* Machines are small, and are stored in a sealed bag. The seal is broken in front of polling officers. So no-one can tamper with machines in transit.
* The chips (microcontrollers) are not re-programmable i.e. locked (for uninformed, this is one of the basic features of a typical microcontroller).
* The code is verifiable because its extremely simple (how hard it is to code a key-press counter?). The program filter off crazy UI issues (eg. multiple button presses), which are again few in number as only input mechanism to system are voting buttons (REAL hardware buttons... no funky GUI.. in fact there is no other input mechanism eg console/GUI anywhere).
* Tampering on-site is near-impossible because apart from multiple polling officers, you have representatives from ALL contesting parties present on the polling booth (we have a multi-party system and additionally, independent individual contestants too!!). So if someone tries to rig anything in anybody's favour, the hawk-eyed representatives will cry foul play and within minutes, the election commission will get the news and polls will be suspended.
Clinton lied about having a blow job, and all americans said how they were really ashamed of their supreme head lying. Clinton was nearly impeached for lying while in office(!!!) - for getting a blow job with mutual consent.
And here we have another guy who lied about WMDs (nuclear weapons etc)... bombed a country into oblivion, got its thousands of innocent citizens killed - and no one even whimpered about it!!! Damn he even got re-elected !!!
Guys, you really have got the sense of truth and lies mixed up.
PS: aha, and I had another laugh seeing Cowboy george winning from Texas... whowouldhavethunk:-D
G5's have water cooling not because they produce hell lot of heat, but because Apple wanted to make them whisper quite!!! So instead of a honkin' turbo-jet fanm you have 9 (yeah, NINE) reaally sloow moving fans cooling the whole unit.
It takes a lot to make a good system and Apple sure knows how to do it right!! Finally a POWERFUL system that you can keep next to your bed and still be able to sleep soundly.
Last I checked India, philippines new zealand etc were already AWARE of free software... Dare say, in India free software awareness is more than that of some US states who are still clinging on to MS software for no reason (apart from hand warming from MS).
Better spend some money on educating developed countries too that there ARE alternatives to some crapware from MS.
Keep in mind while calculating the % of annual income this device costs, that in many asian countries eg India, education is valued VERY HIGHLY. In fact, many of those 'middle class' families will not shy to cut back on cloths, food and luxuries (smaller TV, refridgerator etc) to put their wards in best school of city!
There is a reason why your jobs are moving to India... people are not shy of spending their last rupee on eductaion!
In my case, my father bought me a computer (my first one.. got after waiting for ~4 years) when I completed high school... it costed nearly 50% of his then yearly income, but he saved money for it through the years and bought it for me... on just the indication that it *might* help me in my education... 5 years later, I've completed my degree and am now employed at Oracle corporation:-)
You're one of the few still having a job! You've got a project at hand, and you NEED to do it well.
DO NOT modernize if you don't have to! What you have in your hands is, as you tell, a nice *working* code. IF after your "modernization" crusade, it breaks on some platforms, even due to platform bugs, it will be YOUR neck under the guillotine. Understand THAT!
And, no, I'm not talking this from my behind... been there, done that, got burned!!! Unnecessary modernization/elegance/optimizations/refactoring is root of all evil and prime cause of job loss! Do your job, and fix whatever is *NEEDED*... and make sure you ain't breaking anything. If you can do THAT much flawlessly, you should be thankful. In software engineering there are just too many variables and you carry the onus of working around them. All compiler/platform/libc bugs will form part of YOUR work... so be careful!
"Meanwhile Zeroconf sits in the corner and cries."
Taco, if you're ignorant, then don't bother adding your comments.
OpenTalk/Rendezvous IS ZeroConf!! OpenTalk/Rendezvous are just the names given to Apple's implementation of ZeroConf.
Just like: * 801.11b/g was named AirPort * 30" LCD display was names "cinema display" * CIFS implementation is known as Samba * IEEE1394 is known as Firewire
Hmm, and there's a reason why you dot-commers got shelved.
You know, you could have done a "rollback" and recovered those 100,000 records, i.e. if you were using any real database.
