I think you are right that this is a power play. Call Yahoo's bluff and walk away. Now the share holders are left thinking I cold have had hard cash within 20% of my pipe dream about what this company is worth. Now I'm back to the pipedream. Which state do I prefer.
Before balmers intervention the pipdream valuation was rock solid. Every one thought it was realistic Someone someday would either pay that for yahoo or yahoo itself would generate income on that scale. If they did not they would not have invested in the first place. No one had to think about when that someday was coming or even if it was coming.
Now MS bid, and Yahoo desperately tried to find a white nite to counter offer.
No one else bid. Now MS withdrew theirs.
Sould searching time for yahoo investors. They are going to demand profits, not get them and in a year the company will run out of cash. The engineers MS covets will still be there, the company MS did not need will be cored out and bought for a song.
All that said. I don't think Monkey boy planned it that way at first given his string of high profile failures. But once the ball got rolling be probably realized the opportunity.
This radar absorbing paint sounds like horseshit to me. This guy must be on LSD.
When light hits a surface, it can be reflected, or transmitted. If' it's transmitted then it's going to go through the paint and strike the metal and be reflected.
The only way around this for a linear system is if all the following conditions are met 1) the paint absorbs 2) the paint has an index match to air that is perfect. 3) the absorption depth is on the scale of or larger than the wavelength.
If a material is strongly absorbing, ironically, it also becomes a better reflector due to the impedance mismatch. (air is not strongly absorbing). The only way to correct the impedance mismatch of the permativity is to also have a compensating change in the magnetic permiability. (For broadband absorbtion ferrites, for narrow band absorption maybe something else).
I don't think some thin paint layer can meet any of these.
It's conceivable non-linear materials could do the job but I don't thing there's enough energy in the radar pulse to activate such non-linearities.
What exactly does go into making a "distro" anyhow. My only experience with this is making my own custom Knoppix CDs that woke up as apache servers. Seemed pretty freakin easy. it was sort of a chinese menu of what you wanted to leave in and leave out.
But of course I was standing on the shoulder's of giants. Someone created the look and feel of that and made all the config files work. But how much of that is what goes into a distro and how much is pretty much set by the packages them selves. e.g. choose gnome and is basically the look and feel set?
these days everything seems like it comes down to four looks, KDE or gnome in user interface and redhatish or debianish in directory layout and packages.
THe only distro I've played with that felt amazingly original in every aspect is Damn Small where everything is different and very tight. (never tried Puppy).
So what exactly goes on to make a "distro". What makes say ubuntu different than one of the four chioices (kde,gnome, debian, redhat)
Yes but on most graphics ops it was less than a factor of 2. if all you want to do all day is 100% open GL and no cpu or other ops and don' t mind going deaf, buy a pystar.
seriously that's why they do multiple benchmarks. no one just does a benchmark's apps. it's like saying a TI DSP is powned the x86 since it does FFTs faster.
Look at the specs though, you cant compare the two.
and the options to select it bump it up to the same price as the only slightly slower Apple Mini. Slightly slower? Did you read TFA? The MacBook (which is comparable to the Mac mini) got pwned by the cheap Psystar. no it didn't. The cpu performance was comparable. THe disk perfromance was not bad. Yes, the video card performance lagged but by less than a factor of 2. who cares? what niche buys the cheapest piece of crap so loud you can't stand to be in the same room with then cares about graphics speed within a factor of 2?
if you want faster disk or a dvd burner s on a mac mini you can put one in with a screwdriver or even smarter add a firewire drive.
besides which this argument is about TCO not chest beating performance or spec for spec. it's about what's the entry level price for a mac.
If you want chest beating then the pystar is not what you want anyhow. if you want to talk TCO, then those slower disk and slower graphics cards save you about $160 a year in power bills if you leave this thing on 24/7. the mac mini draws laptop size sips of power and has power management to boot. this thing runs at full bore.
First it's really dumb to be comparing things spec for spec when were talking about what's the cheapest way to get into mac osx computing. the ground floor is a batter value from apple.
But let's suppose you want to trick out the apple with larger faster drives or a dvd burner.
Now it's not a big deal just to crack the case on the apple and put in a bigger drive and the dvd burner.
But an even smarter solution , for just a little more cash is to buy external HD and external DVD and plug them in. Even externally the footprint of the machine is less than the pystar and you get valuable portable devices.
If you were buy fleets of these then you could save money over the pystar by buying just one DVD burner and one uber disk drive and networking it.
And please don't go pricing this out using apple components, those are notoriusly expensive. (not that you don't get some value in assurance of quality, says the man who bought cheap disk drives and learned his lesson). Buy third party and add them.
* Having a Mac without supporting Apple. okay then please remove the OS if you don't want to support apple. Where do you think the desirable OS comes from?
* Having a Mac on the cheap where you can upgrade your video card. You may possible have some application where you need a fsater video card. remember we're only talking less than afactor of 2 between the 8600 and the integrated graphics in most cases.
You application can't be a pro-app since any pro would not be trying to save a few bucks on the machine if it's idiosyncracies cost them billable hours.
So assuming you are in this really tiny segment where you need an even faster graphics card you also need to consider the following.
most apps won't actually utilize the graphics card's boost since they can't count on it being there. Some pro apps will of course. And games may too. But most won't. But on macs the coders know they can optimize for a limited set of cards so they do.
so you've got to be in a pretty unusual case if you want the cheapest piece of shit computer with a graphics card faster than an 8600.
