I'm not exactly sure how this ggggp thread got started and didn't get modded troll right away, but I couldn't agree with you more.
My wife has been teaching in a bad area for five years, and I have had this discussion with her numerous times, and her coworkers on occasion.
Union's have a place in unskilled labor, but when you're highly skilled (Carpenters, heavy machinery operators, electricians, plumbers, teachers, etc) you should be skilled enough to hold a job on your own, and if not - too bad!
Problem is the pay sucks, so the schools get teachers who either really love teaching and want to help, or mediocre people who just want a job. Pay in the Chicago suburbs starts somewhere around $31k, and pay where her family is in the middle of Ohio starts around $26k. You can't live on either of those salaries!
Yes, pay raises are strictly seniority based as well as advanced degrees and hours of tuition towards that degree. There are some fairly lucrative after school things they can sign up to do to earn quite a bit more money though. My wife earns almost an extra 15% by doing just two things that don't seem to take up too much of her time.
Tenure is crap. Nothing to be said about it.
In the bad school districts like where my wife is, teachers constantly have to be worried about being laid off because the school's state test scores aren't getting any better. They laid off everyone who didn't have tenure from a different school in her district a few years ago regardless of how good a teacher they were. This has to do with the Governer taking money away from schools due to budget crisis and that stupid no child left behind act. Some kids are just dumb and/or have no desire to learn.
And, of course, there's around 12 weeks off a year. There is usually an option to teach summer school for a month, which is an extra 2-3k. So take your $31k (or even 36) and do your math and it still comes out to well under $50k per year even if they find another job that pays the same to do during their time off.
For that measly 36-50k per year, my wife works 8 hours a day. Sometimes she gets a prep period, but a lot of the time she has to sub someone else's class, so she often isn't able to get any grading or lesson plans done during school hours. She's up until 12 or 1am at least once per week getting some grades done for the next day. Probably puts in 12 hours of work per week at home.
So for the privelege of making somewhere around $16 or $17 per hour, she gets mouthed off to by kids everyday who don't care, and occasionaly she gets some students where she might be able to actually make a difference.
The article specifically states that the bill covers health insurance and employers. Most large employers just dump new employees onto their group policy and pre-existing conditions may or may not matter. So this sounds like it's geared towards the self insured and small employers who have to be choosy due to premiums.
But what about life insurance? If I'm a perfectly normal (seemingly healthy) person who has never been diagnosed with anything, and then I apply for life insurance and they find something in my blood, does this protect me against them not insuring me? Health Insurance is a big ticket item for an election year, but since I already have health insurance and am unlikely to ever not have a group policy I'm much more interested in banning life insurance companies from performing genetic discrimination.
Okay, honestly - I'm not seeing the problem here. The article states that the data would be tied to the main taxpayer ID listed for the company. It also states that many Mom and Pop shops forgo using a taxpayer ID and instead use the Social Security Number of the primary owner.
So the problem as I see it is there are a whole lot of incredibly lazy business owners that did not incorporate their businesses correctly. If their business is incorporated, it protects them from a whole lot of lawsuits and problems. It also took me a whole five minutes to find an online form that you can submit for an employer identification number which I believe can be used for tax purposes. The IRS site claims that it takes a couple minutes to apply and you receive your EIN electronically and can begin using it immediately. Ergo, no more social security number problems.
So why would have a credit card company store a database (which I really hope they have anyway so they can charge/make their own money) that matches up receipts with my taxpayer ID a problem? We can't help those who don't help themselves and get a taxpayer ID.
I'm in Illinois and went to a state college and also worked for a not for profit company in Chicago. I'm pretty sure used stuff that was bought with state money was sent back to Springfield somewhere where it was sold by pallet to anyone who wanted it (other schools, not for profit institutions, etc). I know for sure that this is what happened to old stuff from the not-for-profit (something to do with the tax breaks they were getting so they couldn't resell anything), and I always assumed that's what happened with the college stuff, too.
All of that makes a lot of sense. I'm completely with you on optical scanners costing less then touchscreens. A computer is more expensive then an etchasketch. Not hard to do the math.
I still believe they're comparing apples to oranges though. Unless they compare similar size/population counties/states that during the same exact years purchased and used optical or touchscreen, then there is a margin of error due to either using projected costs or pricing differences caused by differences in purchase price for different years/inflation. It's counter-productive to publish studies and comparison's that do not include this.
I think it all comes back to my original synopsis. Companies 20 years ago knew that pushing out computers costs lots of money and they were losing money in the short term, but they also knew that ultimately they would more then make up for it with productivity returns.
You only need one optical scanner to count the votes I learned something new today.
Since touch-screens were purchased and optical scanners were not maintained, no actual numbers for optical scanners are available. Right, well that's a big problem right there. Isn't there somewhere in the country that used optical scanners that they could have gotten real prices from?
Not when you have wildly different numbers of people involved, and wildly different things to train them on. Same answer as above - I was being facetious.
Even state-run warehousing isn't free - that warehouse costs money. And when you have 10x the equipment, you then have 10x the warehousing costs. Same answer as above - I know it's not free. If you run your own huge warehouse that also stores a lot of other stuff it should be a lot cheaper though. Definitely not 10x the cost for 10x the equipment - economies of scale and all that.