Instead of modding, I think I should reply to you sir!
What kind of service exactly are you getting from ebay or newegg ???
Yeah, its true that SUN's hardware is expensive... but when shit hits the fan and your server is down... and you're losing money 1000 transactions BY THE MINUTE, you really need someone to come down and save you!!
This is enterprise grade hardware... not any DIY stuff!
If you can manage a whole day replacing and restoring everything from backup, and waiting for your homemade RAID to replicate all data, by ALL means do that. Incidently there are a LOT of businesses that can NOT afford that.
The only problem with SUN is that they've overengineered their products and right now, the market for such exotic stuff is limited... and SUN has been slow to respond to changes.
If you want to blame their management for that, do it. But don't raise a finger at their products!!
Fire the IT Officer ?? Apparantly you haven't been to a school and never had chance to administer a network.
I personally was responsible for a hostel network with 450 odd users... and tell you, the ONLY way you can sleep soundly is by making things assuming everybody has the root password! Students have way much time on their hands, are creative and generally up-to-date with security issues. ONE person cannot spend THAT much time... at 3AM you'd be sleeping while some sleepless fellows will be looking over a just released security advisory! By the time you wake up and check your mailing list mails, they'd have already broken into the system! (most of the time without any damage, but just to "see" if its indeed true).
Sorry man... a network/system administrator in a school/college is probably the worst IT admin job you'd be looking at!
I ride the 180cc one. 16BHP, easily passes all emission norms you throw at it *without catalytic converter*, goes 100MPG (150cc version goes upto 150MPG) IN CITY RIDING (~40MPH)!!
And to boot... its top speed is more freeway friendly at close to 80MPH !
Funny they had us do this then allowed all the CD-R drives you wanted buecause sometimes you just need to give somebody a CD.
In my company, CDRW drives are centrally controlled. You submit request for data to be burned and everything is properly logged.
They also allowed outgoing encrypted SSH sessions and the like it's not like you couldent scp the data out.
Sure, they don't have to block that if their data isn't "critical".
The point is, if your data is important but not critical, just logging all accesses is enough. This gives employees a warm fuzzy feeling of being "trusted" and they have higher satisfaction.
OTOH, if anyone does any funny business, they have logs to show that you made an unauthorized access to outside network and transferred XYZ MB of data. Since technically (and legally) all data on company machine belongs to company, they don't even have to prove that you actually transferred the source code and not just some family pictures your friend mailed you on company email account! the fact that you "transferred" some data is enough to put you behind the bars for a LONG time.
So, beware of ever initiating an encrypted session from office to somewhere you're not supposed to. Remember they have the logs!
I work in India in a major software park. The company in the oppposite quadrant is a typicall BPO company and they have a LARGE poster stuck outside the entrace - "Please get checked and declare all your belongings at security". Several friends too told of similar rules in their companies.
In short, for BPO firms, the data of their clients is of utmost importance. Even CEO of the company is required to go through the mandatory check! Internet access is locked down. No CDROM/CDRW/Floppy/USB/Firewire ! Even printer access is restricted and fully logged and accounted for!
You can get fired for trying to access an irrelevent site (eg Yahoo briefcase), forget about bringing in that 40GB iPod or your favorite USB key.
Oh yeah, did I tell you that even cameras are forbidden and you'd be handed over to police if you're seen taking a "group picture" with your team mates in the office! A camera phone can send you in for good.
Folks, its sometimes business *requirement* not to allow such kind of things. You want to listen to music ? Fine, bring along a vanilla walkman/discman/portable MP3 CD player whatever... just leave the fancy gadgets behind and you'll be fine.
Fortunately I work in a company that has fairly open policies and our data is our own, so the rules are less stringent... no CDRW/USB drive, but still very open policies.
AT LEAST read the/. SUMMARY if not the article, you fool!!
Its clearly written - "Open source codes can easily introduce the users to build security algorithms in the system without the dependence of proprietary platforms"
So EVEN if the open source ones don't have security, the USERS can be motivated to make them secure rather than waiting for vendor to fix them.