A mac mini delivered costs 599. Go over to mac mall and you get 2Gb memory, parallels, ilife, a printer, and free shipping for $599
Conversely, the a Pystar running mac OS costs 399$ + 155$ (OS) + $50 shipping. = $604
if you want firewire add $50 , the mini comes with it. (note you need pystar to install the firewire for you).
if you want wifi, blue tooth, optical audio, etc.. you'll have to buy them. Maybe they will even work with the OS too. who knows.
then of course the annual power bill is a lot less for the mac mini since not only is it lower power, the operating system power management actually functions.
This thing is such a turd that If I were apple I'd be overjoyed someone made it. A mac mmin actually costs less, delivered! You lose less than a factor of 2 on graphics speeds and smidge on disk writes on the mac mini.
In return the mac mini has wifi and blue tooth, temperature control, software updates, you can re-install the operating system, optical audio, ilife,...
oh and it doesn't sound like a supersonic jet landing. The mini has lower power bills too.
it's difficult to think of the niche where anyone could possibly want a turn like this.
SO apple should be please that no one can make a cheaper computer, since it sort of puts it to all the whiners who complain about the "apple tax".
TFA is content free. Every sentence contained in it described the non-linear phenomena of Hysteresis. Of course, linear elements like resistors and caps can't replace it. Duh...
But what's new about hysteresis? Magnetic recording and core memory and re-writeable optical storage are all based on this idea.
Any sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from incompetence. Yes but the alliteration and parallelism works better this way. Malice and Magic start with the same letters. And Incompetence nicely parallels Technology.
thus it's both funnier and more thought provoking the original way. Your version is a more cynical editorial comment, the original is a more philosophical outlook that perhaps incompetence is more prevalent than malice but all too often we humans are given interpret the former as the latter .
There's evidence what you say is true. Old folks with arthritis can't use touch screens because their middle fingers hit the screen before their index fingers causing mis votes or nullified votes. There's statisitical evidence from florida that backs this up.
people do mismark touchscreens. And they seldom notice when they do
What exactly does it do against an attack where, say, the barcode-reading machine reads the bar-code and pops up on the screen "R", but internally records "D"? If the code doing that is subtle enough, it may just push "D" ahead of "R" - and if it's in a state where they already knew that it was going to be a close race, it probably wouldn't even be questioned unless the outcome of the entire election relies (in a big part) on the votes cast right there.
Not to mention that everything just became a lot more expensive, requires a lot more maintenance (I presume the ballot would be thermal paper, as you don't really want to end up running out of ink/toner, and it's a lot simpler mechanism used successfully in cashiers' machines all over the planet with very little breakdown - but all the same, now you have gears, heating elements, etc. to worry about).
I don't pretend to know the ideal solution, but the above seemed like a thought you skipped in your post - even though it must have been thought of at the working group. The OVC system is intended to print on normal paper using normal off the shelf printers. Laser printers or possibly inkjets. Far from increasing the cost this decreases it. Running out of toner is not a problem. Laser printers can accomodate far more people than can vote in a given day. Since the ballot is on cast until the voter likes it, if the machine does malfunction for some reason then they can simply tear it up and vote on another machine. As it's commodity hardware it's not expensive or a security problem to have spares standing by.
I'm not understanding your first question since it seems to conflate different places where a misread occurs. In the ballot generation step, an evil machine might somehow mark the output ballot with R when the voter presses "D". But the ballot is not cast yet. Unlike paper tapes these large format printed ballots are quite visually accessible. And the voter holds it in his hands so the acuity to errors is expected to be much higher.
So yes it might be possible the machine could try to trick the voter. But there's some respectable safe guards here.
If you are wondering if the bar code scanning machine could somehow toggle votes secretly. Yes that could happen. But there's safeguards here as well. But first I note that any record of the vote has this potential point of manipulation.
where are the potential safeguards. 1) sample audits are your friend. I reccommend sample auditing random precints for any voting method to assure the hand count agrees with the machine count. 2) nothing prevents the vote counters from scanning the ballots bar codes on another machine as well. Bar codes are fast and easy. 3) In principle the ballot printing machine could also offer a ballot total independtly. It would only have to be told which of it's recorded ballots were voted. This is not part of the current protocol but could be done.
I do agree. What you are missing is really simple. It was a rush to market. These are almost monopolies now with 80% of the voting systems sold by just two companies--both controlled by a pair of brothers!
one bad thing about it is that it allows you to prove how you voted to a third party: take a camera-phone picture of the printed receipt behind the glass.
You can do that any kind of ballot, really, like an OpTech Eagle. no that's not true. A photo of a paper ballot before it is cast is not proof it is was cast. On the paper tape systems they have to write a message after the printed ballot to designate it "cast" or "revoted". a photo of the ballot with this badge on it is proof of vote.
Anyway, that kind of vote manipulation is not very widespread; I'm afraid you are not speaking from a well researched position here. You may be intrigued to learn that there are several convictions and even more indictments for coerced voting in New Mexico in just the past two elections.
In the past before the secret ballot was introduced in the US, private contractors were permitted to collect ballots and deliver them. This led to Beer parties where bringing the right ballot was the price of admission.
Right now, unions are fighting for the right to have secret ballot elections for shop floor collective bargaining units.
And there have been multiple cases in which landlords threatened tenants to vote the way they wanted. The intimidation was that they claimed to be "connected" and would get to see the ballots. It did not matter if it was true or not. the intimdated could well believe it.
It's often the lesser offices that get manipualted by the way. Judges, police chiefs, and inspectors, and other things landlords care about.
Thus is this both historically and in the present day an active concern. Admittedly the present day threat in infact small precisely because of the measures taken to preserve secrecy.
