Posted 8:19 AM (0) comments

Conway Walks the Plank

15 months after I suggested that PeopleSoft's stockholders wake up to the mess CEO Craig Conway was making, the stockholders reps (i.e., the board of directors) have told Conway not to let the door hit him on the way out.

His very personal fight to ward off the Oracle takeover has failed. It has damaged PeopleSoft and it has severly impacted the stockholders. It remains to be seen, though, if new CEO Dave Duffield (the company's founder as well as Chairman) has what it takes to salvage some value for those who have financed the company.

Posted 8:16 AM (1) comments

ACM is all thumbs

The venerable old Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) may be passing into organizational senility, at least when you view their entry into the world of electronic voting. According to a Network World story, "Paperless e-voting gets thumbs down from ACM," the organization polled it's membership and the results are reported as indicating that "Voting systems should enable each voter to inspect a physical (e.g. paper) record to verify that his or her vote has been accurately cast."

But, how many different ways, how many different times can I say this? A paper receipt tells us absolutely nothing about how the vote was recorded!

The only way to insure accurate vote tallies is to validate and certify the machine. With validation, the vote count is accurate and no recount is needed. Without validation, the vote count is worthless, no matter how many paper receipts are issued.