/2. But so did all of the banks (for front end systems, not backend). Most of the banks have since moved off OS/2 to Windows NT or Win2k, so I have no idea what's running in the ATMs anymore.
It does have to validate itself, period. If you don't then a hack of the system can invalidate every vote cast on it. Worse, it can fake the votes in such a way that you wouldn't be able to tell that they were invalid.
And you totally ignored the UI, ruggedness, and flexibility issues.
Not to mention that there appeared to be little or no problems with the voting machines. According to the article the problems were human ones.
If it's so amazingly simple, feel free to go ahead and make it!
Don't forget that it has to be insanely easy to use, with extremely clear instructions and adaptable to an infinite number of configurations for different polling uses.
It also has to be capable of verifying that the voter is valid, that the ballot is valid, and that it itself is valid (i.e. - has not been tampered with).
You either need secured local storage or a secure connection to another storage facility (whether that be onsite or offsite). If local, you need to make sure the data won't be destroyed by substandard handling (see below).
It must be rugged, portable, easy to setup, and low cost.
It must save state, so that if it does crash the current voter doesn't get screwed. Optimally they should be able to go to another voting machine to finish their ballot.
Let us know when you've finished. Don't forget this is both a hardware and software solution. We'll be waiting.
Well, uncompressed HD video eats roughly 1 Gb/s without sound, so a 320 GB drive won't let you store more than about 2600 seconds of video, which is less than an hour. Which is ignoring that to actually edit you'll need at least half the disk free, if not more.
Of course, no single drive on the planet can handle a sustained throughput of 1 Gb/s (124 MB/s), so how you get that uncompressed video data to disk is another matter.
It's still very much a niche use, and Joe Consumer wouldn't be interested in doing this, but it wasn't too long ago that nobody could imagine using 10 MB of storage.
And why are you backing up program files? Why aren't you just backing up your data? Of that 95 GB, I doubt more than 1-2 GB is actually critical data you'd need to back up.
As for the theoretical limit - it's 144 petabytes (that's 144,000 TB, which is almost certainly more storage than has been produced in the past 50 years) with ATAPI-6 (implemented in both UltraDMA/133 and SerialATA). That's a 48-bit addressing scheme with 512 byte sectors. You won't be running into that limit anytime soon.
Video editing would chew up 320 GB pretty fast... and that's not even HD.
Being able to store CD's in a lossless electronic format (like FLAC) would also chew up space moderately fast, although you could fit one hell of a storage library on that.
For business use more space is always good. Databases chew up space like nothing else, particularly when you're talking about data warehouses.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah.... no, I don't think you quite got what he meant.
Without the Exchange Connector he would lose functionality with Ximian because IMAP/SMTP can't replicate what Exchange/Outlook do. With the Exchange Connector he regains that functionality. This isn't a limitation of Ximian's client as it is the data from Exchange - and there's a "fix" but it's proprietary and costs money. Can't exactly blame Ximian for getting payback on the really deeply mystic stuff.
Matter of fact there are backend servers out there, even free ones, that can replace Exchange. But it requires you to buy additional software for Outlook clients and it still isn't as integrated as Exchange/Outlook is -- but it's 98% there and about half the cost or less. This isn't too surprising, since you'd expect vendor software to work best with software from the same vendor.
You can, in fact, have your cake and eat it too, but right now there will still be crumbs here and there. Which, of course, is what this German Groupware order is all about.
If this means Barton sooner rather than later, I'm happy... although from what I've read Barton (166 MHz FSB, 512k cache) is still slated for Q1'03. Sigh.
Why? Because I'd like to get a Barton CPU for my next computer. I'm already in the waiting game for the NV30 and (to a much lesser extent) Serial ATA, so putting a better CPU on the list isn't a big deal.
Why not Hammer? Because I know better than to buy a first generation CPU with first generation motherboards. Barton is just a mild revision to a 4 year old CPU core, and the motherboards are now hitting their 6th generation (KT133, KT133A, KT266, KT266A, KT333, KT400).
For those who need the speed, power, and addressibility of a 64-bit chip this announcement sucks, but for those just looking for a faster current generation chip it's not entirely bad.
In those days it was always followed with "Flame Off", though this has sadly gone by the wayside
Most likely because a lot of the flamers and trolls never actually stop.
too much emphesis on preventing fraud, as if voting fraud is somehow a new phenomenon unique to electronic voting
Of course it isn't, but the idea is that it might actually be viable to prevent fraud with electronic voting... although I suspect that, as geeks, we can't poke as many holes in an electronic system as you can in a paper system.
With proper security, however, the bar gets raised a lot higher.
