We don't need $200 spread around to 10,000 people, we need $2,000,000 concentrated on funding a few good developers to pay full-time attention to whatever FOSS project the government itself needs.
Paraphrasing the wonderful Iron Man movie script, "That's the way Dad did it, that's the way the Internet does it... and it's worked out pretty good so far."
How about funding the full-time development of an open, transparent, computer-assisted voting system for a start? That might could help.
This is a wonderfully-written comment, and it's a shame, really, to try and poke any holes in it. But this is slashdot, after all, and we're here just to have a good time. Beers all around!
The argument relies on a bit of a strawman: that we can either leave licensing to private individuals, or enrich the general welfare, but not both. But this does not have to be case at all.
In fact, I can give you a very good example of a private licensing arrangement that not only is compatible with enriching the general welfare, it is primarily designed to accomplish exactly that purpose: the Creative Commons license.
So, the distinction we need to draw isn't between those agreements entered into privately vs. those entered into with the general public, it's between those written for broad distribution (the network model) vs. limited distribution (the restricted-use model.)
I would argue that the restricted-use model is simply an outdated, unsustainable business practice. It no longer captures the right revenue from the right people, and is therefore a poor business choice.
We have moved into an age where the network model is needed to properly monetize a work. Vastly more money is possible to be made from distributing a work widely than from restricting use. The fact that the music industry has completely failed to learn how to leverage the network effect has very little to do with licensing, and everything to do with having the WRONG kind of license.
Ain't nothing wrong with doing a sequel. "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" was the third movie in a trilogy, and was by far the best. It often takes several passes through a creative landscape before all the elements find their place and the whole thing jells.
Sequels don't have to have the same characters or plot. It can be enough to just take the basic idea and feel of the first movie, and run with it in a new direction.
For example, I'd love to see someone explore the idea of replication much deeper. What if Replicants weren't time-limited, but made perpetual instead? What if memory could be captured and re-implanted in one generation of Replicant after another, so that consciousness would span several lifetimes/bodies? What if anyone could make a copy of themselves, on demand? Say you want to try what it feels like to jump out of an airplane -- without a parachute. Do you make a replica, and then toss yourself?
Sure, of course I found Word's similar feature. However, it a) did not allow independent chapter documents, b) did not separate style information cleanly, so people's stylesheets were overwriting each other, and c) just plain did not work well -- corrupted files, numbering was a nightmare, even pagination did not work properly.
It really wasn't a matter of the exact same feature being done better in one product vs another. The OpenOffice designers had re-thought the whole process, and come up with a simpler, cleaner design that was flexible and didn't break.
My point about switching, then, is that for all the things people love about Word, there is a TON of cruft in that product, even now. My company saved a lot of time and money by adopting a cleaner solution, and that ought to go into the ROI calculation.
To get the full value out of OpenOffice, think about going beyond merely swapping out Word. If you take advantage of some of OpenOffice's unique features, it might get you a quicker ROI.
For example, I once had to pull together the technical response to a large RFP. We had over a dozen authors. Rather than shlepping copies of the whole response doc back and forth to everyone (my nightmare scenario), I used Open Office's Master Document feature to create a live, compound document: a Master Document for the entire response, and a separate Chapter Document for each section. Since the Chapters were separate documents, the various authors could work on them independently. Once a week I would refresh the Master Document, which would automatically pull in all the work thus far.
This worked really well, and the way Open Office cleanly separated the master from the sub-documents was very impressive. The point is, we got a lot of bang for the buck out of that experience, and that one project pretty much sold everyone on the value of making the switch to Open Office.
I can't believe the number of posts here from people claiming how "obvious" it was that the OLPC would never work, and if Negroponte would just fix this or that aspect of the development strategy, the hardware, the software, the pricing, or the partner program, then everything would turn up roses.
There was nothing obvious about the adventures of the OLPC. They were defining an entirely new class of machine that, even now, has no true competitor (and no, none of the current netbook offerings have it right yet: they cost too much, they draw too much power, they can't be used in full daylight, and they aren't nearly rugged enough.)
When you are charting something this new, it attracts the best and brightest. These kind of people have huge egos, that's part of the package. So the fact that there have been lots of sparks flying is no surprise.
When you are trying to change the status quo this completely, it attracts intense opposition from the entrenched competition. I doubt any of us would enjoy putting up with the hammering, back-stabbing, broken promises and endless fight for oxygen that is probably a daily experience for the OLPC executives.
So, I say, cut these people some slack. Go buy a OLPC, and see what all the talk is about. I've been using an OLPC for a year now, and am daily impressed with how very different it is from any other device out there.