Moreover the miracle of the internet allows foreign governments to play. Imagine china set up a web site offering rewards for camera phone pictures of the right ballot. It would not even be illegal for them to do so.
more hamfisted things like vote caging or simply purging the ballot rolls of tens of thousands of people are all the rage these days -- neither of which are addressed by even the most secure voting machines. But we certainly do have to secure the devices nonetheless. I totally agree. It's too easy to get carried away trying to shut down every possible way to rig voting to the point where one ignores other threats to the vote process. One needs a balance and to use limited resources wisely. Adding crap like crypto for example is solving the wrong problem.
I draw the line in a different place. It's important to rememeber it's not just that security needs to be effective, but it needs to be apparent to the voter that it is effective. When paper tapes jam, or there's ways to sell votes, it is not effective.
1. You propose using a 1D barcode along the side to "encode" the selection(s). It deliberately contains the minimal amount of data necessary to record the vote at the time of counting. Yet the barcode contains data that links it to a session on the voting machine, so that the printed ballot can be linked to a physical use at the machine. How do you obfuscate the session so you can't connect a particular voter to the vote, The voter's use of the machine does not require activation in an identifiable manner. (by contrast e.g. Most DRE type systems have an activation chit that comes when the voter registers.)
In OVC the machine just records the session happened but it has no way to ID who voted. This point was debated at length in the design. One lighter weight protocol is simply to record the vote pattern and not create a UID for the session. Then one is simply verifying that some session had that vote pattern. That is less unique but still a reasonable check. If I recall correctly the standard OVC system uses a UID. But the protocol could work without it.
and how do you prevent someone from creating a lot of sessions and generating multiple receipts, i.e. stuffing the box? It's the old Onion layer philosophy. You are wrapping a lot of layers here to make that hard. The person has to create these ballots somehow. If they are created externally and stuffed then they also have to somehow alter the computer records to that created these. If they are created on those machines, they have to do so during polling hours and in plain view.
In both cases they both have to not only get these into the metal box, but they have to also remove the same number of other ballots.
Even if they did that, there would still be an anomolous number of ballot creation sessions. More sessions than ballots cast, discarded or left the prceinct without voting.
If they tried to stuff the ballot box in some private moment--perhaps later in the evneing when the boxes are hauled down to city-hall, then these wont match the scanned records or the Creation sessions.
It would take a rather daunting conspiracy to pull off this in just one precinct. Expertise in the computer hack, and the paper stuffing is needed.
(I did think of one possible solution for #1 but you introduce additional hardware into the system. Right now the touchscreen voting systems I've used, someone hands you a smart card, you put it in the system, it keeps the card locked in until it's recorded whatever you've entered, and then you hand it back to the election official. You could do the same thing, except the card is merely an "access card," rather than a "vote-recording card.")
I'm not following you. OVC does not need an activation chit. It's not even a big problem if a voter generates multiple ballots as long as administrative controls assure they only cast a single one. These controls are well practiced so that's not a challenge. But it does aid security to try to recapture all unused ballots since this will allow better correspondence with the generation sessions in the event of a discrepancy. But it's not neccessary to be perfect.
2. Continuing with the barcode, how do you encode a short-enough code that still permits write-in candidates? Obviously you can't use a barcode format like [session-number]-[candidate-number] if you provide a "Write-in" option.
See the OVC site for details on this. If I recall correctly, the bar code just flags the existence of a write-in, not the name. The write-in name can be either be recovered manually or recovered from the vote creation session. There's trick ballot secrecy issues that write-ins tend to unavoidably pierce in almost any system. But incase I got this wrong check their site as This may have changed.
It's not the errors, it's the possibility of rigging elections.
It's not the errors, it's the possibility of rigging elections. Actually the biggest threat is neither. It's the preception that elections might be rigged or have errors without detection. Voting is about convincing the losers they lost so the winners can get on with governing with a mandate. When suspcions persist because the voting system are not transparent or are known to be vulnerable we just don't have effective democracy.
I'd much rather have a paper tape under a window that prints out your votes in a clearly legible form (you vote for Candidate X and it prints his name on the tape. At the end of your session, it prints the tape out and lets you watch it go by, then it hides your tape for the next person and prints his votes right on the same spot. The printer should be a generic receipt printer like you see at checkouts, and noisy like one (dot matrix) so it's obvious when it's printing. this of course is exactly what the touchsreens do do now.
one bad thing about it is that it allows you to prove how you voted to a third party: take a camera-phone picture of the printed receipt behind the glass.
the paper tapes jam. 10% of the tapes in ohio could not be read. Look at the paper print-outs felton has. some are hard to read.
the paper tape maintains a serial vote order. the early and late voters are at risk of exposure of their vote by malicious officials. (a typical machine may have less than 200 votes, so vote-order reconstruction is not hard).
the tapes have to archival for at least a couple years in the even to lawsuits or recounts.
On sequoia and diebold tape systems a ballot won't fit in the viewing widow, requiring it to be inspected in stages by the voter. it's tedious. Studies have shown almost no voter does it, and when they do they don't spot errors. Particularly errors of omission.
The problem with a system like this is that it's more work for the polling place volunteers to replace the paper tape when it runs out, but it should be very very easy to count (the system could add little barcodes next to each name to make them machine readable for faster recounting if need be, but a person checking each one by hand would also work).
The accounting on whole rolls of paper tape should be pretty straightforward too. It'll be hard for someone to toss in another roll like they can toss in an extra 1000 votes because the number of rolls should be a small. In fact if it's designed properly, I suspect you could run a whole day on a single roll and avoid having to change them out. For true paranoia, you could have the machine print out some sort of crypto key (public key) on the roll when it first starts printing so you can verify that it came from a particular voting machine later on (and wasn't swapped out by an unscrupulous worker).