With optical scanners, it's quite possible that you never move them at all (although you'd have to factor in moving around ballots). Interesting thought - that might make sense.
Not sure what voter outreach means. If it means training voters, there's probably more expenses Yeah, me neither.
Maybe because Maryland doesn't print separate absentee ballots, so that's just covered by general ballot printing? If it was covered, then it wouldn't be charged separately for the touchscreens. It must have been forgotten - it either has to exist for both, or not for either.
Most likely, any of those services are not comparable to optical scan systems anyway. You're basically saying "It's not fair to include the $28 million in fees paid to DieBold for touch-screen voting when there are no fees paid to Diebold for optical scan voting!" Not exactly. I'm all for proving that one thing is better or worse then the other, especially if it's taxpayer dollars wasted. But you can't publicize dollar amounts and say that touchscreen costs more then optical without explaining what the costs are. Maybe they are special services that the state wanted when they had optical scanners but couldn't find a vendor for? If that was the case, now that they have a vendor they might keep those costs even if they switch back to optical. Maybe it's a whole bunch of steak and lobster dinners and golf outings for the project managers. We simply have no idea, which means it's unfair to compare.
In order to vote on a touchscreen machine, you have to stand there to fill out your entire ballot. In order to vote on an optical scanner, the only time you use the machine is when you slide your paper ballot into the machine
Ahh - see, I knew there was something I was missing. Okay, I'll give ya that one.
Nope. Elections in the U.S. are generally run by counties and cities, not the state, so the bill for storage falls to the counties.
I still have a problem with this one. Who bought the equipment? The individual counties, or the state in one big purchase? Even if the counties did buy them individually (which I do not believe), they could still all store them in the same place since each machine should be equivalent to the next. I think I could rent half the local climate controlled Uhaul storage compound for less then what they're paying.
Fifteen or twenty (600 - 800 ft^3) and you're looking at a van or some moving service. So, yes, moving costs are a factor. My point wasn't that moving things costs money - my point was the large fluctuation in costs from year to year on the touchscreens vs the optical. If you need 10 machines in XXY county one year, chances are excellent you'll use 10 machines in the same county next year. Thus the transportation costs should be the same. I understand that union based moving companies generally charge per pound so moving more items costs more money, but either both transportation costs should be flat, or they should both fluctuate.
Ask them to set up 15 touchscreen computers, a ballot encoder, and a laptop poll book and... yeah, you're going to need some training and education there.
You got me again - except that has nothing to do with the voters, that's the training of the judges/polltakers which is a separate line item that I didn't question. You don't train individual users, you train the pollsters to be able to show the users how to do it if they need help.
Finding a person who can manage ~1000 touchscreen computers...
I was being facetious. I know the PM's will cost more, but they shouldn't cost that much more. You don't need a 6sigma black belt for this.
Scanners scale. Allocating scanners is much easier.
Okay, yes - but that doesn't answer the problem that they projected optical prices and used actual touchscreen prices. That indicates a margin of error. Where did they compute and publicize their margin of error?
Insert your favorite quote about statistics here...
I glanced at the article and didn't see any useful data, so I paged through the pdf. There's some stuff in there that I don't understand and could cause some major problems with their statistics.
1) They appear to be comparing projected costs of optical scanners with actual costs of touchscreen machines. The PDF shows a 7 year lifespan of the original optical machine purchase, amortized over the first five years with zero additional purchases for that 7 year period, only warranty repairs. I sincerely doubt that there were zero additional purchases.
2) Can't they hire the same project managers for the touchscreen rollout as for the optical? People management is people management, no real difference.
3) Warehousing costs - aren't they storing the equipment at a state run facility? No reason why there should be a huge capital payment associated with that.
4) Transportaion costs fluctuate wildly on the touchscreen actual costs page, but are unwaveringly cheap on the optical page. The same equipment would always have to be moved to the same place, so I don't see that assumption as valid.
5) Voter outreach is 2x more for touchscreen as it is for the optical assumptions. I don't see how that cost would be different.
6) I don't see a line item for absentee ballot printing on the optical page at all.
7) I call BS on the statement that 10 touchscreens are needed for the job of a single optical scanner. Why would a county be willing to have a single optical scanner during an election? What if it failed? Those people wouldn't be able to vote that day? I think 2-3 is a more legitimate answer to account for quick processing and/or machine failures.
8) What exactly are the optional services that Diebold provides that account for almost $28M. That's a third of the overall total cost. There's no breakdown of what the services are, so there's no way to compare them with line items on the optical scanner costs.
They're comparing apples to oranges here with the projected costs of optical. It's simply not a fair comparison. And then not listing what those services are that almost singlehandedly account for the entire difference in cost between optical and touchscreen is ludicrous. If you take that line item out since there is no equivalent line item on the optical sheet, you have $67.5M for touchscreen and $52.4M for optical. Even using the listed number of $95M for touchscreen, that's still a little less than 2x the cost of optical. How exactly did they arrive at a 10 fold increase statistic?