I think the best system is still a card system
Well, perhaps... except that even with arrow systems you wind up with cards that are invalid because someone mismarked them, didn't mark hard enough, the graphite wears off with enough recounts, etc. And even with these systems the recounts never produce the same numbers, and they take a considerable amount of time.
Electronic systems have the potential of eliminating all of these issues (note trolls - I said potential, not absolute). The system will prevent you from entering a ballot that is invalid. You won't accidentilly vote for two different candidates in the same race - just not possible. And barring fraud (see above), the vote won't be questionable, it won't decay with recounts, and the recount will be nearly instantaneous (depending on how long system verification takes) and will add up the same every time (if it doesn't, you're in the land of fraud again).
Eventually we might be able to do online voting, which would be pretty nice if done properly (big if). Sure as hell won't get that with a paper ballot. Of course, 80% of the reason to go to Internet voting could be solved just by getting into the 20th Century (yes, 20th) and allowing voting for more than 12 hours on a single workday. Come on -- week long voting shouldn't be an issue. If it's a cost problem, then a Saturday would still be better than Tuesday.
That said, you're very right about Murphy's Law and KISS.
The SB added digital sound recording and playback. The AdLib was just a very cheap 8-bit MIDI synth, so it was fine if you wanted music, but useless if you wanted to do sound effects, speech, etc.
The original SB wasn't cheaper either -- it was actually a good bit more expensive. But the feature it added was worth the expense, and as the first ones out of the gate they set the standard for digital sound. It didn't become a moot point until late in the Win3.x/early Win95 days when the drivers got reliable enough (and DOS games started becoming rare enough) to use a single interface that utilized whatever card you had.
And even then some companies took forever to get it right -- Turtle Beach being notorious for issues with some of the earlier cards.
Which part of the statement where I said I owned both an SB Live and an SB64 (SB AWE64 to be technical) did you miss?
Which part of the statement in which I recommended a variety of sound cards, not just a TB (and, in fact, I recommended Hercules twice while only mentioning TB once)?
And, know what, they don't all work perfectly. If they did there wouldn't be the complaints. Do they work "well enough" for most people? Sure. But so does onboard sound. If you're going to buy a soundcard at this point, you should take the time to learn what's out there and why it's even worth buying one. Otherwise you're just throwing your money down the toilet.
Same... probably because he often seems prolific in what's only a 30 minute show (which is 22-24 minutes of actual air time).
But we've also been spoiled by a few of the recent interviews that have been very, very long and prosaic.
And not every PC is equipped with AGP
Well, every PC built in the past 3 or 4 years is... and, frankly, if your main PCs are older than that you're not likely to be reading ArsTechnica or something about a BIOS tweaking guide.
But like most 'BIOS' guides I've read, this gives alot of info on 'tweaks', with little mention of the damage that the wrong settings can do
Obviously a problem... I haven't read the article yet (didn't feel like it this morning, and it's toast now), but they should really mark the settings that are potentially dangerous. Screwing around with your RAM timings, CPU clock, etc. can release the magic smoke awfully quickly.
There's also a disproportionate amount of Soundblaster-bashing going on here
Not really. Creative Labs has long made the worst hardware they could get away with, and did so thanks to having created the original standard for PC sound. They've never been high quality cards, and have often caused problems with other hardware and software. Go talk to someone who tried putting an SB Live in a dual processor NT4 system about it for example.
Frankly, if you're looking for a new soundcard then there's little reason to buy Creative. For general use (games/music) both Hercules and Turtle Beach make better cards for less. For games alone, Hercules or Philips are better (Philips mentioned purely due to QSound). If you're talking about just playing music, doing a home theater PC, or mid to high end audio then a more expensive card that does real 24/96 or 24/192 audio is preferred - M-Audio and many others fit the bill here.
I do think that the incompatibility bit is somewhat overstated (I don't have any problems with my SB Live or my much older SB64 ISA), although SB's are notoriously bad about sharing PCI IRQs and the like, but the poor sound quality and total lack of compliance to industry standards are not. The digital out on the Live series doesn't comply to any spec known to man -- its voltage is roughly 10x the allowed spec. Even the Audigy continues to resample everything to 48 KHz, which plays hell with CD Audio, and their claims of 96 KHz sampling rates are deceptive at best (only applies to the digital outputs, and only sometimes at that).
If you want more details, I suggest either the PC AV Tech or [H]ardOCP's Audio forum. If you're interested in HTPC's in particular, then take a look at AVS Forum's HTPC forum.
From the parent post:
Which just isn't how copyright law works, at least in the US (and anyone else who agrees to international copyright law).