OVC is not merely yet another touchscreen. It's a different kind of voting system. It's procedures are straighforward and simple yet at first blush may seem overly elaborate. In fact each of the seemingly simple steps in the process is a result of long deliberation by many voting system and security experts to foreclose various error modes and attack modes (e.g. chain voting, or secret ballot violations) while not making something too complex to operate and maintain. It also has to fail in a safe mode and be robust against operator error.
Here's the process: 1) voter makes selections on a touchscreen. These are recorded but this is NOT a cast ballot or a record of the vote.
2) computer prints out a paper summary ballot of the voters choices in an easy to read ballot-like format
3) also along the edge is a 1-D barcode encoding the selections in an obfuscated but not encrypted format.
4) voter can now cast this ballot by depositing it in a metal box. Or they can tear it up and ask to vote again. or they can walk out with the ballot if they like (it's not cast unless deposited so it's not a "receipt").
6) After polls close, witnesses and the election judge unseal the box, and hand shuffle the ballots to destroy any residual vote order.
7) then election workers, use a bar code wand to scan every ballot. As it is scanned the ballot is recreated on screen and the judge can compare any ballot she chooses to the paper copy. (this provides one of many random checks on the fidelity of the bar code)
8) as each ballot is scanned, the computer also checks the ballot creation record of the ballot generating machines. Every ballot must have a valid ballot creation session that matches the paper ballot. (the reverse is not true--there will be more ballot creation sessions than actually cast ballots since some ballots were discarded or taken and revoted.) This step is a partial safeguard against ballot stuffing, since an attacker will now have to modify many records and witness accounts to change the ballots (alter the machine records, alter the paper ballots, alter the turned in ballots, etc... And alter various anti-forgery measures)
Nice features: 1) nothing forecloses hand counting the paper in a recount since it's the official ballot not the electronic record or the bar code.
2) the untrusting voter can take the printed ballot to a third, un-netowrked machine to read the barcode back to him to see that it matches. Or she can leave with it and take it outside to some place that will also do this (say the ACLU or the Green party might have a booth set up offering this) Or she could take a cell -phone picture and decode it using some bar-code reader on the web. etc.....
It's a good test because even a single failure leaves the voter with deomstable official proof of an error. And it's robust because an error in the bar code discovered late in the process does not screw the election--you can still recount the paper ballots text.
3) the bar code is made 1D and short, deliberately so that it is information strarved. There can't be any diaboloical things hidden in it, like the voters identity or ways to tell other stand alone scanners to collude in what they tell the voter is in it. Also it allows very low tech equipment to read it (cue-cats wands $5)
As can be seen theres many onion layers to the security model. It's not depeneding of fool proof steps to remain that way. It's robust against operator error.
Additional features are that the touch screen can be just a commodity computer. it boots off an un mutable cdrom not a disk drive. So after the elections you can simply discard the computers. That is, give them to schools or state agencies or sell them on e-bay. These are not sophisticated voting machines. This frees up the monies normally used for secure storage and maintainece.
Since the voting terminals are cheap you can have many of them to avoid lines or problems with machine failure.
Just for full disclosure-- I'm not part of Open Voting consortium. I'm a voting systems advocate and I'm hoping their system gets picked up and matured by some secretary of state (hopefully california since it's a market that will drive things nationally). I want my state to have the option of this. Right now we're drowing in maintainece fees from ES&S even for the paper ballot systems which have gone up 1000% in the last year alone.
The man you need to talk to is alan dechert at open voting consortium.
In this case there are almost certainly multiple errors, one of which is the design error sequoia explained that causes the wrong ballot to be recorded.
Another plausible error mode here is the one the ES&S ivotronics had (and ones with old firmware still have). Certified voting machines are required to redundantly store the votes, usually 3 times, and there may be some effort to have these in different memory modules.
A while back ES&S had a bug that was triggered by a low battery voltage. The low battery condition would cause the logger to report this in the log. However the log entry was too long and cause a buffer over flow that over wrote the header of one of the redudant vote files. When the votes were read out at the precinct the machine did not notice the corrupt header and a second programming bug caused the malformed headers to cause other problems including mis-reported various things (like the maching ID) which then caused all sorts of downstream problems.
When the votes were read out by another method the corruption of the primary vote file was detected and it silently failed over to the secondary record. This produced a vote report that did not match up with the first one.
A reveiew of multiple systems was done by the Florida election supervisor who estimated about 1 in 7 machines reported wrong. He was fired.
Yes Caltech and MIT have done studies on vote count accuracy. Surprisingly nothing beats hand counting paper ballots. However this sort of assessment is very hard to do because the nature of the error space is so fickle. e.g. machine counting is generally perfect except when it's not. So one has very non gaussian error modes that require huge sampling and unanticipatable conditions to discover.
Hand counting paper ballots is robust and adaptable. However even here it is hard to test under labratory conditions.
The most recent study is one happeing right now in Bernalillo county NM, by University of New Mexico and Caltech. Many different ways of counting ballots by hand are being tried (different numbers of observers, different ways of verbalizing, different ways of pre-sorting ballots, and different orders of counting races, etc...) One of the more remarkable findings so far is that teams of counters can have prodigiously different rates of counting (10x variation). This makes logistics of recounting hard to predict and hard to allocate resources for.
However even that study is flawed in part by the neccessity of time. You cant convince people to count a full election a dozen different ways. So you have to use shorter ballots or only count selected races and this will mask certain error modes.
Another kind of error mode those studies cant' examine is the one that happened in Washington state during the Governor's race. In king county, various piles of ballots were "misplaced" and later "discovered". It could be malice, but more likely incompetence and lack of procedures causing ballots to be stacked willy nilly in various store rooms or in different containers when gathered from all the precints.
