Showing 4 posts tagged oops
“On the day after the election, complaints started pouring in from the volunteers themselves indicating that not only did Project Orca not improve the process, it may have actually hindered it. John Ekdahl, a volunteer who writes at Ace Of Spades HQ, outlined the various glitches and breakdowns of the system. Instead of handing out voter lists at local offices, volunteers were emailed 60 page PDF files and told to print them out at home the night before the election. They weren’t given official poll watcher certificates or told that those were required to enter most polling places. The “app” wasn’t really an app at all, it was a secure website, creating confusion for volunteers trying to find it in the iTunes store. It also didn’t auto-forward users who didn’t know to add an S to the http:// protocol in the app’s URL (which most browsers don’t ask you to type anymore), leaving numerous user lost on a broken webpage. Volunteers in other parts of the country shared similar complaints. The emailed packets came late or not at all. PINs that were required to login and download the voter lists didn’t work and couldn’t be reset. Calls and emails to the help desk went unanswered, and the entire system may have just completely crashed in the middle of election day. Frustrated volunteers struggled to get answers that never came, leaving most of them to fend for themselves or simply give up, wasting an entire day without bringing a single new voter to the voting booth.”
“Occupation: “prisoner.” Awards: “eight life sentences.” The Harvard Alumni Association was apologizing on Wednesday evening for publishing those and other details in an update from Ted Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, in a directory for alumni attending their 50th class reunion this week.”
Bummer: Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos Weren't, and It Was the Cable Guy's Fault
The blame lies with a fiber-optic cable used to connect a GPS receiver, which corrects the timing of the neutrinos’ flight, and a computer card that reads the receiver. As part of the efforts to replicate the results, a team member apparently tightened the connection and then measured the length of time it took the timing data to travel down the fiber. The data showed up, you guessed it, 60 nanoseconds earlier than assumed.
» via Popular Science
Botched McAfee update shutting down corporate XP machines worldwide
The anecdotal numbers keep rolling in, and they’re not small — 30,000 machines are knocked out here, 60,000 there. Given that the only fixes right now involve techs spending time with each affected machine individually, things could get seriously messy.
» via Engadget