That's all I was responding to... and it's quite clear that Epson isn't going to do this.
Spitzak said it properly here. They don't have to release the source. They merely have to stop violating the license, and one of those methods is to remove the software from distribution.
Frankly, it's entirely possible that the GPL was misunderstood -- since there are disagreements as to exactly what it means in some cases (such as dynamic linking). A library could've been used without the senior developer or project manager realizing that it was GPL and not LGPL.
Did they violate it? Yup. And they're doing the right thing. Sorry you have an issue with that.
Then someone comes along on a payroll, sees much money for no work, grabs your work and changes the credits. This is more like what happened here
You have absolutely no idea what "happened here". In fact, the FSF has stated that Epson is doing the right thing and has actually gone well beyond what is required to work toward a fix. Frankly, they could've just stonewalled (like virtually every other violator has done) or said "fine, we'll just pull it and say screw it". Instead they admitted to an inadvertant mistake (and yes, they happen -- if you don't think so, then you clearly have no experience with large companies and real world coding), publicly admitted to it, and are actively trying to remedy the situation and continue providing the software.
Quite frankly, your attitude is exactly what Microsoft portrays when demonizing the GPL. As a software developer I sure as hell wouldn't touch GPL'd software with a 10 foot pole if it meant that a mistake would mean giving up my core business logic. Hell, I wouldn't even develop for Linux because of the attitude associated with it.
Fortunately, the vast majority of people seem to actually comprehend the GPL and see Epson as doing the Right Thing. So there's still hope for the non-frothing Linux advocates.
Demanding the source code means they release the source code
Which means that their proprietary, core business logic of dithering and color matching gets released to all of their competitors! Whee!
You know, the exact same stuff that they get marked higher on than their competitors in reviews of their hardware? Yeah, that stuff.
Uh uh.
You can't just pay damages and continue to violate copyright. The first thing any judge would do is grant an injunction against your continued distribution of the violating material.
Heck, it's even possible the Judge would make you responsible for stopping other people's distribution of it too, which would make your legal fees skyrocket as you started suing every Tom, Dick, and Harry who mirrored your software.
As for damages, it's very much unknown if you'd get any. In the US you have to have filed for copyright in order to secure damages -- otherwise all you can get is an injunction to stop further violations. Of course, if the company ignores that injunction then they're in contempt of court, which does have hefty damages associated with it. But you won't see any of that money.
invunerable robots
Uh... when was the last time you actually watched BattleBots?
Sure, the wedges are hardpressed to actually hurt another bot, but wedges rarely go the distance. Spinners and bladebots destroy them. Hell, just watch any match that involves Hazard, Son of Wyachi, or Warhead and you'll get to watch the other bot running around desperately trying to keep some of its parts together.
Was that in a day, a few weeks, a year, or what?
A couple days I think. The issue was that the request for retesting was submitted and didn't occur for 2-3 days, followed by another week to disappear from the list.
I can understand that it's not entirely desirable to immediately test, since less-than-honest types could "fix" the server, have it de-listed, and then remove the fix. But an immediate test followed by 2-3 retests at random intervals would be a better alternative methinks.
When your business gets blackholed and you're unable to send email to large portions of the net, I'm sure you'll think that "2 weeks" is an entirely reasonable time period. Thankfully our primary domain wasn't the one blackholed (as it didn't have an open relay).
Certainly they limited the damage your company did to the rest of the Internet by passing along all that spam while the relay was open
Nice theory, except that mail logs show that no spam was forwarded through the open relay until it appeared on the black hole list. This was a domain that had been setup for at least a year and wasn't used anywhere except for a domain registration and private, customer-only email use.
First off, he's right. A black hole list has the potential for abuse, and there need to be some checks to make sure they're not abused as such.
Second, once you're listed on a black hole, it can be hell to get off. My company had a secondary domain that was used for customer emails. It was, indeed, an open-relay due to misconfiguration. Eventually it got blackholed and our admins realized the mistake they'd made and set out to fix it. They did fix it eventually, but by that time the server was being slammed by spammers trying to use it as an open-relay. And on top of that trying to get the black hole list to remove the domain was difficult - it took well over two weeks, while the black hole-ing occurred in under a day. Eventually the entire domain was just dropped, since even with the open relay closed the spammers were still abusing the hell out of our pipe.
That said, as best I can tell the author of the article barely even tried to remedy the situation. Yes, the black hole system forged a header to hit his open relay. Duh. So do spammers. If they could do it, so could (and will) others, and that's why you're black holed. But I'm sure he could've contacted the people running the black hole to find out what he could do to fix the problem. Instead it looks like he just wants to take them to court.
