A few winters ago, my local PBS station (Mountain Lake PBS), was showing a documentary on birthing. Well, they got to the point where the focused the camera on the woman's crotch (not blurred out), and the transmitter hiccupped somehow, freezing the image perfectly centered on her nether region. This wasn't a problem at the studio, it was a problem at the transmitter/antenna site.
Well, they don't call this station Mountain Lake PBS for nothing. The transmitter is in a pretty remote location and could only be reached by snowmobile at this time of year. So, the image lasted quite a long time (12 hours, IIRC) before it got fixed. As silly as it sounds, the incident made national news. Just thought I'd share.
Ah, but see he said he *would* start charging....if they're gonna screw it up no matter what, you might as well make some dough, or score a 12 pack, whatever....:)
You know, the strange part of that is that Windows does ship with an indexing service. Not the best, to be sure, but for most file searching perfectly adequate. It seems like if it was already there they'd at least try to use that for searching on existing systems.
I challenge you to provide me an example of a large, highly utilized system that has never had any kind of failure, ie: 100% uptime. Even if there is an example, which I doubt, please realize that eventually it will fail. That's just the nature of the beast.
I don't know anything about EDS, but I do know this: They could have done 100,000 projects/upgrades flawlessly and you'd never know it, but let them screw up once (or however many times this company has) and you'll never hear the end of it.
Please realize that I'm not defending them. I'm just pointing out that, as someone who works in IT, management never sees it when things go flawlessly, but they will not hesitate to throw your ass to the wolves should something go wrong.
I'll agree with you that it is harder, but it is hardly undoable. There was a pic floating around the web that showed a guy with a Bush/Cheney bumper sticker on his pickup truck loading the paper ballots in the back of it. Perhaps you've seen it, perhaps you haven't. I'm not even sure the photo was real. Hell, for all I know it was Photoshopped, but if it was true, it shows you how easy it would be to just steal the paper ballots and alter them as seen fit.
Do you really think that the people who have the power to rig an electronic voting device can't steal/alter some paper in a ballot box? I don't.
PopSci (I think) did a piece on a secure 2 part receipt that could work (you kept a part, the box kept a part), but then a verified count would involve getting those second parts back from everyone who voted, IIRC.
I agree with you totally on this point. If they can write "You voted for liar #1" on screen but actually write something else to storage, why wouldn't they do the same thing on a paper receipt.
I do think that Open Source is the way to go for these machines, though I have that nagging worry in the back of my mind that there will be a flaw found by a black-hat (perhaps a hired one) that is held close to the chest, so to speak. Hopefully, there are enough honest code reviewers out there that would catch and report the same vulnerability. That's how the process works now for other FOSS projects, but I wonder with the stakes as high as a US election if that would still be the case.
I also have to laugh at these people who say they don't trust e-voting machines that they can't view the source on, but who will then walk in to a funny colored mechanical booth, push some buttons, then open a lever, and somewhow feel secure in their vote without a receipt and without knowing who the hell all those gears, cogs, and twiddlybits actually just voted for.
I'm for anything that convinces a jury to be skeptical of an eyewitness account as they *are* notoriously unreliable.
When my wife (then girlfriend) and I were undergrads, she used me as an experiment for one of her classes (she majored in criminal investigative psychology). She had me walk through one of her classes unannounced and nonchalantly, then, after I had left, asked the rest of the class to write down a description of me.
Of the 40 or 50 or so students in the class, most weren't even in the ballpark (in a huge blow to my masculinity, some didn't even get the sex right!) and only a very few would have been usable descriptions. So, anything that makes them understand how useless they are is a good thing.
Along those lines, I was thinking that maybe the sound editing was outsourced. We all know that their photography is stock stuff; witness all the MS ads picturing Apples. It is conceivable, though not necessarily true, that this work was done by an outside agency.
I don't know if you read much code, but most virus code is horrible. Quite a bit of it is straight from a point-and-click virus builder, and the stuff that is hand written tends not to work as intended. Of course, I am talking about a virus, so maybe it works just like the author wanted it to for all I know....
Dude, I've got mod points and love to mod this up, but I can't find a +1 "Sucks To Be You" anywhere...though I'm sure there are some apple haters that would hit the funny button....