I'm sure that the touchscreens are more expensive than opticals at first. Same thing when companies were first rolling out desktop computers to their workforce a couple decades ago. They understand that it cost a lot of money and a lot of lost productivity, but they also knew that they would reap huge rewards in additional productivity in the long run.
Now that said - let's find some other electronic voting firm to spend our next $100M with instead of Diebold.
That's a really good point. Didn't think about that. Kind of an iffy grey area though to prove what the money was actually paying for, which might be why Creative thought their odds were good enough to go with a lawsuit.
I haven't bought a creative soundcard in the past decade. I don't watch movies on my computer, and I don't need 7.1 sound for gaming. I just stick with whatever chip comes on the motherboard. I don't know how many people actually buy separate soundcards anymore - I can't believe that it is still the core of their business. Now, I have bought a couple creative MP3 players in the past five years. I might have to think twice about buying another one the next time one of them dies.
I don't really follow law too much, but isn't there a law about making money off of somebody else's product without their permission? I don't know what he did, but if he added to their code without modifying the original parts, then I would think he probably didn't violate any copyrights. But if he made money off providing a driver for a device he did not engineer, then I think Creative has a claim against him. Basically he 'deprived' them of the right to sell their own solution. Not that they had a solution, but you get the gist.
Here's a couple similar situations: Microsoft has generic drivers that you can get through windowsupdate for many hardware vendors. Some are written inhouse at M$ and some are given to them by the vendors themselves. But they don't make extra money off providing these drivers, it's just an added service.
If company X takes a GPL'd program and repackages it with a different name and a few changed buttons and sells it without offering modified source or recognition, everyone here would be up at arms over it. It wasn't their's to mess with. Same deal here.
This guy did a great service to the community, but he undoubtedly did it by using some things that weren't his to use (code, hardware spec's, etc) and he got greedy and charged for it.
Now, I don't think he should go to jail or anything, but giving back the money he 'deprived' Creative of in the first place should hopefully be the end of the complaint.
Really want to play that game Mr five digit? Last time I played I was immediately whomped. I think it was a three digit, but could have been somewhere between 1-2k. There's still a lot of active people that signed up that first day when registration opened.
I don't care who implements this solution. It was a bad idea a few years ago and it's still a bad idea today. The delivery mechanism will be compromised, and just having this type of thing out there will create new interest in creating hazardous worms/virii. I don't know about you guys, but I don't want anybody touching any of my systems. Ever! How about differences in configurations? What if I have a highly modified registry because I'm doing some advanced package testing? Then you come in and 'fix' something based on default values and it corrupts my entire system? Who's going to fix it then?
What about all the security admins who filter traffic based on pattern matches and ports? So now when we see a spike in traffic from thousands of machines going to 1433 on successive IP's we're supposed to somehow make a diagnosis on whether it's good or bad traffic? It's unnecessary overhead on the network. Whatever it's intention, auto fixing of problems and specifically designed auto replicating extra internet traffic is a bad idea.
Kinda like the Hockey strike. We all found other things to do instead of watch tv or hockey. If it's going to take almost two more months before everything on the air is new again, by that time it will have been close to 6 months with very limited new material and then it will (probably) be summer rerun season. Am I going to go back to vegging on the couch for 3 hours every night when the shows come back on? I've severely cut back on my tv watching and I don't really miss it. I don't think I'm the only one. Sure, I've been hoping that they're going to bring back some shows (24 & numb3rs). But I doubt I'll go back to watching all the other stuff since I've already broken the habit.
Nice FUD. Take your anti HD-DVD propoganda elsewhere please and re-read my post. Yeah, Yeah, I know. Don't feed the trolls. Don't worry, I won't bother replying again unless it's to an intelligent comment.
I, along with many other people do not care who wins the HD war. I am buying both, but the two combo units currently on the market are more expensive then two separate units and do not come with free DVD's of either format. I don't care if the price on HD is currently artifically low, and neither does anyone who's buying it. A non educated consumer going into a store will look at both options and wonder why Blu-Ray thinks their stuff is worth almost 2x as much as HD, and will likely buy the HD option unless they have compelling information from a trusted family member or friend to get Blu-Ray despite the price.
I do not consider published hardware specs with players that support them (or the lack thereof) that I mentioned in my post to be FUD and neither should any educated consumer.
Right, you're correct. I forgot about that. I don't own a PS3 and have no current plans to own one, so since that one is not a standalone player it isn't even a consideration for me. The PS3 player seems like a great option for people who already have a PS3 and are also people who just want Blu-Ray and not necessarily the best Blu-Ray picture available.
From what I've read, the PS3 does not do 1080p24 output, which should be the display choice of the future once more TV's start supporting it (My tv does support it, and so does my HD player, so that's a major consideration for me). I don't think a framerate change is possible to do via a software update - it probably requires a different chip. It also doesn't have a dedicated onboard chip that does upconversion of DVD's. On the plus side, they do allow bitstream audio output.
So, not a good deal at all if you're only interested in playing movies and not games. $500 for the unit with a remote is even more then the mediocre non profile 1.1 standalone players. It's an even worse deal when you take into consideration a couple key features of next gen players that the PS3 unit does not have and likely will never have.