When you find yourself reading an ebook, and pass from the deep gloom of a subway station into the direct sunlight without even thinking about the fact that a normal PC can't do that, then you're graduated to the new OLPC world.
When you find yourself grabbing your XO without a case, walking in the rain to your car and throwing it on the back seat without a second thought, then you've graduated to the new OLPC world.
When you find yourself propping your XO up on a bowl in the kitchen so you can browse recipies on the web while you cook, and don't worry for a second about what might happen if you spill something all over it (been there, done that), then you've graduated.
Asking how to restrict the laptops is the wrong place to start. By thinking about how you WON'T use the laptops, you've already lost the battle.
You need to first think about how the laptops WILL be used. For each class where the laptop will be used, the instructors must know exactly how to leverage them well enough to make their use an essential aspect of learning. If a student is busy using a laptop for a legitimate, in-class purpose, then they won't be off browsing p0rn -- at least not without the teacher noticing.
At any other time when the use of the laptop is not essential, simply turn it off and put it away. Don't allow the laptops out on the playground, or in the lunch room. They are strictly for classroom or home use only.
The point is to treat a laptop like a No. 2 pencil. It's just a tool, useful only in a certain context, and outside that context, we don't use it.
Just purchased the MP3 version. It is, as claimed, mpga 320K, DRM-free. In addition to the tracks, you get cover artwork and liner notes as jpgs.
The range of purchase options is very interesting. $8.99 for MP3 files and artwork, $12.99 for a CD, $29.99 for a direct metal mastered double vinyl record, and $79.99 for a DVD containing 24bit 96Khz tracks, and a second DVD containing multi-track session files for a selection of the album tracks.
The purchasing experience was flawless: create an account, give a credit card (with optional choice of saving the number or not; I chose not), get a zipfile of the downloads. Not a wasted keystroke or mouse click.
This really is the way I want to purchase my music. Two big thumbs up from the consumer angle. Lots of choices, low prices, immediate downloads, supports the artists.
The way this is set up, you can either download the file for free, or buy the book (hardcover). I don't want a book, I want a file -- but I also want to financially support the author and his publisher.
How about a "download with donation" option, with a 50/50 split to the author and the publisher? (For those who might object to giving the publisher anything, just ask any author how much work goes into getting a book ready for publication. Splitting the donation is plenty fair, I can assure you.)
At last, a sensible bit of advice! Talk to your employer first.
First, there's no way to avoid legal entanglements if you take ANYTHING from your employer that they have paid you to produce. The only clean, legal route you have to code happiness is through your employer.
Second, actually selling a successful product requires at least three legs on the stool: development, sales, and corporate support (finance, IT, HR, and executive). OK, you've got one leg -- who's going to provide the rest?
Lastly, just trying to get your current employer to let you set up shop internally can provoke changes for the better. Your employer might wake up and ask themselves whey those geeks from development are clamoring for a shot at selling a new product.
they are committing the cardinal sin of software development, they are letting the marketing department develop their systems.
No argument here about that! Marketing shouldn't be developing, end of story. But is that what we're seeing here? Isn't it more like marketing telling engineering, "oh yeah, and guys, there's one more thing: make sure the UI for Windows 7 doesn't stink. It's gotta be fast, I mean, blazing; as fast as you can make it. People love that stuff!"
Of course a snappy UI is a huge deal. Users spend a lot of time navigating before they actually run anything. And, keeping the UI snappy even when the CPU is under heavy load is an especially important user experience requirement.
There's nothing illegitimate or sneaky about optimizing the hardware to better serve the user.
No, not in Virginia. Each party running for office can send a select number of observers, the candidates themselves can observe (but only for a short amount of time), and the media can come in and take pictures. The orderliness of the polling place is extremely well-protected in Virginia law. The poll workers are even given limited police powers -- including the power to put someone under a form of house arrest for up to 24 hours -- to guard the polling place, if need be.
"You know I've heard people make claims that various elections have been stolen on these machines. It's a difficult--it's not a claim I would make because I think it's risky to make a claim when you can't prove it nor would I say that no elections have ever been stolen on these machines as some other people claim because you can't prove that either. And I think the problem is when we find ourselves in the situation where we can neither prove nor disprove that the election was--would be tabulated--recorded and tabulated and what we need to do is move to systems where we can prove things. And I think that's what we have to do and the fact that the 2008 Presidential election has not been contested the way that for example the 2000 election was contested doesn't mean we're out of the woods. There will be other contested races as we're seeing in Minnesota although there they're going to count it and there we will find out."
I think she's got this spot on. We need to move to system where one can prove the result. Once we can prove that a machine count and a human count produce the same result, it doesn't matter what's inside the "black box". We know it's producing the right outcome, so we can trust it.