Actually, I just got on this very subject today with a contract coder we employ occasionally in our US based college. The contractor, who is Canadian, said he'd much rather have the American system for medical coverage. When I asked him about it costing more, he'd said that cost wasn't his issue with the Canadian system, it was the waiting time. He mentioned a story about his mother needing some form of cancer tumor cut off her arm and it took her 6 months to get in and have it removed and by that time it was too late. His point was what good is free/cheap if you can't get it in time?
Actually, there are a few simple reasons for the doctors wearing glasses, but I think the big one is that most of the doctors are middle-age or older and suffer from age-related farsightedness. This is caused by, if I remember correctly, the eye losing its elasticity and the muscles being unable to focus the eye correctly.
In short, even with laser correction, old geezers still need reading glasses.
Or I could be blowing smoke out my ass. Who knows....
See critical mass argument above; also see argument above about how most mal-ware still requires user intervention to install. Put the 2 together and you'll have the same problem no matter the OS.
I can understand the idea here, but still it seems to me that simulating with something like a lead filled bomb (granted which is only half as dense as Uranium and Plutonium if memory serves) would be a much safer alternative, not to mention much less costly.
I didn't read this particular article, but I did read one on the same subject just a couple of days ago, and it mentioned that this was a "training bomb" with live nuclear material but no detonation cap, so it *can't* go off. WTF they were doing with live nuke material in a training bomb is beyond me, but I thought I'd mention the no detonator thing anyway.
As soon as I read that he thought that most home machines didn't need a DNS or DHCP client, I killed the window and wrote the article off as pure BS...this guy has no clue. I can't think of a home system that DOESN'T need these...unless absolutely zero internet connectivity is necessary and that certainly isn't the case for most home computers.
Windows has had production 64-bit OSes since Windows 2000, only they called it the DataCenter version, and you had to get it with your hardware from an OEM. So yes, you can have 64 bit Windows, though you'll pay dearly for it.
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A few winters ago, my local PBS station (Mountain Lake PBS), was showing a documentary on birthing. Well, they got to the point where the focused the camera on the woman's crotch (not blurred out), and the transmitter hiccupped somehow, freezing the image perfectly centered on her nether region. This wasn't a problem at the studio, it was a problem at the transmitter/antenna site.
Well, they don't call this station Mountain Lake PBS for nothing. The transmitter is in a pretty remote location and could only be reached by snowmobile at this time of year. So, the image lasted quite a long time (12 hours, IIRC) before it got fixed. As silly as it sounds, the incident made national news. Just thought I'd share.
Ah, but see he said he *would* start charging....if they're gonna screw it up no matter what, you might as well make some dough, or score a 12 pack, whatever.... :)
You know, the strange part of that is that Windows does ship with an indexing service. Not the best, to be sure, but for most file searching perfectly adequate. It seems like if it was already there they'd at least try to use that for searching on existing systems.
But see, smart people in the PC Service biz *encourage* the use of IE...it only drives the housecalls up all the more!
I challenge you to provide me an example of a large, highly utilized system that has never had any kind of failure, ie: 100% uptime. Even if there is an example, which I doubt, please realize that eventually it will fail. That's just the nature of the beast.
I don't know anything about EDS, but I do know this: They could have done 100,000 projects/upgrades flawlessly and you'd never know it, but let them screw up once (or however many times this company has) and you'll never hear the end of it.
Please realize that I'm not defending them. I'm just pointing out that, as someone who works in IT, management never sees it when things go flawlessly, but they will not hesitate to throw your ass to the wolves should something go wrong.
I'll agree with you that it is harder, but it is hardly undoable. There was a pic floating around the web that showed a guy with a Bush/Cheney bumper sticker on his pickup truck loading the paper ballots in the back of it. Perhaps you've seen it, perhaps you haven't. I'm not even sure the photo was real. Hell, for all I know it was Photoshopped, but if it was true, it shows you how easy it would be to just steal the paper ballots and alter them as seen fit.
Do you really think that the people who have the power to rig an electronic voting device can't steal/alter some paper in a ballot box? I don't.
