I was getting very frustrated with my Windows computer ( My Linux one was working fine) as the browser (Chrome) kept opening up new tabs and windows and giving me a "warning" about websites that I knew weren't problems. It kept urging me to call a particular number (Which I had absolutely no intention of ever doing) and finally got to the point where it interfered with the operation of the browser that the whole thing was becoming useless.
I took the computer to a tech support service and they fixed it up some. They improved the speed and reduced some of the clutter that I had been experiencing. I used Internet Explorer as my browser for awhile as that's the Windows default browser, bu eventually opened up Chrome again. %$^#@!! The problem that I brought it in for was still being a problem!!! As the problem hadn't occurred in Explorer, I decided to go to the tech support site for Chrome.
Boo-yah! With three exchanges, the problem had been identified and solved! My experience with the tech support company was not a waste, but it brought back to me how many times I and the data tech people in the Navy and I disagreed. Yeah, they were smart and informed, but I often knew just as much about certain aspects of computers as they did.
The court scholar serving Hermann of Thuringia.
The scholar
Showing posts with label computers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label computers. Show all posts
2014/10/07
2012/11/14
Project ORCA - major fizzle
First off, yes, the Mitt Romney campaign Digital Director Zac Moffatt is correct:
And when we look at the margin of victory that Obama enjoyed, we see that the race wasn't anywhere near close enough for the complete and utter clusterfuck that was the Project Orca to have had any serious effect on the race.
That being said, Project Orca would, in a rational universe where people cared deeply about objective facts, do such enormous damage to Mitt Romney's reputation as a skilled and savvy and smart and organized businessman that no one would miss the would-be Romney presidency for the effect that he would have had on the nation's economy.
As the right-wing blogger Ace of Spades points out, Romney and the Republican Party had 37,000+ ("Ace" initially estimated only 30,000+) volunteer poll-watchers and get-out-the-vote people:
Now, this sounds great IF your objective is to save money. Outsourcing production of the voter rolls to individual employees sounds like a great idea IF people are all supplied with corporate-style laser printers that spit out a half-dozen to a dozen pages a minute and to people who have the time and the expertise to absorb a few pages of written technical instructions. Obviously, campaign volunteers are not employees and they don't necessarily have the equipment or training to do these things. The Ars Technica piece concludes that the Romney team essentially did a "beta test" (Sort of a technological "full dress rehearsal," with customers actually getting their hands on the product and testing it in real time with the tools they'd normally use) on November 6th. Problem: November 6th was the drop-dead, must-work-perfectly day when all the bugs had to be ironed out and and all the errors fixed and for all of the system's users to be completely up-to-date with and comfortable with the system. Yes, the Romney team would have had to sacrifice secrecy and shock effect, but they would have had a fully working and functional product and not a complete fizzle of a product launch. Yes, yes, Zac Moffat points out that they did a few things right. I'll give 'em a C- on the whole thing.
What's perhaps the clearest sign of just plain, flat-out incompetence, bordering on malfeasance, is that Comcast, the website provider, was not informed that the project was expecting really massive traffic on November 6th. Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) ran into a very similar problem during his 2006 primary campaign against challenger Ned Lamont. His website crashed because it wasn't prepared to be as busy as it was during the last days of the campaign, when the site was flooded with people wanting to cast an informed vote but who hadn't taken the time to do any research beforehand. Romney's contractor or Romney's own people should have known from Lieberman's experience that website providers need to be notified that you have a political site and that you're expecting a really big surge in traffic on election day. There's no guarantee that the website provider would have provided any resources with which to assist the electioneering team, but at least Comcast would not have been under the impression that Romney's site was suffering a denial-of-service attack. They might have even been prepared to assist with computer resources, extra lines of communication or more servers.
So yes, Project Orca was very much of a test of Romney's abilities/capabilities as an executive and yes, he failed that test miserably. The nation lost nothing when it didn't vote him into office.
Update:
Ars Technica decided to follow up their look at the failed Mitt Romney product by looking at the successful Barack Obama product. The Obama 2008 campaign software, nicknamed Houdini, was okay. Not great, just okay. It more or less did the job and contributed some to the campaign, but Obama's people understood they'd really have to scale it up for 2012. Some interesting quotes: "Rather than focusing on creating something significantly new, Reed said, the team focused on taking what they already knew worked and fitting the pieces together." and "Dashboard didn't replace real-world field offices; rather, it was designed to overcome the problems posed by the absence of a common tool set in the 2008 election, making it easier for volunteers to be recruited and connected with people in their area." and "...the philosophy of applications like Dashboard and Call Tool was that 'you can't just make a difference through tech alone,' Ecker said. 'You can't just send e-mails and make robocalls and do stuff on Facebook—the real persuasion is going to happen when a real person is talking to a real person.'"
"For whatever reasons, the conservative bloggers have latched onto
Orca as the reason it all fell apart," Moffatt added. Those bloggers
have suggested that developers with Democratic sympathies somehow acted
as a fifth column within the Romney camp.
