The Millennium Shrimp

Saw this essay posted on slashdot this afternoon. He conducted an independent recount of votes in Humbolt County, CA and discovered a software bug in  Diebold’s GEMS (which counts scanned paper ballots generated by touch screen voting) that will delete the first set of scanned ballots if you delete any other set of scans(!)

It’s a good example of how horribly flawed the closed source software development model is when applied to the public sector. Diebold bought a piece of crap that someone else wrote and now they’re trying to recoup their investment. They have no incentive to actually fix the software - that would cost money and it’s far more profitable to downplay the issue and keep pushing the product. Meanwhile, the people who have an interest in fixing the software can’t because they don’t actually own it. Imagine your car having an annoying oil leak and you have to wait for GM to get around to fixing it. GM doesn’t really care if your car is burning oil. They’re not the ones buying a quart of oil every week to top it off. Can you imagine the City Fire Department not being able to get their trucks fixed because they only lease them? That’s exactly the problem with Closed source software. You don’t own the software and the person most affected by the problem is powerless to remedy it.
It’s not so much that there’s a vast conspiracy to control American elections as there is a misapplication of a bad business model to a sector where it should never have been applied in the first place.

Heh, yes, you can build a Linux cluster in a filing cabinet. I may have to put this on the to do list.

So, our secretary here at work bought an Asus eee pc for her daughter. It’s pink. It also doesn’t come with Java pre-installed(?!)The 4G models come with Java, but the 2G models don’t. So,I installed Java for her. That was about two months ago. Then her daughter screwed something up, so she re-installed the distro, but couldn’t get Java to work. It’s probably one of the more convoluted installations I’ve gone through on a modern Linux distribution for a relatively common software package.

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The 1337 prayer.

“Clearly when we draw up a battle plan for what we’ve been working for the last several years, trying to get SCO’s intellectual property rights fought through in the courts and the marketplace, the endgame didn’t have this sort of outcome for me personally,”

Daryl McBride (link: interview in Salt Lake Tribune) is leaving as CEO of SCO Group after driving them into bankruptcy and earning himself possible even more animus in the FOSS and Linux communities through a series of “kamikaze” lawsuits.  However, as Linux Watch notes:

In addition to his CEO pay, McBride received a 70 percent bonus in 2007 on his base salary of $265,000. His total compensation for the year that SCO sank into bankruptcy was $571,220.

Yep, I’m definitely in the wrong business. Won’t someone pay me $500,000 to run their company into the ground.