NO ONE is saying that open source is more secure than proprietary solutions... the only difference is that USERS can make it secure, if they want it to!
VLC and MPlayer are perfectly free if you don't distribute proprietary codecs.
And what exactly you'd do with them ? The utility of VLC and Mplayer is in being able to play number of formats, which happen to be one or other variation of MPEG4. You can't legally distribute MPEG4 codecs without playing fee to the consortium, ditto for patented ASF, and when you take out MPEG4 (divx, xvid etc) and ASF codecs, it as good as any other proprietary piece of crap!!
And guess what, Helix will have proprietary codecs, too, which will not be freed. So, as far as this goes, there's absolutely no difference
Of course! but here the proprietary codec happens to be Real's... and you'd be surprized to know that Real's decoder, at least, is available free of charge and can be *LEGALLY used in helix.
Belive me folks... this is VERY good news for Linux media scene. There are ONLY 3(*) major competitors in high quality streaming/non-streaming media *business*, and Linux has been DAMN lucky to get one.
[* The other two are Apple (quicktime) and Microsoft (windows media)... now you can get open champagne again when you get Apple on board!!]
VLC ain't free!... because VLC and MPlayer use many patented codecs and algorithms! They can't be free (as in beer and more importantly, as in SPEECH!)
Now as an end-user you may use them, and though its illegal you can mostly get away with that, but as a "corporation", Redhat and Novell etc can't touch them even with a 10 meter barge pole!
Helix, otoh, as a product from Real themselves, can be used *LEGALLY*.
Being legal is important when it comes to being in business and making money. As Redhat Corp, last thing I'd want is thrown out of business by a NNN million dollar lawsuite claiming infringement on XYZ number of MPEG4 patents.
If these "smart" systems happen to be running *NIX, then practially 90% of maintenance can be done remotely. So it doesn't matter whether admin is located in room next to server room or half way across the globe.
The rest 10% job deals with hardware problem, and last I looked all enterprise grade hardware had self diagnostics built in. So if your next-gen "smart" system says drive is kaput, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to replace it... a janitor can do that!! Add to that these next gen smart systems will have MUCH better HW diagnostics and redundancy and you can see that admin job go non-local too!
There is practically no reason for the average (or above average) user to use PPC architecture when AMD is readily available, cheap, and fast
AMD is a processor (hardware) is just one piece of the puzzle.
Most people need complete solutions, and software is the other big part!!
No, Linux isn't an answer yet. Its good when I want to play i.e. from 5PM till 9AM on weekdays and on weekends.
Between 9AM and 5PM when my job is at stake, I'd like that damn thing to work!! And Apple's PPC+OSX combo is better than AMD+Windows combo in this position.
Okay, I have the mod points, but this is one of the best questions I've seen in a while on/., and seriously, this problem is NOT simple! Multicast + encryption = can of worms!
For good points see one the post "Secure Multicast IETF and Secure Spread" in replies.
DRM crows, hold on. Multimedia streaming is not just used for movies and ripped TV serials. Inside corporations it is used for webcasting (to intranet) meetings, training talks, company policies and LOT more... at a given time there might be THOUSANDS of employees world wide tuned in to the webcast (say, Taiwan mfgr office, US HQ dev office and India dev office in a 24hr development + manufacturing setup).
Now you DO NOT want outsiders and even unauthorized employees to sneek in on the sales report meeting webcast! Its plain and simple. Its NOT DRM, its access control!
Multicasting in such an environment is a bitch. You need to devise a secure mechanism of distributing keys, administrating and monitoring the listeners. Multicasting has multicasting groups, so you need to provide some kind of scalable encryption accesscontrol mechanism that works at least across few main stream OSs (Windows 2k/XP/2k3, OSX, Linux and FreeBSD).
Trust me kn this, this *is* a fairly new problem and very good one at that. Three cheers to anybody coming up with a *proper* FREE SPEECH solution for that!
Slashdot Mirror
No they aren't ! For following reason -
* Machines are small, and are stored in a sealed bag. The seal is broken in front of polling officers. So no-one can tamper with machines in transit.