Personally, I just went out yesterday and bought myself an A30. 7-10 free DVD's for $200-$250 and the player supports everything possible except for bitstream audio output? Count me in. If the format dies tomorrow, and my player lasts the 6+ years that my cheapy Apex has, and I can't buy a single extra HD DVD disk, I'll still be happy and consider the price a great deal.
Blu-Ray format does not seem to be managed well. I want both formats because I don't believe that either format will die in the next 18 months. However, HD's specs are well established, and work well. Blu-Ray's specs are ever changing. Profile 1.1 was ratified a while back, but as far as I know there is nothing available in the consumer markets that meets this spec today. Profile 2 is out there as well, and while I haven't dona a lot of research, I didn't find any release dates specified from any manufacturer on when they were going to meet the new profile specs. Things like on board memory and expansion ports for adding things later are in the new specs. Seems to me that the Blu-Ray commission seems to think there's big things coming down the pipe for the platform if they are adding expansion to it. I am not willing to plunk down $400 to get a decent Blu-Ray player that only comes with 5 free movies today. That comes out to $150 more for the player, plus $130 for the extra 5 disks to match what my HD player comes with. That is a huge price difference just to get shafted with a player that doesn't meet the latest Blu-Ray specs and probably will never be able to be upgraded to meet them, either.
Thanks, but no thanks. I plan to support both formats since there are movies on each that I want. But I'll wait a few months for Blu-Ray to figure out if they're actually going to put out a product that meets their customers needs, and drop the price on it in the meantime.
Cisco IOS has already been running in house (for development purposes) on Unix for years. They call it IOU (IOS on Unix). It is a closely guarded secret. Supposedly it is fully featured and can emulate as many routers with as many interfaces as you want, all on one Solaris system. Supposedly Cisco employees get in trouble (fired??) for even mentioning its existence and certainly if they ever gave access to somebody, and only a very small number of Cisco employees even have access to it. It wouldn't be very difficult for them to take this development version that is apparently rock solid since it's been around for a number of years and roll it into a production product. Obviously this is all hearsay since I've never even seen it, but from what I'm reading, it sounds like they've been holding this trump card for a long time just waiting to unleash it if a competitor seemed like they were gaining too much ground.
I've had comcast out for a couple installations (both business and home), and some clients of mine have asked me to be there for their installs as well for some unknown reason. If you're reasonably tech savvy and make it known to the installer that you don't want them touching your machines, in my experience they have been willing to use their own laptops to setup the connection using a backdoor tech site accessed through a proxy that doesn't require software installation. Then they just have you connect your computer and make sure you can get out to the internet and setup your account name if you haven't previously had a comcast account. I've never had a problem. Not that I run Mac's or exclusively Linux machines, but I still don't allow any ISP to install anything on a machine that I control - that's just completely unnecessary, and the install techs know it and have procedures for bypassing that if you ask nicely.
Go to any one-off cell phone store in the states (not a chain store) and just ask them. Chances are extremely good that they have some on hand, and have an 'arrangement' for special requests. Can't speak for Jitterbug specifically.
There are also some websites dedicated to giving you the codes for the common phones, with some free and some for pay. It took me a whole five minutes to get the unlock code for my old Nokia.
Okay, gotta admit my eyes glazed over and I only got through the first couple parts of your post. But, I am one of the fabled non coffee drinking IT engineers. Never liked warm drinks, and I just don't like the taste of coffee (so the cold ones are out, too). I drink probably less than 10 cups a year, and almost all of those are heavily flavored with Irish Creme of either the inebriating or the non kind. I drink plenty of Coke Zero, but I refuse to move up to ballz and other caffeine powered stuff. I popped caffeine pills as a teenager until I was up to around 1800mg/day. Way more than any heavy coffee drinker I've ever met. Now I know better and my intake is pretty limited.
Yeah, the kids need to be taught about consequences of their actions, but more than that the parents need to be taught that the kids are THEIR responsibility and need to be taught what is right and wrong, and if they can't control the kids then the kids shouldsn't have cell phones. I can't stand all these parents who are shocked at the bills their kids rack up and then call up the press to get an article somewhere in the hopes that the company will drop their bill because of the bad publicity. You created the problem, now figure out a way to deal with it. Too many people blaming society for things that are solely their responsibility.
I only have a baby, can't really relate to this exactly. However, I have many friends/coworkers who have teenagers, and I have to say that if I was in the market for a cell phone for a kid I wouldn't get a prepaid cell phone, but I'd get something like the disney phone. It's close to what I'd want, but not exact. Phone companies should really cater to the product that parents want, and not flat rates that make them the most money when the user's go over it.
Here's what I would want in a phone for a teenager: Fully featured cell phone (wouldn't want the kid to feel like a reject with one of those four button phones) Flat monthly minutes (rollover is preferred in the unlikely event they aren't all used) 'Normal" features such as free roaming, long distance, etc The kicker is that when the included minutes or texts are used up, the phone does not allow any incoming or outgoing text messages, and only allows phone calls to predesignated password protected numbers (home, parents cell, etc). If the kid tries to send a text message or make a call to an unapproved number it will prompt for a password or request a calling card / prepaid card number to add extra minutes.