I'm really please with Bernallilo County Clerk Maggie Toulouse for staging this mock recounts since these will iron out procedural issues and establish a lot of currently anecdotal human factors issues more concretely. Moreover the willingness to be som open about this and invite activists in is quite refreshing. Many clerks have a siege mentality--and of course this is because they have so many activitst making demands and too little money to staff their positions.
The typical clerks office pays less than $10/hour to new staff and your not going to get IT folks for that rate.
Send Maggie an email telling her she's got your respect: clerk@bernco.gov. Clerks really deserve a pat on the back when they do it right.
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I think you are right that this is a power play. Call Yahoo's bluff and walk away. Now the share holders are left thinking I cold have had hard cash within 20% of my pipe dream about what this company is worth. Now I'm back to the pipedream. Which state do I prefer.
Before balmers intervention the pipdream valuation was rock solid. Every one thought it was realistic Someone someday would either pay that for yahoo or yahoo itself would generate income on that scale. If they did not they would not have invested in the first place. No one had to think about when that someday was coming or even if it was coming.
Now MS bid, and Yahoo desperately tried to find a white nite to counter offer.
No one else bid. Now MS withdrew theirs.
Sould searching time for yahoo investors. They are going to demand profits, not get them and in a year the company will run out of cash. The engineers MS covets will still be there, the company MS did not need will be cored out and bought for a song.
All that said. I don't think Monkey boy planned it that way at first given his string of high profile failures. But once the ball got rolling be probably realized the opportunity.
This radar absorbing paint sounds like horseshit to me. This guy must be on LSD.
When light hits a surface, it can be reflected, or transmitted. If' it's transmitted then it's going to go through the paint and strike the metal and be reflected.
The only way around this for a linear system is if all the following conditions are met
1) the paint absorbs
2) the paint has an index match to air that is perfect.
3) the absorption depth is on the scale of or larger than the wavelength.
If a material is strongly absorbing, ironically, it also becomes a better reflector due to the impedance mismatch. (air is not strongly absorbing). The only way to correct the impedance mismatch of the permativity is to also have a compensating change in the magnetic permiability. (For broadband absorbtion ferrites, for narrow band absorption maybe something else).
I don't think some thin paint layer can meet any of these.
It's conceivable non-linear materials could do the job but I don't thing there's enough energy in the radar pulse to activate such non-linearities.
I think this is bullshit
What exactly does go into making a "distro" anyhow. My only experience with this is making my own custom Knoppix CDs that woke up as apache servers. Seemed pretty freakin easy. it was sort of a chinese menu of what you wanted to leave in and leave out.
But of course I was standing on the shoulder's of giants. Someone created the look and feel of that and made all the config files work. But how much of that is what goes into a distro and how much is pretty much set by the packages them selves. e.g. choose gnome and is basically the look and feel set?
these days everything seems like it comes down to four looks, KDE or gnome in user interface and redhatish or debianish in directory layout and packages.
THe only distro I've played with that felt amazingly original in every aspect is Damn Small where everything is different and very tight. (never tried Puppy).
So what exactly goes on to make a "distro". What makes say ubuntu different than one of the four chioices (kde,gnome, debian, redhat)
...Less space than a Nomad, Lame.
Now are those Imperial Gigabytes or Metric Gigabytes.
And when they say 50% off do they really mean 48.8%?
Yes but on most graphics ops it was less than a factor of 2. if all you want to do all day is 100% open GL and no cpu or other ops and don' t mind going deaf, buy a pystar.
seriously that's why they do multiple benchmarks. no one just does a benchmark's apps. it's like saying a TI DSP is powned the x86 since it does FFTs faster.
Price drop: mac is now $569.
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add a cheap external (fast) diskdrive if you want more storage.
if you want faster disk or a dvd burner s on a mac mini you can put one in with a screwdriver or even smarter add a firewire drive.
besides which this argument is about TCO not chest beating performance or spec for spec. it's about what's the entry level price for a mac.
If you want chest beating then the pystar is not what you want anyhow. if you want to talk TCO, then those slower disk and slower graphics cards save you about $160 a year in power bills if you leave this thing on 24/7. the mac mini draws laptop size sips of power and has power management to boot. this thing runs at full bore.
More to add to this.
First it's really dumb to be comparing things spec for spec when were talking about what's the cheapest way to get into mac osx computing. the ground floor is a batter value from apple.
But let's suppose you want to trick out the apple with larger faster drives or a dvd burner.
Now it's not a big deal just to crack the case on the apple and put in a bigger drive and the dvd burner.
But an even smarter solution , for just a little more cash is to buy external HD and external DVD and plug them in. Even externally the footprint of the machine is less than the pystar and you get valuable portable devices.
If you were buy fleets of these then you could save money over the pystar by buying just one DVD burner and one uber disk drive and networking it.
And please don't go pricing this out using apple components, those are notoriusly expensive. (not that you don't get some value in assurance of quality, says the man who bought cheap disk drives and learned his lesson). Buy third party and add them.
You application can't be a pro-app since any pro would not be trying to save a few bucks on the machine if it's idiosyncracies cost them billable hours.
So assuming you are in this really tiny segment where you need an even faster graphics card you also need to consider the following.
most apps won't actually utilize the graphics card's boost since they can't count on it being there. Some pro apps will of course. And games may too. But most won't. But on macs the coders know they can optimize for a limited set of cards so they do.
so you've got to be in a pretty unusual case if you want the cheapest piece of shit computer with a graphics card faster than an 8600.