----
Moffatt said that this kind of thinking puts too much faith in a single piece of software. "Anyone who knows campaigns knows this was all baked in before that day—there was no magic, Orca wasn't a silver bullet,"...
----
Moffatt said that this kind of thinking puts too much faith in a single piece of software. "Anyone who knows campaigns knows this was all baked in before that day—there was no magic, Orca wasn't a silver bullet,"...
That being said, Project Orca would, in a rational universe where people cared deeply about objective facts, do such enormous damage to Mitt Romney's reputation as a skilled and savvy and smart and organized businessman that no one would miss the would-be Romney presidency for the effect that he would have had on the nation's economy.
As the right-wing blogger Ace of Spades points out, Romney and the Republican Party had 37,000+ ("Ace" initially estimated only 30,000+) volunteer poll-watchers and get-out-the-vote people:
In a final training call on November 3, field volunteers were told to
expect "packets" shortly containing the information they needed to use
Orca. Those packets, which showed up in some volunteers' e-mail inboxes
as late as November 5, turned out to be PDF files—huge PDF files which
contained instructions on how to use the app and voter rolls for the
voting precincts each volunteer would be working. After discovering the
PDFs in his e-mail inbox at 10:00 PM on Election Eve, Ekdahl said that
"I sat down and cursed, as I would have to print 60+ pages of
instructions and voter rolls on my home printer. They expected 75 to
80-year old veteran volunteers to print out 60+ pages on their home
computers? The night before election day?"
Now, this sounds great IF your objective is to save money. Outsourcing production of the voter rolls to individual employees sounds like a great idea IF people are all supplied with corporate-style laser printers that spit out a half-dozen to a dozen pages a minute and to people who have the time and the expertise to absorb a few pages of written technical instructions. Obviously, campaign volunteers are not employees and they don't necessarily have the equipment or training to do these things. The Ars Technica piece concludes that the Romney team essentially did a "beta test" (Sort of a technological "full dress rehearsal," with customers actually getting their hands on the product and testing it in real time with the tools they'd normally use) on November 6th. Problem: November 6th was the drop-dead, must-work-perfectly day when all the bugs had to be ironed out and and all the errors fixed and for all of the system's users to be completely up-to-date with and comfortable with the system. Yes, the Romney team would have had to sacrifice secrecy and shock effect, but they would have had a fully working and functional product and not a complete fizzle of a product launch. Yes, yes, Zac Moffat points out that they did a few things right. I'll give 'em a C- on the whole thing.
What's perhaps the clearest sign of just plain, flat-out incompetence, bordering on malfeasance, is that Comcast, the website provider, was not informed that the project was expecting really massive traffic on November 6th. Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) ran into a very similar problem during his 2006 primary campaign against challenger Ned Lamont. His website crashed because it wasn't prepared to be as busy as it was during the last days of the campaign, when the site was flooded with people wanting to cast an informed vote but who hadn't taken the time to do any research beforehand. Romney's contractor or Romney's own people should have known from Lieberman's experience that website providers need to be notified that you have a political site and that you're expecting a really big surge in traffic on election day. There's no guarantee that the website provider would have provided any resources with which to assist the electioneering team, but at least Comcast would not have been under the impression that Romney's site was suffering a denial-of-service attack. They might have even been prepared to assist with computer resources, extra lines of communication or more servers.
So yes, Project Orca was very much of a test of Romney's abilities/capabilities as an executive and yes, he failed that test miserably. The nation lost nothing when it didn't vote him into office.
Update:
Ars Technica decided to follow up their look at the failed Mitt Romney product by looking at the successful Barack Obama product. The Obama 2008 campaign software, nicknamed Houdini, was okay. Not great, just okay. It more or less did the job and contributed some to the campaign, but Obama's people understood they'd really have to scale it up for 2012. Some interesting quotes: "Rather than focusing on creating something significantly new, Reed said, the team focused on taking what they already knew worked and fitting the pieces together." and "Dashboard didn't replace real-world field offices; rather, it was designed to overcome the problems posed by the absence of a common tool set in the 2008 election, making it easier for volunteers to be recruited and connected with people in their area." and "...the philosophy of applications like Dashboard and Call Tool was that 'you can't just make a difference through tech alone,' Ecker said. 'You can't just send e-mails and make robocalls and do stuff on Facebook—the real persuasion is going to happen when a real person is talking to a real person.'"
2009/05/30
Ubuntu vs Windows
As yer resident techno-geek, I spoke with a buddy of mine today and he was unclear as to the distinction between Microsoft and Linux operating systems. There are essentially three operating systems in use today, with many, many smaller, more specialized ones in use. They're Microsoft Windows, Ubuntu Linux and the whole Apple line.
Microsoft has two versions of Windows out today, the home version is XP, the business version is Vista. Linux has many, many versions, but the primary, flagship version is Ubuntu. Apple has some interoperability between itself and both of the other systems but essentially if you want an Apple computer, it's because you're working on projects that don't really need to interface with other systems, i.e., graphic design.
Do Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux interact?
We-l-l-l, that depends on what you mean by that. Can you install a Windows program like Frontpage or Powerpoint onto an Ubuntu operating system?