PopSci (I think) did a piece on a secure 2 part receipt that could work (you kept a part, the box kept a part), but then a verified count would involve getting those second parts back from everyone who voted, IIRC.
I agree with you totally on this point. If they can write "You voted for liar #1" on screen but actually write something else to storage, why wouldn't they do the same thing on a paper receipt.
I do think that Open Source is the way to go for these machines, though I have that nagging worry in the back of my mind that there will be a flaw found by a black-hat (perhaps a hired one) that is held close to the chest, so to speak. Hopefully, there are enough honest code reviewers out there that would catch and report the same vulnerability. That's how the process works now for other FOSS projects, but I wonder with the stakes as high as a US election if that would still be the case.
I also have to laugh at these people who say they don't trust e-voting machines that they can't view the source on, but who will then walk in to a funny colored mechanical booth, push some buttons, then open a lever, and somewhow feel secure in their vote without a receipt and without knowing who the hell all those gears, cogs, and twiddlybits actually just voted for.
You're probably right, which just proves the point even more, since they all have the same results.
I'm for anything that convinces a jury to be skeptical of an eyewitness account as they *are* notoriously unreliable.
When my wife (then girlfriend) and I were undergrads, she used me as an experiment for one of her classes (she majored in criminal investigative psychology). She had me walk through one of her classes unannounced and nonchalantly, then, after I had left, asked the rest of the class to write down a description of me.
Of the 40 or 50 or so students in the class, most weren't even in the ballpark (in a huge blow to my masculinity, some didn't even get the sex right!) and only a very few would have been usable descriptions. So, anything that makes them understand how useless they are is a good thing.
Well, if "immediate effect" = "getting laid" , then I'd say he did pretty well.
Along those lines, I was thinking that maybe the sound editing was outsourced. We all know that their photography is stock stuff; witness all the MS ads picturing Apples. It is conceivable, though not necessarily true, that this work was done by an outside agency.
No, that record was set by a previous machine. This one is just a prototype for a much larger/faster version, and still managed to hit 70 teraflops...
I don't know if you read much code, but most virus code is horrible. Quite a bit of it is straight from a point-and-click virus builder, and the stuff that is hand written tends not to work as intended. Of course, I am talking about a virus, so maybe it works just like the author wanted it to for all I know....
Dude, I've got mod points and love to mod this up, but I can't find a +1 "Sucks To Be You" anywhere...though I'm sure there are some apple haters that would hit the funny button....
Actually, I just got on this very subject today with a contract coder we employ occasionally in our US based college. The contractor, who is Canadian, said he'd much rather have the American system for medical coverage. When I asked him about it costing more, he'd said that cost wasn't his issue with the Canadian system, it was the waiting time. He mentioned a story about his mother needing some form of cancer tumor cut off her arm and it took her 6 months to get in and have it removed and by that time it was too late. His point was what good is free/cheap if you can't get it in time?
In short, even with laser correction, old geezers still need reading glasses.
Or I could be blowing smoke out my ass. Who knows....
See critical mass argument above; also see argument above about how most mal-ware still requires user intervention to install. Put the 2 together and you'll have the same problem no matter the OS.
No, the correct term is "Free as in speech". :P
I can understand the idea here, but still it seems to me that simulating with something like a lead filled bomb (granted which is only half as dense as Uranium and Plutonium if memory serves) would be a much safer alternative, not to mention much less costly.
I didn't read this particular article, but I did read one on the same subject just a couple of days ago, and it mentioned that this was a "training bomb" with live nuclear material but no detonation cap, so it *can't* go off. WTF they were doing with live nuke material in a training bomb is beyond me, but I thought I'd mention the no detonator thing anyway.
As soon as I read that he thought that most home machines didn't need a DNS or DHCP client, I killed the window and wrote the article off as pure BS...this guy has no clue. I can't think of a home system that DOESN'T need these...unless absolutely zero internet connectivity is necessary and that certainly isn't the case for most home computers.
I didn't say anything about those architectures. And you're right, I don't think MIPS made the cut.
Windows has had production 64-bit OSes since Windows 2000, only they called it the DataCenter version, and you had to get it with your hardware from an OEM. So yes, you can have 64 bit Windows, though you'll pay dearly for it.