1)
A mac mini delivered costs 599. Go over to mac mall and you get 2Gb memory, parallels, ilife, a printer, and free shipping for $599
Conversely, the a Pystar running mac OS costs
399$ + 155$ (OS) + $50 shipping. = $604
if you want firewire add $50 , the mini comes with it. (note you need pystar to install the firewire for you).
if you want wifi, blue tooth, optical audio, etc.. you'll have to buy them. Maybe they will even work with the OS too. who knows.
then of course the annual power bill is a lot less for the mac mini since not only is it lower power, the operating system power management actually functions.
This thing is such a turd that If I were apple I'd be overjoyed someone made it. A mac mmin actually costs less, delivered! You lose less than a factor of 2 on graphics speeds and smidge on disk writes on the mac mini.
...
In return the mac mini has wifi and blue tooth, temperature control, software updates, you can re-install the operating system, optical audio, ilife,
oh and it doesn't sound like a supersonic jet landing. The mini has lower power bills too.
it's difficult to think of the niche where anyone could possibly want a turn like this.
SO apple should be please that no one can make a cheaper computer, since it sort of puts it to all the whiners who complain about the "apple tax".
TFA is content free. Every sentence contained in it described the non-linear phenomena of Hysteresis. Of course, linear elements like resistors and caps can't replace it. Duh...
But what's new about hysteresis? Magnetic recording and core memory and re-writeable optical storage are all based on this idea.
How did this get on slashdot?
Any sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from incompetence. Yes but the alliteration and parallelism works better this way. Malice and Magic start with the same letters. And Incompetence nicely parallels Technology.
thus it's both funnier and more thought provoking the original way. Your version is a more cynical editorial comment, the original is a more philosophical outlook that perhaps incompetence is more prevalent than malice but all too often we humans are given interpret the former as the latter
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Nice oblique Arthur C Clark homage. Nearly spit my coffee onto my keyboard.
There's evidence what you say is true. Old folks with arthritis can't use touch screens because their middle fingers hit the screen before their index fingers causing mis votes or nullified votes. There's statisitical evidence from florida that backs this up.
people do mismark touchscreens. And they seldom notice when they do
If the code doing that is subtle enough, it may just push "D" ahead of "R" - and if it's in a state where they already knew that it was going to be a close race, it probably wouldn't even be questioned unless the outcome of the entire election relies (in a big part) on the votes cast right there.
Not to mention that everything just became a lot more expensive, requires a lot more maintenance (I presume the ballot would be thermal paper, as you don't really want to end up running out of ink/toner, and it's a lot simpler mechanism used successfully in cashiers' machines all over the planet with very little breakdown - but all the same, now you have gears, heating elements, etc. to worry about).
I don't pretend to know the ideal solution, but the above seemed like a thought you skipped in your post - even though it must have been thought of at the working group. The OVC system is intended to print on normal paper using normal off the shelf printers. Laser printers or possibly inkjets. Far from increasing the cost this decreases it. Running out of toner is not a problem. Laser printers can accomodate far more people than can vote in a given day. Since the ballot is on cast until the voter likes it, if the machine does malfunction for some reason then they can simply tear it up and vote on another machine. As it's commodity hardware it's not expensive or a security problem to have spares standing by.
I'm not understanding your first question since it seems to conflate different places where a misread occurs. In the ballot generation step, an evil machine might somehow mark the output ballot with R when the voter presses "D". But the ballot is not cast yet. Unlike paper tapes these large format printed ballots are quite visually accessible. And the voter holds it in his hands so the acuity to errors is expected to be much higher.
So yes it might be possible the machine could try to trick the voter. But there's some respectable safe guards here.
If you are wondering if the bar code scanning machine could somehow toggle votes secretly. Yes that could happen. But there's safeguards here as well. But first I note that any record of the vote has this potential point of manipulation.
where are the potential safeguards. 1) sample audits are your friend. I reccommend sample auditing random precints for any voting method to assure the hand count agrees with the machine count. 2) nothing prevents the vote counters from scanning the ballots bar codes on another machine as well. Bar codes are fast and easy. 3) In principle the ballot printing machine could also offer a ballot total independtly. It would only have to be told which of it's recorded ballots were voted. This is not part of the current protocol but could be done.
I do agree. What you are missing is really simple. It was a rush to market. These are almost monopolies now with 80% of the voting systems sold by just two companies--both controlled by a pair of brothers!
You can do that any kind of ballot, really, like an OpTech Eagle. no that's not true. A photo of a paper ballot before it is cast is not proof it is was cast. On the paper tape systems they have to write a message after the printed ballot to designate it "cast" or "revoted". a photo of the ballot with this badge on it is proof of vote. Anyway, that kind of vote manipulation is not very widespread; I'm afraid you are not speaking from a well researched position here. You may be intrigued to learn that there are several convictions and even more indictments for coerced voting in New Mexico in just the past two elections.
In the past before the secret ballot was introduced in the US, private contractors were permitted to collect ballots and deliver them. This led to Beer parties where bringing the right ballot was the price of admission.
Right now, unions are fighting for the right to have secret ballot elections for shop floor collective bargaining units.
And there have been multiple cases in which landlords threatened tenants to vote the way they wanted. The intimidation was that they claimed to be "connected" and would get to see the ballots. It did not matter if it was true or not. the intimdated could well believe it.
It's often the lesser offices that get manipualted by the way. Judges, police chiefs, and inspectors, and other things landlords care about.
Thus is this both historically and in the present day an active concern. Admittedly the present day threat in infact small precisely because of the measures taken to preserve secrecy.