This way it is completely impossible to go over your minutes in a month, except by just a couple for emergency/calling home usage which would never amount to more than $5/month. I don't know why there isn't a product like this on the market, although Disney does come close from what I heard about it. This is really what parents want even though they don't know it yet because they haven't ever seen it. No parent really wants to give their kid free reign with a cell phone.
I work in network support, so our changes are relatively easy.
However, I heard from one of the Unix guys (solaris, linux, AIX, HP-UX, younameit) that after getting halfway through patching the systems, which apparently requires a reboot, IBM told them that Java also requires a patch which also requires (or recommends) a reboot. So they had to start all over again because nobody thought to check Java before they started. If you support systems that use Java and hadn't heard about that yet, you will definitely want to look into it.
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I'm not exactly sure how this ggggp thread got started and didn't get modded troll right away, but I couldn't agree with you more.
My wife has been teaching in a bad area for five years, and I have had this discussion with her numerous times, and her coworkers on occasion.
Union's have a place in unskilled labor, but when you're highly skilled (Carpenters, heavy machinery operators, electricians, plumbers, teachers, etc) you should be skilled enough to hold a job on your own, and if not - too bad!
Problem is the pay sucks, so the schools get teachers who either really love teaching and want to help, or mediocre people who just want a job. Pay in the Chicago suburbs starts somewhere around $31k, and pay where her family is in the middle of Ohio starts around $26k. You can't live on either of those salaries!
Yes, pay raises are strictly seniority based as well as advanced degrees and hours of tuition towards that degree. There are some fairly lucrative after school things they can sign up to do to earn quite a bit more money though. My wife earns almost an extra 15% by doing just two things that don't seem to take up too much of her time.
Tenure is crap. Nothing to be said about it.
In the bad school districts like where my wife is, teachers constantly have to be worried about being laid off because the school's state test scores aren't getting any better. They laid off everyone who didn't have tenure from a different school in her district a few years ago regardless of how good a teacher they were. This has to do with the Governer taking money away from schools due to budget crisis and that stupid no child left behind act. Some kids are just dumb and/or have no desire to learn.
And, of course, there's around 12 weeks off a year. There is usually an option to teach summer school for a month, which is an extra 2-3k.
So take your $31k (or even 36) and do your math and it still comes out to well under $50k per year even if they find another job that pays the same to do during their time off.
For that measly 36-50k per year, my wife works 8 hours a day. Sometimes she gets a prep period, but a lot of the time she has to sub someone else's class, so she often isn't able to get any grading or lesson plans done during school hours. She's up until 12 or 1am at least once per week getting some grades done for the next day. Probably puts in 12 hours of work per week at home.
So for the privelege of making somewhere around $16 or $17 per hour, she gets mouthed off to by kids everyday who don't care, and occasionaly she gets some students where she might be able to actually make a difference.
Sound like a good deal to you?
The article specifically states that the bill covers health insurance and employers. Most large employers just dump new employees onto their group policy and pre-existing conditions may or may not matter. So this sounds like it's geared towards the self insured and small employers who have to be choosy due to premiums.
But what about life insurance? If I'm a perfectly normal (seemingly healthy) person who has never been diagnosed with anything, and then I apply for life insurance and they find something in my blood, does this protect me against them not insuring me? Health Insurance is a big ticket item for an election year, but since I already have health insurance and am unlikely to ever not have a group policy I'm much more interested in banning life insurance companies from performing genetic discrimination.
Okay, honestly - I'm not seeing the problem here. The article states that the data would be tied to the main taxpayer ID listed for the company. It also states that many Mom and Pop shops forgo using a taxpayer ID and instead use the Social Security Number of the primary owner.
So the problem as I see it is there are a whole lot of incredibly lazy business owners that did not incorporate their businesses correctly. If their business is incorporated, it protects them from a whole lot of lawsuits and problems. It also took me a whole five minutes to find an online form that you can submit for an employer identification number which I believe can be used for tax purposes. The IRS site claims that it takes a couple minutes to apply and you receive your EIN electronically and can begin using it immediately. Ergo, no more social security number problems.
So why would have a credit card company store a database (which I really hope they have anyway so they can charge/make their own money) that matches up receipts with my taxpayer ID a problem? We can't help those who don't help themselves and get a taxpayer ID.
I'm in Illinois and went to a state college and also worked for a not for profit company in Chicago. I'm pretty sure used stuff that was bought with state money was sent back to Springfield somewhere where it was sold by pallet to anyone who wanted it (other schools, not for profit institutions, etc). I know for sure that this is what happened to old stuff from the not-for-profit (something to do with the tax breaks they were getting so they couldn't resell anything), and I always assumed that's what happened with the college stuff, too.
All of that makes a lot of sense. I'm completely with you on optical scanners costing less then touchscreens. A computer is more expensive then an etchasketch. Not hard to do the math.
:)
I still believe they're comparing apples to oranges though. Unless they compare similar size/population counties/states that during the same exact years purchased and used optical or touchscreen, then there is a margin of error due to either using projected costs or pricing differences caused by differences in purchase price for different years/inflation. It's counter-productive to publish studies and comparison's that do not include this.