* The chips (microcontrollers) are not re-programmable i.e. locked (for uninformed, this is one of the basic features of a typical microcontroller).
* The code is verifiable because its extremely simple (how hard it is to code a key-press counter?). The program filter off crazy UI issues (eg. multiple button presses), which are again few in number as only input mechanism to system are voting buttons (REAL hardware buttons... no funky GUI.. in fact there is no other input mechanism eg console/GUI anywhere).
* Tampering on-site is near-impossible because apart from multiple polling officers, you have representatives from ALL contesting parties present on the polling booth (we have a multi-party system and additionally, independent individual contestants too!!). So if someone tries to rig anything in anybody's favour, the hawk-eyed representatives will cry foul play and within minutes, the election commission will get the news and polls will be suspended.
- Akhilesh
I had a good laugh when I read this.
:-D
Clinton lied about having a blow job, and all americans said how they were really ashamed of their supreme head lying. Clinton was nearly impeached for lying while in office(!!!) - for getting a blow job with mutual consent.
And here we have another guy who lied about WMDs (nuclear weapons etc)... bombed a country into oblivion, got its thousands of innocent citizens killed - and no one even whimpered about it!!! Damn he even got re-elected !!!
Guys, you really have got the sense of truth and lies mixed up.
PS: aha, and I had another laugh seeing Cowboy george winning from Texas... whowouldhavethunk
Is it a troll ???
G5's have water cooling not because they produce hell lot of heat, but because Apple wanted to make them whisper quite!!! So instead of a honkin' turbo-jet fanm you have 9 (yeah, NINE) reaally sloow moving fans cooling the whole unit.
It takes a lot to make a good system and Apple sure knows how to do it right!! Finally a POWERFUL system that you can keep next to your bed and still be able to sleep soundly.
Does everybody in SF already has free medical facilities ? Free shelter ?
Someone telling Nethack is a *PIM* application, christ's second coming is close now :=P
Umm, how exactly are "age" and "sex" private information ??
Hey UN,
Last I checked India, philippines new zealand etc were already AWARE of free software... Dare say, in India free software awareness is more than that of some US states who are still clinging on to MS software for no reason (apart from hand warming from MS).
Better spend some money on educating developed countries too that there ARE alternatives to some crapware from MS.
Keep in mind while calculating the % of annual income this device costs, that in many asian countries eg India, education is valued VERY HIGHLY. In fact, many of those 'middle class' families will not shy to cut back on cloths, food and luxuries (smaller TV, refridgerator etc) to put their wards in best school of city!
:-)
There is a reason why your jobs are moving to India... people are not shy of spending their last rupee on eductaion!
In my case, my father bought me a computer (my first one.. got after waiting for ~4 years) when I completed high school... it costed nearly 50% of his then yearly income, but he saved money for it through the years and bought it for me... on just the indication that it *might* help me in my education... 5 years later, I've completed my degree and am now employed at Oracle corporation
Also remeber that... JPEG, GIF, SDRAM, etc were/are also STANDARDS... it didn't stop some companies to use submarine patents to extract royalties!
Umm you're only partially correct, viruses are ok, but its not just Windows that is vulenarable to DDoS attacks.
Anyways, it doesn't matter since most grids that do any kind of important work are not open to internet.
Hi there,
You're one of the few still having a job! You've got a project at hand, and you NEED to do it well.
DO NOT modernize if you don't have to! What you have in your hands is, as you tell, a nice *working* code. IF after your "modernization" crusade, it breaks on some platforms, even due to platform bugs, it will be YOUR neck under the guillotine. Understand THAT!
And, no, I'm not talking this from my behind... been there, done that, got burned!!! Unnecessary modernization/elegance/optimizations/refactoring is root of all evil and prime cause of job loss! Do your job, and fix whatever is *NEEDED*... and make sure you ain't breaking anything. If you can do THAT much flawlessly, you should be thankful. In software engineering there are just too many variables and you carry the onus of working around them. All compiler/platform/libc bugs will form part of YOUR work... so be careful!
"Meanwhile Zeroconf sits in the corner and cries."