Moreover the miracle of the internet allows foreign governments to play. Imagine china set up a web site offering rewards for camera phone pictures of the right ballot. It would not even be illegal for them to do so. more hamfisted things like vote caging or simply purging the ballot rolls of tens of thousands of people are all the rage these days -- neither of which are addressed by even the most secure voting machines. But we certainly do have to secure the devices nonetheless. I totally agree. It's too easy to get carried away trying to shut down every possible way to rig voting to the point where one ignores other threats to the vote process. One needs a balance and to use limited resources wisely. Adding crap like crypto for example is solving the wrong problem.
I draw the line in a different place. It's important to rememeber it's not just that security needs to be effective, but it needs to be apparent to the voter that it is effective. When paper tapes jam, or there's ways to sell votes, it is not effective.
Two questions:
1. You propose using a 1D barcode along the side to "encode" the selection(s). It deliberately contains the minimal amount of data necessary to record the vote at the time of counting. Yet the barcode contains data that links it to a session on the voting machine, so that the printed ballot can be linked to a physical use at the machine. How do you obfuscate the session so you can't connect a particular voter to the vote, The voter's use of the machine does not require activation in an identifiable manner. (by contrast e.g. Most DRE type systems have an activation chit that comes when the voter registers.)
In OVC the machine just records the session happened but it has no way to ID who voted. This point was debated at length in the design. One lighter weight protocol is simply to record the vote pattern and not create a UID for the session. Then one is simply verifying that some session had that vote pattern. That is less unique but still a reasonable check. If I recall correctly the standard OVC system uses a UID. But the protocol could work without it. and how do you prevent someone from creating a lot of sessions and generating multiple receipts, i.e. stuffing the box? It's the old Onion layer philosophy. You are wrapping a lot of layers here to make that hard. The person has to create these ballots somehow. If they are created externally and stuffed then they also have to somehow alter the computer records to that created these. If they are created on those machines, they have to do so during polling hours and in plain view.
In both cases they both have to not only get these into the metal box, but they have to also remove the same number of other ballots.
Even if they did that, there would still be an anomolous number of ballot creation sessions. More sessions than ballots cast, discarded or left the prceinct without voting.
If they tried to stuff the ballot box in some private moment--perhaps later in the evneing when the boxes are hauled down to city-hall, then these wont match the scanned records or the Creation sessions.
It would take a rather daunting conspiracy to pull off this in just one precinct. Expertise in the computer hack, and the paper stuffing is needed.
(I did think of one possible solution for #1 but you introduce additional hardware into the system. Right now the touchscreen voting systems I've used, someone hands you a smart card, you put it in the system, it keeps the card locked in until it's recorded whatever you've entered, and then you hand it back to the election official. You could do the same thing, except the card is merely an "access card," rather than a "vote-recording card.")
I'm not following you. OVC does not need an activation chit. It's not even a big problem if a voter generates multiple ballots as long as administrative controls assure they only cast a single one. These controls are well practiced so that's not a challenge. But it does aid security to try to recapture all unused ballots since this will allow better correspondence with the generation sessions in the event of a discrepancy. But it's not neccessary to be perfect.2. Continuing with the barcode, how do you encode a short-enough code that still permits write-in candidates? Obviously you can't use a barcode format like [session-number]-[candidate-number] if you provide a "Write-in" option.
See the OVC site for details on this. If I recall correctly, the bar code just flags the existence of a write-in, not the name. The write-in name can be either be recovered manually or recovered from the vote creation session. There's trick ballot secrecy issues that write-ins tend to unavoidably pierce in almost any system. But incase I got this wrong check their site as This may have changed.It's not the errors, it's the possibility of rigging elections. Actually the biggest threat is neither. It's the preception that elections might be rigged or have errors without detection. Voting is about convincing the losers they lost so the winners can get on with governing with a mandate. When suspcions persist because the voting system are not transparent or are known to be vulnerable we just don't have effective democracy.
one bad thing about it is that it allows you to prove how you voted to a third party: take a camera-phone picture of the printed receipt behind the glass.
the paper tapes jam. 10% of the tapes in ohio could not be read. Look at the paper print-outs felton has. some are hard to read.
the paper tape maintains a serial vote order. the early and late voters are at risk of exposure of their vote by malicious officials. (a typical machine may have less than 200 votes, so vote-order reconstruction is not hard).
the tapes have to archival for at least a couple years in the even to lawsuits or recounts.
On sequoia and diebold tape systems a ballot won't fit in the viewing widow, requiring it to be inspected in stages by the voter. it's tedious. Studies have shown almost no voter does it, and when they do they don't spot errors. Particularly errors of omission.
The problem with a system like this is that it's more work for the polling place volunteers to replace the paper tape when it runs out, but it should be very very easy to count (the system could add little barcodes next to each name to make them machine readable for faster recounting if need be, but a person checking each one by hand would also work).
The accounting on whole rolls of paper tape should be pretty straightforward too. It'll be hard for someone to toss in another roll like they can toss in an extra 1000 votes because the number of rolls should be a small. In fact if it's designed properly, I suspect you could run a whole day on a single roll and avoid having to change them out. For true paranoia, you could have the machine print out some sort of crypto key (public key) on the roll when it first starts printing so you can verify that it came from a particular voting machine later on (and wasn't swapped out by an unscrupulous worker).
OVC is not merely yet another touchscreen. It's a different kind of voting system. It's procedures are straighforward and simple yet at first blush may seem overly elaborate. In fact each of the seemingly simple steps in the process is a result of long deliberation by many voting system and security experts to foreclose various error modes and attack modes (e.g. chain voting, or secret ballot violations) while not making something too complex to operate and maintain. It also has to fail in a safe mode and be robust against operator error.
Here's the process:
1) voter makes selections on a touchscreen. These are recorded but this is NOT a cast ballot or a record of the vote.
2) computer prints out a paper summary ballot of the voters choices in an easy to read ballot-like format
3) also along the edge is a 1-D barcode encoding the selections in an obfuscated but not encrypted format.