I think it all comes back to my original synopsis. Companies 20 years ago knew that pushing out computers costs lots of money and they were losing money in the short term, but they also knew that ultimately they would more then make up for it with productivity returns.
It also helps our economy
In order to vote on a touchscreen machine, you have to stand there to fill out your entire ballot. In order to vote on an optical scanner, the only time you use the machine is when you slide your paper ballot into the machine
Ahh - see, I knew there was something I was missing. Okay, I'll give ya that one.Nope. Elections in the U.S. are generally run by counties and cities, not the state, so the bill for storage falls to the counties.
I still have a problem with this one. Who bought the equipment? The individual counties, or the state in one big purchase? Even if the counties did buy them individually (which I do not believe), they could still all store them in the same place since each machine should be equivalent to the next. I think I could rent half the local climate controlled Uhaul storage compound for less then what they're paying. Fifteen or twenty (600 - 800 ft^3) and you're looking at a van or some moving service. So, yes, moving costs are a factor. My point wasn't that moving things costs money - my point was the large fluctuation in costs from year to year on the touchscreens vs the optical. If you need 10 machines in XXY county one year, chances are excellent you'll use 10 machines in the same county next year. Thus the transportation costs should be the same. I understand that union based moving companies generally charge per pound so moving more items costs more money, but either both transportation costs should be flat, or they should both fluctuate.Ask them to set up 15 touchscreen computers, a ballot encoder, and a laptop poll book and ... yeah, you're going to need some training and education there.
You got me again - except that has nothing to do with the voters, that's the training of the judges/polltakers which is a separate line item that I didn't question. You don't train individual users, you train the pollsters to be able to show the users how to do it if they need help.Finding a person who can manage ~1000 touchscreen computers...
I was being facetious. I know the PM's will cost more, but they shouldn't cost that much more. You don't need a 6sigma black belt for this.Scanners scale. Allocating scanners is much easier.
Okay, yes - but that doesn't answer the problem that they projected optical prices and used actual touchscreen prices. That indicates a margin of error. Where did they compute and publicize their margin of error?Does that answer your questions?
Kinda. Sorta.Insert your favorite quote about statistics here...
I glanced at the article and didn't see any useful data, so I paged through the pdf. There's some stuff in there that I don't understand and could cause some major problems with their statistics.
1) They appear to be comparing projected costs of optical scanners with actual costs of touchscreen machines. The PDF shows a 7 year lifespan of the original optical machine purchase, amortized over the first five years with zero additional purchases for that 7 year period, only warranty repairs. I sincerely doubt that there were zero additional purchases.
2) Can't they hire the same project managers for the touchscreen rollout as for the optical? People management is people management, no real difference.
3) Warehousing costs - aren't they storing the equipment at a state run facility? No reason why there should be a huge capital payment associated with that.
4) Transportaion costs fluctuate wildly on the touchscreen actual costs page, but are unwaveringly cheap on the optical page. The same equipment would always have to be moved to the same place, so I don't see that assumption as valid.
5) Voter outreach is 2x more for touchscreen as it is for the optical assumptions. I don't see how that cost would be different.
6) I don't see a line item for absentee ballot printing on the optical page at all.
7) I call BS on the statement that 10 touchscreens are needed for the job of a single optical scanner. Why would a county be willing to have a single optical scanner during an election? What if it failed? Those people wouldn't be able to vote that day? I think 2-3 is a more legitimate answer to account for quick processing and/or machine failures.
8) What exactly are the optional services that Diebold provides that account for almost $28M. That's a third of the overall total cost. There's no breakdown of what the services are, so there's no way to compare them with line items on the optical scanner costs.
They're comparing apples to oranges here with the projected costs of optical. It's simply not a fair comparison. And then not listing what those services are that almost singlehandedly account for the entire difference in cost between optical and touchscreen is ludicrous. If you take that line item out since there is no equivalent line item on the optical sheet, you have $67.5M for touchscreen and $52.4M for optical. Even using the listed number of $95M for touchscreen, that's still a little less than 2x the cost of optical. How exactly did they arrive at a 10 fold increase statistic?
I'm sure that the touchscreens are more expensive than opticals at first. Same thing when companies were first rolling out desktop computers to their workforce a couple decades ago. They understand that it cost a lot of money and a lot of lost productivity, but they also knew that they would reap huge rewards in additional productivity in the long run.
Now that said - let's find some other electronic voting firm to spend our next $100M with instead of Diebold.
That's a really good point. Didn't think about that. Kind of an iffy grey area though to prove what the money was actually paying for, which might be why Creative thought their odds were good enough to go with a lawsuit.
I haven't bought a creative soundcard in the past decade. I don't watch movies on my computer, and I don't need 7.1 sound for gaming. I just stick with whatever chip comes on the motherboard. I don't know how many people actually buy separate soundcards anymore - I can't believe that it is still the core of their business. Now, I have bought a couple creative MP3 players in the past five years. I might have to think twice about buying another one the next time one of them dies.
I don't really follow law too much, but isn't there a law about making money off of somebody else's product without their permission? I don't know what he did, but if he added to their code without modifying the original parts, then I would think he probably didn't violate any copyrights. But if he made money off providing a driver for a device he did not engineer, then I think Creative has a claim against him. Basically he 'deprived' them of the right to sell their own solution. Not that they had a solution, but you get the gist.
