mercury

Electronic voting and partial audits

On February 16th fellow CNET blogger Robert Vamosi wrote an item headlined "With improvements, e-voting could be good, says researcher." I think that e-voting is a very bad thing and that no "improvements" will ever convert it to a good thing. But I'm not an expert on the subject, so I asked Rebecca Mercuri, a specialist in computer security and electronic voting, if she would like to respond to the claim made by the "researcher" in question. Mercuri has appeared many times on the Personal Computer Show to discuss electronic voting, which is … Read more

Review: 2008 Mercury Sable

Driving the 2008 Mercury Sable around San Francisco, we considered painting it yellow, putting a light on top, and starting a career as a taxi driver. The Mercury Sable, brand engineered from the Ford Taurus, is a big sedan with a huge amount of trunk space. The car seems reasonably well-built, with good interior fit and finish, while its V-6 engine gives it enough power to get around. But the car offers a completely characterless driving experience, with poor powertrain response and loads of understeer. One of the key reasons we wanted to review the Mercury Sable, and its most … Read more

September 11, six years later

I woke on September 11, 2001 to the news of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the loss of UA Flight 93 in Pennsylvania.

I went in to work that morning, but nobody was getting any work done, and I couldn't concentrate, so I went home again.

While watching the news coverage, I wrote and emailed a letter to the San Jose Mercury News and several nationally-recognized newspapers. I don't actually know if my letter was printed anywhere else, but the Mercury News contacted me later that day and… Read more

AMD gains back some share, but still down

AMD has managed to push past the effects of a disastrous inventory problem last quarter, but not all the way.

Mercury Research reports that AMD gained back four of the six points of market share it lost in the first quarter after an inventory screwup. Intel shipped 76.3 percent of all x86 chips for the desktop, notebook and server markets in the second quarter, while AMD shipped 22.9 percent. Intel hit 80 percent in the first quarter of this year, but that was an anomaly based on AMD's supply-chain troubles, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury … Read more

Lay offs at the Mercury News

With Bush's pardon commutation of Scooter Libby's 30 month prison sentence dominating the news this morning, the San Jose Mercury News published an article announcing 31 lay offs from their newsroom. This news, along with 15 recent volunteer resignations brings The Mercury's fleet of reporters down to 200 which according to the article is about half of what it was in 2000. Of course, this news shouldn't come as too much of a surprise as newspapers across the country have been feeling the heat for some time and many have resorted to lay offs in an effort to balance their declining budgets.

So why is it that print newspapers are faltering in recent years? Is it because of the rise of online journalists and bloggers or is it because American's have grown hypersensitive about paper waste and have decided it is no longer responsible to read a daily newspaper? Has Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth had that much of an impact? Somehow I doubt it.

Tech problems due to Mercury in retrograde?

When Yahoo Messenger went down Wednesday, it might have just been one of those little technology glitches that happen from time to time.

And when some people started having problems with Gmail Thursday, well, it probably was because of some small gremlin in Google's hamster wheel.

Same with my friend's company's corporate e-mail going down the last couple of days--all easily explainable.

Except, maybe there's a single unifying explanation. Maybe it's because of Mercury in retrograde.

I know. Roll your eyes all you want. But the phenomenon--an optical illusion in which Mercury, from our earthly … Read more