Taco, if you're ignorant, then don't bother adding your comments.
OpenTalk/Rendezvous IS ZeroConf!! OpenTalk/Rendezvous are just the names given to Apple's implementation of ZeroConf.
Just like:
* 801.11b/g was named AirPort
* 30" LCD display was names "cinema display"
* CIFS implementation is known as Samba
* IEEE1394 is known as Firewire
Zeroconf is known as OpenTalk/Rendezvous!
Is that clear now ?
Hmm, and there's a reason why you dot-commers got shelved. You know, you could have done a "rollback" and recovered those 100,000 records, i.e. if you were using any real database.
Instead of modding, I think I should reply to you sir!
What kind of service exactly are you getting from ebay or newegg ???
Yeah, its true that SUN's hardware is expensive... but when shit hits the fan and your server is down... and you're losing money 1000 transactions BY THE MINUTE, you really need someone to come down and save you!!
This is enterprise grade hardware... not any DIY stuff!
If you can manage a whole day replacing and restoring everything from backup, and waiting for your homemade RAID to replicate all data, by ALL means do that. Incidently there are a LOT of businesses that can NOT afford that.
The only problem with SUN is that they've overengineered their products and right now, the market for such exotic stuff is limited... and SUN has been slow to respond to changes.
If you want to blame their management for that, do it. But don't raise a finger at their products!!
Fire the IT Officer ?? Apparantly you haven't been to a school and never had chance to administer a network.
I personally was responsible for a hostel network with 450 odd users... and tell you, the ONLY way you can sleep soundly is by making things assuming everybody has the root password! Students have way much time on their hands, are creative and generally up-to-date with security issues. ONE person cannot spend THAT much time... at 3AM you'd be sleeping while some sleepless fellows will be looking over a just released security advisory! By the time you wake up and check your mailing list mails, they'd have already broken into the system! (most of the time without any damage, but just to "see" if its indeed true).
Sorry man... a network/system administrator in a school/college is probably the worst IT admin job you'd be looking at!
That is a moped and won't go faster than 20MPH.
How about this ?
I ride the 180cc one. 16BHP, easily passes all emission norms you throw at it *without catalytic converter*, goes 100MPG (150cc version goes upto 150MPG) IN CITY RIDING (~40MPH)!!
And to boot... its top speed is more freeway friendly at close to 80MPH !
Now beat that! 80MPH and 100-150MPG
Sure, they don't have to block that if their data isn't "critical".
The point is, if your data is important but not critical, just logging all accesses is enough. This gives employees a warm fuzzy feeling of being "trusted" and they have higher satisfaction.
OTOH, if anyone does any funny business, they have logs to show that you made an unauthorized access to outside network and transferred XYZ MB of data. Since technically (and legally) all data on company machine belongs to company, they don't even have to prove that you actually transferred the source code and not just some family pictures your friend mailed you on company email account! the fact that you "transferred" some data is enough to put you behind the bars for a LONG time.
So, beware of ever initiating an encrypted session from office to somewhere you're not supposed to. Remember they have the logs!
Hey
I work in India in a major software park. The company in the oppposite quadrant is a typicall BPO company and they have a LARGE poster stuck outside the entrace - "Please get checked and declare all your belongings at security". Several friends too told of similar rules in their companies.
In short, for BPO firms, the data of their clients is of utmost importance. Even CEO of the company is required to go through the mandatory check! Internet access is locked down. No CDROM/CDRW/Floppy/USB/Firewire ! Even printer access is restricted and fully logged and accounted for!
You can get fired for trying to access an irrelevent site (eg Yahoo briefcase), forget about bringing in that 40GB iPod or your favorite USB key.
Oh yeah, did I tell you that even cameras are forbidden and you'd be handed over to police if you're seen taking a "group picture" with your team mates in the office! A camera phone can send you in for good.
Folks, its sometimes business *requirement* not to allow such kind of things. You want to listen to music ? Fine, bring along a vanilla walkman/discman/portable MP3 CD player whatever... just leave the fancy gadgets behind and you'll be fine.