Here's a couple similar situations: Microsoft has generic drivers that you can get through windowsupdate for many hardware vendors. Some are written inhouse at M$ and some are given to them by the vendors themselves. But they don't make extra money off providing these drivers, it's just an added service.
If company X takes a GPL'd program and repackages it with a different name and a few changed buttons and sells it without offering modified source or recognition, everyone here would be up at arms over it. It wasn't their's to mess with. Same deal here.
This guy did a great service to the community, but he undoubtedly did it by using some things that weren't his to use (code, hardware spec's, etc) and he got greedy and charged for it.
Now, I don't think he should go to jail or anything, but giving back the money he 'deprived' Creative of in the first place should hopefully be the end of the complaint.
Yeah, I have the same problem. I got mod points that expire on the 2nd. I just wish they had enabled modding the stories themselves.
Really want to play that game Mr five digit? Last time I played I was immediately whomped. I think it was a three digit, but could have been somewhere between 1-2k. There's still a lot of active people that signed up that first day when registration opened.
I don't care who implements this solution. It was a bad idea a few years ago and it's still a bad idea today. The delivery mechanism will be compromised, and just having this type of thing out there will create new interest in creating hazardous worms/virii. I don't know about you guys, but I don't want anybody touching any of my systems. Ever! How about differences in configurations? What if I have a highly modified registry because I'm doing some advanced package testing? Then you come in and 'fix' something based on default values and it corrupts my entire system? Who's going to fix it then?
What about all the security admins who filter traffic based on pattern matches and ports? So now when we see a spike in traffic from thousands of machines going to 1433 on successive IP's we're supposed to somehow make a diagnosis on whether it's good or bad traffic? It's unnecessary overhead on the network. Whatever it's intention, auto fixing of problems and specifically designed auto replicating extra internet traffic is a bad idea.
Kinda like the Hockey strike. We all found other things to do instead of watch tv or hockey. If it's going to take almost two more months before everything on the air is new again, by that time it will have been close to 6 months with very limited new material and then it will (probably) be summer rerun season. Am I going to go back to vegging on the couch for 3 hours every night when the shows come back on? I've severely cut back on my tv watching and I don't really miss it. I don't think I'm the only one. Sure, I've been hoping that they're going to bring back some shows (24 & numb3rs). But I doubt I'll go back to watching all the other stuff since I've already broken the habit.
Nice! I had no idea. I might have to pick a used one or something.
Thanks!
Nice FUD. Take your anti HD-DVD propoganda elsewhere please and re-read my post. Yeah, Yeah, I know. Don't feed the trolls. Don't worry, I won't bother replying again unless it's to an intelligent comment.
I, along with many other people do not care who wins the HD war. I am buying both, but the two combo units currently on the market are more expensive then two separate units and do not come with free DVD's of either format. I don't care if the price on HD is currently artifically low, and neither does anyone who's buying it. A non educated consumer going into a store will look at both options and wonder why Blu-Ray thinks their stuff is worth almost 2x as much as HD, and will likely buy the HD option unless they have compelling information from a trusted family member or friend to get Blu-Ray despite the price.
I do not consider published hardware specs with players that support them (or the lack thereof) that I mentioned in my post to be FUD and neither should any educated consumer.
Right, you're correct. I forgot about that. I don't own a PS3 and have no current plans to own one, so since that one is not a standalone player it isn't even a consideration for me. The PS3 player seems like a great option for people who already have a PS3 and are also people who just want Blu-Ray and not necessarily the best Blu-Ray picture available.
From what I've read, the PS3 does not do 1080p24 output, which should be the display choice of the future once more TV's start supporting it (My tv does support it, and so does my HD player, so that's a major consideration for me). I don't think a framerate change is possible to do via a software update - it probably requires a different chip. It also doesn't have a dedicated onboard chip that does upconversion of DVD's. On the plus side, they do allow bitstream audio output.
So, not a good deal at all if you're only interested in playing movies and not games. $500 for the unit with a remote is even more then the mediocre non profile 1.1 standalone players. It's an even worse deal when you take into consideration a couple key features of next gen players that the PS3 unit does not have and likely will never have.
Personally, I just went out yesterday and bought myself an A30. 7-10 free DVD's for $200-$250 and the player supports everything possible except for bitstream audio output? Count me in. If the format dies tomorrow, and my player lasts the 6+ years that my cheapy Apex has, and I can't buy a single extra HD DVD disk, I'll still be happy and consider the price a great deal.
Blu-Ray format does not seem to be managed well. I want both formats because I don't believe that either format will die in the next 18 months. However, HD's specs are well established, and work well. Blu-Ray's specs are ever changing. Profile 1.1 was ratified a while back, but as far as I know there is nothing available in the consumer markets that meets this spec today. Profile 2 is out there as well, and while I haven't dona a lot of research, I didn't find any release dates specified from any manufacturer on when they were going to meet the new profile specs. Things like on board memory and expansion ports for adding things later are in the new specs. Seems to me that the Blu-Ray commission seems to think there's big things coming down the pipe for the platform if they are adding expansion to it. I am not willing to plunk down $400 to get a decent Blu-Ray player that only comes with 5 free movies today. That comes out to $150 more for the player, plus $130 for the extra 5 disks to match what my HD player comes with. That is a huge price difference just to get shafted with a player that doesn't meet the latest Blu-Ray specs and probably will never be able to be upgraded to meet them, either.