Finally, black holes/black lists/spam filters/etc. aren't solving the problem. The bandwidth is still being chewed up, and as is pointed out in the article, the block lists act like honeypots for the spammers - everytime a new site is added the spammers find a new site to spam from. Sure, if you participate in the black hole you won't deliver the spam, but the bandwidth has already been sucked up from the backbones, and you're still using CPU power to deny the spam. As much as I'd like to see lawyers stay the hell away from the Net, I don't see any other way to stop spam than to make it illegal. It may be that most of the relays are foreign, but most of the spammers are in the US or another Western country. Anti-spam laws could significantly help.
I was in NYC over the Labor Day weekend and thought the Metrocard machines were cool... didn't understand why the hell people would be waiting in line. Got a day pass for my wife and one for myself in less time than it took the cashier to deal with one person -- and paid via credit card at that.
ATMs are not portable or inexpensive. Nor do they have wildly different input requirements that polling booths do.
Yes, I've seen "small" and "portable" ATMs... they require movement by flatbed trucks (or are built into conversion vans) and cost $50k each.
That said, you make a good point, and a lot of the verification/security bits could be lifted from an ATM design.
Actually, I'd pseudo-jump on you for the "100% uptime" requirement, not the 100% reliability.
.00000001% whose vote is misinterpreted.
The caveat there is that it doesn't have to have 100% uptime as in "24/7", but 100% uptime for a specified duration (generally 1 week, after which it can be serviced).
But with that said, yes, this is an application where 100% reliability is required. Unless, of course, you don't mind being that
And how are you validating that you're storing what was voted for?
You're not. And so a hack to the firmware, software, or a few other places could subvert the data.
The Why is because this has to be right. It's the core function of the government and one of the only ways that the people can express their decision making abilities.
And, frankly, hanging chads would be nothing in comparison to a firmware virus that changed 10% of the votes to a particular political party or candidate. To say that you'd be betting your reputation on it is an understatement.
Well, a few years ago virtually every ATM ran OS/2. But so did all of the banks (for front end systems, not backend). Most of the banks have since moved off OS/2 to Windows NT or Win2k, so I have no idea what's running in the ATMs anymore.
No, you've ignored 90% of the issues.
It does have to validate itself, period. If you don't then a hack of the system can invalidate every vote cast on it. Worse, it can fake the votes in such a way that you wouldn't be able to tell that they were invalid.
And you totally ignored the UI, ruggedness, and flexibility issues.
Not to mention that there appeared to be little or no problems with the voting machines. According to the article the problems were human ones.
If it's so amazingly simple, feel free to go ahead and make it!
Don't forget that it has to be insanely easy to use, with extremely clear instructions and adaptable to an infinite number of configurations for different polling uses.
It also has to be capable of verifying that the voter is valid, that the ballot is valid, and that it itself is valid (i.e. - has not been tampered with).
You either need secured local storage or a secure connection to another storage facility (whether that be onsite or offsite). If local, you need to make sure the data won't be destroyed by substandard handling (see below).
It must be rugged, portable, easy to setup, and low cost.
It must save state, so that if it does crash the current voter doesn't get screwed. Optimally they should be able to go to another voting machine to finish their ballot.
Let us know when you've finished. Don't forget this is both a hardware and software solution. We'll be waiting.
Well, uncompressed HD video eats roughly 1 Gb/s without sound, so a 320 GB drive won't let you store more than about 2600 seconds of video, which is less than an hour. Which is ignoring that to actually edit you'll need at least half the disk free, if not more.
Of course, no single drive on the planet can handle a sustained throughput of 1 Gb/s (124 MB/s), so how you get that uncompressed video data to disk is another matter.
It's still very much a niche use, and Joe Consumer wouldn't be interested in doing this, but it wasn't too long ago that nobody could imagine using 10 MB of storage.
And why are you backing up program files? Why aren't you just backing up your data? Of that 95 GB, I doubt more than 1-2 GB is actually critical data you'd need to back up.
As for the theoretical limit - it's 144 petabytes (that's 144,000 TB, which is almost certainly more storage than has been produced in the past 50 years) with ATAPI-6 (implemented in both UltraDMA/133 and SerialATA). That's a 48-bit addressing scheme with 512 byte sectors. You won't be running into that limit anytime soon.
Video editing would chew up 320 GB pretty fast... and that's not even HD.
Being able to store CD's in a lossless electronic format (like FLAC) would also chew up space moderately fast, although you could fit one hell of a storage library on that.
For business use more space is always good. Databases chew up space like nothing else, particularly when you're talking about data warehouses.