Fortunately I work in a company that has fairly open policies and our data is our own, so the rules are less stringent... no CDRW/USB drive, but still very open policies.
AT LEAST read the /. SUMMARY if not the article, you fool!!
Its clearly written - "Open source codes can easily introduce the users to build security algorithms in the system without the dependence of proprietary platforms"
So EVEN if the open source ones don't have security, the USERS can be motivated to make them secure rather than waiting for vendor to fix them.
NO ONE is saying that open source is more secure than proprietary solutions... the only difference is that USERS can make it secure, if they want it to!
And what exactly you'd do with them ? The utility of VLC and Mplayer is in being able to play number of formats, which happen to be one or other variation of MPEG4. You can't legally distribute MPEG4 codecs without playing fee to the consortium, ditto for patented ASF, and when you take out MPEG4 (divx, xvid etc) and ASF codecs, it as good as any other proprietary piece of crap!!
Of course! but here the proprietary codec happens to be Real's... and you'd be surprized to know that Real's decoder, at least, is available free of charge and can be *LEGALLY used in helix.
Belive me folks... this is VERY good news for Linux media scene. There are ONLY 3(*) major competitors in high quality streaming/non-streaming media *business*, and Linux has been DAMN lucky to get one.[* The other two are Apple (quicktime) and Microsoft (windows media)... now you can get open champagne again when you get Apple on board!!]
VLC ain't free! ... because VLC and MPlayer use many patented codecs and algorithms! They can't be free (as in beer and more importantly, as in SPEECH!)
Now as an end-user you may use them, and though its illegal you can mostly get away with that, but as a "corporation", Redhat and Novell etc can't touch them even with a 10 meter barge pole!
Helix, otoh, as a product from Real themselves, can be used *LEGALLY*.
Being legal is important when it comes to being in business and making money. As Redhat Corp, last thing I'd want is thrown out of business by a NNN million dollar lawsuite claiming infringement on XYZ number of MPEG4 patents.
How long have been living in your cave ?
If these "smart" systems happen to be running *NIX, then practially 90% of maintenance can be done remotely. So it doesn't matter whether admin is located in room next to server room or half way across the globe.
The rest 10% job deals with hardware problem, and last I looked all enterprise grade hardware had self diagnostics built in. So if your next-gen "smart" system says drive is kaput, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to replace it... a janitor can do that!! Add to that these next gen smart systems will have MUCH better HW diagnostics and redundancy and you can see that admin job go non-local too!
AMD is a processor (hardware) is just one piece of the puzzle.
Most people need complete solutions, and software is the other big part!!No, Linux isn't an answer yet. Its good when I want to play i.e. from 5PM till 9AM on weekdays and on weekends.
Between 9AM and 5PM when my job is at stake, I'd like that damn thing to work!! And Apple's PPC+OSX combo is better than AMD+Windows combo in this position.
Okay, I have the mod points, but this is one of the best questions I've seen in a while on /., and seriously, this problem is NOT simple! Multicast + encryption = can of worms!
For good points see one the post "Secure Multicast IETF and Secure Spread" in replies.
DRM crows, hold on. Multimedia streaming is not just used for movies and ripped TV serials. Inside corporations it is used for webcasting (to intranet) meetings, training talks, company policies and LOT more... at a given time there might be THOUSANDS of employees world wide tuned in to the webcast (say, Taiwan mfgr office, US HQ dev office and India dev office in a 24hr development + manufacturing setup).
Now you DO NOT want outsiders and even unauthorized employees to sneek in on the sales report meeting webcast! Its plain and simple. Its NOT DRM, its access control!
Multicasting in such an environment is a bitch. You need to devise a secure mechanism of distributing keys, administrating and monitoring the listeners. Multicasting has multicasting groups, so you need to provide some kind of scalable encryption accesscontrol mechanism that works at least across few main stream OSs (Windows 2k/XP/2k3, OSX, Linux and FreeBSD).
Trust me kn this, this *is* a fairly new problem and very good one at that. Three cheers to anybody coming up with a *proper* FREE SPEECH solution for that!