Thanks, but no thanks. I plan to support both formats since there are movies on each that I want. But I'll wait a few months for Blu-Ray to figure out if they're actually going to put out a product that meets their customers needs, and drop the price on it in the meantime.
Cisco IOS has already been running in house (for development purposes) on Unix for years. They call it IOU (IOS on Unix). It is a closely guarded secret. Supposedly it is fully featured and can emulate as many routers with as many interfaces as you want, all on one Solaris system. Supposedly Cisco employees get in trouble (fired??) for even mentioning its existence and certainly if they ever gave access to somebody, and only a very small number of Cisco employees even have access to it. It wouldn't be very difficult for them to take this development version that is apparently rock solid since it's been around for a number of years and roll it into a production product. Obviously this is all hearsay since I've never even seen it, but from what I'm reading, it sounds like they've been holding this trump card for a long time just waiting to unleash it if a competitor seemed like they were gaining too much ground.
I've had comcast out for a couple installations (both business and home), and some clients of mine have asked me to be there for their installs as well for some unknown reason. If you're reasonably tech savvy and make it known to the installer that you don't want them touching your machines, in my experience they have been willing to use their own laptops to setup the connection using a backdoor tech site accessed through a proxy that doesn't require software installation. Then they just have you connect your computer and make sure you can get out to the internet and setup your account name if you haven't previously had a comcast account. I've never had a problem. Not that I run Mac's or exclusively Linux machines, but I still don't allow any ISP to install anything on a machine that I control - that's just completely unnecessary, and the install techs know it and have procedures for bypassing that if you ask nicely.
Go to any one-off cell phone store in the states (not a chain store) and just ask them. Chances are extremely good that they have some on hand, and have an 'arrangement' for special requests. Can't speak for Jitterbug specifically.
There are also some websites dedicated to giving you the codes for the common phones, with some free and some for pay. It took me a whole five minutes to get the unlock code for my old Nokia.
Okay, gotta admit my eyes glazed over and I only got through the first couple parts of your post. But, I am one of the fabled non coffee drinking IT engineers. Never liked warm drinks, and I just don't like the taste of coffee (so the cold ones are out, too). I drink probably less than 10 cups a year, and almost all of those are heavily flavored with Irish Creme of either the inebriating or the non kind. I drink plenty of Coke Zero, but I refuse to move up to ballz and other caffeine powered stuff. I popped caffeine pills as a teenager until I was up to around 1800mg/day. Way more than any heavy coffee drinker I've ever met. Now I know better and my intake is pretty limited.
Yeah, the kids need to be taught about consequences of their actions, but more than that the parents need to be taught that the kids are THEIR responsibility and need to be taught what is right and wrong, and if they can't control the kids then the kids shouldsn't have cell phones. I can't stand all these parents who are shocked at the bills their kids rack up and then call up the press to get an article somewhere in the hopes that the company will drop their bill because of the bad publicity. You created the problem, now figure out a way to deal with it. Too many people blaming society for things that are solely their responsibility.
I only have a baby, can't really relate to this exactly. However, I have many friends/coworkers who have teenagers, and I have to say that if I was in the market for a cell phone for a kid I wouldn't get a prepaid cell phone, but I'd get something like the disney phone. It's close to what I'd want, but not exact. Phone companies should really cater to the product that parents want, and not flat rates that make them the most money when the user's go over it.
Here's what I would want in a phone for a teenager:
Fully featured cell phone (wouldn't want the kid to feel like a reject with one of those four button phones)
Flat monthly minutes (rollover is preferred in the unlikely event they aren't all used)
'Normal" features such as free roaming, long distance, etc
The kicker is that when the included minutes or texts are used up, the phone does not allow any incoming or outgoing text messages, and only allows phone calls to predesignated password protected numbers (home, parents cell, etc). If the kid tries to send a text message or make a call to an unapproved number it will prompt for a password or request a calling card / prepaid card number to add extra minutes.
This way it is completely impossible to go over your minutes in a month, except by just a couple for emergency/calling home usage which would never amount to more than $5/month. I don't know why there isn't a product like this on the market, although Disney does come close from what I heard about it. This is really what parents want even though they don't know it yet because they haven't ever seen it. No parent really wants to give their kid free reign with a cell phone.
I work in network support, so our changes are relatively easy.
However, I heard from one of the Unix guys (solaris, linux, AIX, HP-UX, younameit) that after getting halfway through patching the systems, which apparently requires a reboot, IBM told them that Java also requires a patch which also requires (or recommends) a reboot. So they had to start all over again because nobody thought to check Java before they started. If you support systems that use Java and hadn't heard about that yet, you will definitely want to look into it.
Isn't associating with a known criminal a quasi-valid reason for being arrested? Not necessarily convicted, but arrested.