4) voter can now cast this ballot by depositing it in a metal box. Or they can tear it up and ask to vote again. or they can walk out with the ballot if they like (it's not cast unless deposited so it's not a "receipt").
6) After polls close, witnesses and the election judge unseal the box, and hand shuffle the ballots to destroy any residual vote order.
7) then election workers, use a bar code wand to scan every ballot. As it is scanned the ballot is recreated on screen and the judge can compare any ballot she chooses to the paper copy. (this provides one of many random checks on the fidelity of the bar code)
8) as each ballot is scanned, the computer also checks the ballot creation record of the ballot generating machines. Every ballot must have a valid ballot creation session that matches the paper ballot. (the reverse is not true--there will be more ballot creation sessions than actually cast ballots since some ballots were discarded or taken and revoted.) This step is a partial safeguard against ballot stuffing, since an attacker will now have to modify many records and witness accounts to change the ballots (alter the machine records, alter the paper ballots, alter the turned in ballots, etc... And alter various anti-forgery measures)
Nice features:
1) nothing forecloses hand counting the paper in a recount since it's the official ballot not the electronic record or the bar code.
2) the untrusting voter can take the printed ballot to a third, un-netowrked machine to read the barcode back to him to see that it matches. Or she can leave with it and take it outside to some place that will also do this (say the ACLU or the Green party might have a booth set up offering this) Or she could take a cell -phone picture and decode it using some bar-code reader on the web. etc.....
It's a good test because even a single failure leaves the voter with deomstable official proof of an error. And it's robust because an error in the bar code discovered late in the process does not screw the election--you can still recount the paper ballots text.
3) the bar code is made 1D and short, deliberately so that it is information strarved. There can't be any diaboloical things hidden in it, like the voters identity or ways to tell other stand alone scanners to collude in what they tell the voter is in it. Also it allows very low tech equipment to read it (cue-cats wands $5)
As can be seen theres many onion layers to the security model. It's not depeneding of fool proof steps to remain that way. It's robust against operator error.
Additional features are that the touch screen can be just a commodity computer. it boots off an un mutable cdrom not a disk drive. So after the elections you can simply discard the computers. That is, give them to schools or state agencies or sell them on e-bay. These are not sophisticated voting machines. This frees up the monies normally used for secure storage and maintainece.
Since the voting terminals are cheap you can have many of them to avoid lines or problems with machine failure.
Since t
Just for full disclosure-- I'm not part of Open Voting consortium. I'm a voting systems advocate and I'm hoping their system gets picked up and matured by some secretary of state (hopefully california since it's a market that will drive things nationally). I want my state to have the option of this. Right now we're drowing in maintainece fees from ES&S even for the paper ballot systems which have gone up 1000% in the last year alone.
The man you need to talk to is alan dechert at open voting consortium.
In this case there are almost certainly multiple errors, one of which is the design error sequoia explained that causes the wrong ballot to be recorded.
Another plausible error mode here is the one the ES&S ivotronics had (and ones with old firmware still have). Certified voting machines are required to redundantly store the votes, usually 3 times, and there may be some effort to have these in different memory modules.
A while back ES&S had a bug that was triggered by a low battery voltage. The low battery condition would cause the logger to report this in the log. However the log entry was too long and cause a buffer over flow that over wrote the header of one of the redudant vote files. When the votes were read out at the precinct the machine did not notice the corrupt header and a second programming bug caused the malformed headers to cause other problems including mis-reported various things (like the maching ID) which then caused all sorts of downstream problems.
When the votes were read out by another method the corruption of the primary vote file was detected and it silently failed over to the secondary record. This produced a vote report that did not match up with the first one.
A reveiew of multiple systems was done by the Florida election supervisor who estimated about 1 in 7 machines reported wrong. He was fired.
Yes Caltech and MIT have done studies on vote count accuracy. Surprisingly nothing beats hand counting paper ballots. However this sort of assessment is very hard to do because the nature of the error space is so fickle. e.g. machine counting is generally perfect except when it's not. So one has very non gaussian error modes that require huge sampling and unanticipatable conditions to discover.
Hand counting paper ballots is robust and adaptable. However even here it is hard to test under labratory conditions.
The most recent study is one happeing right now in Bernalillo county NM, by University of New Mexico and Caltech. Many different ways of counting ballots by hand are being tried (different numbers of observers, different ways of verbalizing, different ways of pre-sorting ballots, and different orders of counting races, etc...) One of the more remarkable findings so far is that teams of counters can have prodigiously different rates of counting (10x variation). This makes logistics of recounting hard to predict and hard to allocate resources for.
However even that study is flawed in part by the neccessity of time. You cant convince people to count a full election a dozen different ways. So you have to use shorter ballots or only count selected races and this will mask certain error modes.
Another kind of error mode those studies cant' examine is the one that happened in Washington state during the Governor's race. In king county, various piles of ballots were "misplaced" and later "discovered". It could be malice, but more likely incompetence and lack of procedures causing ballots to be stacked willy nilly in various store rooms or in different containers when gathered from all the precints.
I'm really please with Bernallilo County Clerk Maggie Toulouse for staging this mock recounts since these will iron out procedural issues and establish a lot of currently anecdotal human factors issues more concretely. Moreover the willingness to be som open about this and invite activists in is quite refreshing. Many clerks have a siege mentality--and of course this is because they have so many activitst making demands and too little money to staff their positions.
The typical clerks office pays less than $10/hour to new staff and your not going to get IT folks for that rate.
Send Maggie an email telling her she's got your respect: clerk@bernco.gov. Clerks really deserve a pat on the back when they do it right.