No.
Ubuntu comes with Open Office, which is very similar to Microsoft Office. Ubuntu has many other programs which are very similar, but no, you can't take a Windows program and install it onto Ubuntu.
Can you open up and use Windows documents, like a Powerpoint presentation on an Ubuntu operating system?
Yes.
There may be a problem with documents created via more complex programs, such as with graphic design or database programs, but straightforward word-processed documents or basic spreadsheets will have no difficulty being translated.
Creating HTML, or Internet-readable documents, is a bit of a special case. HTML was specifically designed to work on any and all operating systems. If you download or call up a document that's been written in HTML, then no matter what kind of operating system you've got, you should be able to read it. I use the program Mozilla Seamonkey to write HTML documents on both my Windows XP desktop computer and on my Ubuntu Linux laptop computer. The program comes in both "flavors," Windows and Linux, but the documents that I create don't need any obvious adaption procedures to be written on first one machine and then the other.
So yes, there's a high degree of interoperability between Windows and Linux operating systems, but they're not identical. There is a very high likelihood that a document written on one operating system is readable and writable in the other, especially if the document is written in HTML.
Update: a buddy of mine responded to reading the above: "Good job! But one question: why do you use Mozilla to create your documents rather than Microsoft Office Word ?" My answer:
When I do my weekly report for new visitors to my church, I do it first in Linux Open Office Spreadsheet, then I keep the original copy and create an exact duplicate in Microsoft Excel (as everybody else has MS Office). The OO sheet is about 10 kilobytes, the MS Excel sheet is over 100 kilobytes! The balance is all just excess code. Worthless filler. I've seen the same thing happen in MS Word vs Mozilla Seamonkey. This is a real problem for modifying a document on the web (Besides being harder to pull up or download, the prawnworks.net home page is about 150 kilobytes as it is) as I often go into the code to find and fix problems. Having so much filler just makes it more difficult.
I'm completely unimpressed with MS Word as when I copy an article and save it to read later, Word takes all the indents out! It doesn't copy the article in a way that I can distinguish the speaker from lengthy quotes. Very aggravating as the blogs I read very frequently use indenting.
Did I mention you shouldn't get me started on why I prefer OO to MS?
And my buddy then wrote back: "I promise I won't do this anymore!
:-))))))))))))))))))))))))
Microsoft has two versions of Windows out today, the home version is XP, the business version is Vista. Linux has many, many versions, but the primary, flagship version is Ubuntu. Apple has some interoperability between itself and both of the other systems but essentially if you want an Apple computer, it's because you're working on projects that don't really need to interface with other systems, i.e., graphic design.
Do Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux interact?
We-l-l-l, that depends on what you mean by that. Can you install a Windows program like Frontpage or Powerpoint onto an Ubuntu operating system?
No.
Ubuntu comes with Open Office, which is very similar to Microsoft Office. Ubuntu has many other programs which are very similar, but no, you can't take a Windows program and install it onto Ubuntu.
Can you open up and use Windows documents, like a Powerpoint presentation on an Ubuntu operating system?
Yes.
There may be a problem with documents created via more complex programs, such as with graphic design or database programs, but straightforward word-processed documents or basic spreadsheets will have no difficulty being translated.
Creating HTML, or Internet-readable documents, is a bit of a special case. HTML was specifically designed to work on any and all operating systems. If you download or call up a document that's been written in HTML, then no matter what kind of operating system you've got, you should be able to read it. I use the program Mozilla Seamonkey to write HTML documents on both my Windows XP desktop computer and on my Ubuntu Linux laptop computer. The program comes in both "flavors," Windows and Linux, but the documents that I create don't need any obvious adaption procedures to be written on first one machine and then the other.
So yes, there's a high degree of interoperability between Windows and Linux operating systems, but they're not identical. There is a very high likelihood that a document written on one operating system is readable and writable in the other, especially if the document is written in HTML.
Update: a buddy of mine responded to reading the above: "Good job! But one question: why do you use Mozilla to create your documents rather than Microsoft Office Word ?" My answer:
When I do my weekly report for new visitors to my church, I do it first in Linux Open Office Spreadsheet, then I keep the original copy and create an exact duplicate in Microsoft Excel (as everybody else has MS Office). The OO sheet is about 10 kilobytes, the MS Excel sheet is over 100 kilobytes! The balance is all just excess code. Worthless filler. I've seen the same thing happen in MS Word vs Mozilla Seamonkey. This is a real problem for modifying a document on the web (Besides being harder to pull up or download, the prawnworks.net home page is about 150 kilobytes as it is) as I often go into the code to find and fix problems. Having so much filler just makes it more difficult.
I'm completely unimpressed with MS Word as when I copy an article and save it to read later, Word takes all the indents out! It doesn't copy the article in a way that I can distinguish the speaker from lengthy quotes. Very aggravating as the blogs I read very frequently use indenting.
Did I mention you shouldn't get me started on why I prefer OO to MS?
And my buddy then wrote back: "I promise I won't do this anymore!
:-))))))))))))))))))))))))
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