Reuters reports that Unisys will build an electronic voting system using hardware from Dell and software from Microsoft. Somebody should tell them the '90s are over. My final beef with usability gurus is that they don't take into account that there are, well, stupid users. There are folks who have trouble using a dictionary let alone navigating a Web site. They easily get lost in the real world.
Stupid people skew results.
A site doesn't have to work well for everyone. Collaborative computing on Mars NASA wants to see if the Internet can replace highly trained scientists and grad students, at least for certain tasks. Its clickworkers project aims to see if Internet users can identify craters on images from Mars. There are many scientific tasks that require human perception and common sense, but may not require a lot of scientific training. Identifying craters on Mars is something almost anyone can do, and classifying them by age is only a little harder.