As far as I know, none of the voting systems and procedures we have now -- optical scan included -- are designed around this concept of proof.
Another complicating factor is that the United States is a federation of 50 independent state governments. The states run their own elections, with very little input or control by the federal government. The actual elections themselves are administered by the dozens of local boards of election within each state.
So, that's 50 sets of voting rules, written by 50 state legislatures, adjudicated by 50 state courts overseeing dozens of local boards of election each.
People from outside the US often think of America as a single people with a single form of government, and that's really only partially true.
This is undoubtedly the right technical move. There is a huge amount of underused bandwidth in this part of the spectrum. As long as there is a reliable way to avoid the licensed operators, it would be stupid not to optimize our usage. Not optimizing our bandwidth is one of the reasons why we're slipping in broadband adoption compared to the rest of the world.
At work, I am the resident "crazy open source guy" who is always raising the red flag on vendor lock-in. However, I have absolutely zero emotional attachment to technologies. To me, a computer is like a No. 2 pencil: it's just a tool with a particular set of capabilities and costs. Whatever provides the most value, use it.
It just so happens that to most of my firm's customers, the Microsoft product line provides the best value. However, nothing is forever, and I can certainly imagine a future where other vendors might begin to compete. Therefore, avoiding vendor lock-in -- with any vendor, not just Microsoft -- is a vital principle.
I was at the PDC, and my impression is that Microsoft has finally "joined the conversation" with regards to using open source protocols. They have adopted a completely RESTian approach to services, with AtomPub as the foundation for CRUD operations. For anyone who has been playing in the Web 2.0 world, using Azure is going to be very simple to work with.
Microsoft is also writing a whole new layer of.Net wrappers to help existing MS developers reuse their existing skills in the web services world. The wrappers let.Net developers write in "comfortable".Net Oo concepts, then transform into underlying, lowest-common-denominator service calls based on open protocols such as HTTP.
My take is that as long as MS keeps supporting the open standards faithfully, it will be easy to interoperate with them. However, I don't think it makes much sense to rely on helper code, like a crutch. Developers should just bite the bullet and learn how to talk to standards-based services in the first place. It really isn't that hard.
I was actually quite excited by what I saw at PDC. It's a bold, sweeping move by MS. The web really is quite a tangle, and if MS makes it easier for all those legions of corporate developers to really start playing in web services, that would be a huge benefit.
Sorry, but I remain unconvinced. The point of the analogy is to show that using machines is widely recognized as a way of increasing confidence in records-keeping. Nothing in what you've said argues otherwise.
But let's take this discussion in a slightly different direction. Rather than talking about how one might implement a system, let's talk about its requirements. I think we can all agree that the business requirement is to to prove the completeness and accuracy of any count.
Is paper really the only way to implement this requirement? There is nothing else we can think of to help us, other than to mark a physical piece of media, with all the issues and problems that entails? I think not.
As a poll worker, I love having an electronic machine to help people cast votes.
With an electronic ballot, we can spread long ballots across several pages, making it vastly easier to group and manage the information (all Presidential candidates on one page, all Congressional on a second, all propositions on a third, etc.)
We can use large fonts to make the ballot easier to read.
We can provide audio ballots for blind voters
We can interact with the voter and confirm their choices with checkmarks and summary pages -- without interfering with their privacy
We can help enforce constraints such as "vote for any two"
We can control the physical access to a machines much easier than to thousands of physical ballots
And yes, we can of course count a bit faster -- and more reliably -- using a machine.
For all those wanting to go back to a paper-based system, I would merely point out that the business world has been working for the past 30 years to move away from paper records. Would you want your banker to revert to keeping your records in hand-written ledger books? Hardly.
The _only_ practicable and moderately secure way to do an election is by pen and paper and manual counting. It's done all over the world and it works near flawlessly.
Paper ballots are prone to all the problems inherent in any physical writing medium: stuffing, tampering, switching, loss, defacement, mutilation, illegibility... just to name a few.
Manual counting is so notoriously difficult to do without error, that one must perform multiple, independent counts just to verify the accuracy of a tally.
Paper ballots are no panacea, and have their own, very long history of problems, abuses, and issues.
Some interesting counterpoints, but I'm not entirely convinced.
I take your point that unless one has the background and the tools to do a thorough scan of source code, then it is of little practical use. However, if your argument is that in order to enjoy the benefits of a capability, one must be able to in fact use it, then I would say your point is really more in the way of a practical observation than it is a specific critique. Naturally, my ordering presumes that one CAN do something useful with a scan of the source code.
It sounds like his argument against FOSS is fact-based, not political. Address the facts.
He believes that anyone can change the source of an open source application and recompile it. That is TRUE. He is right to identify that as a vulnerability. The mitigation is to only download binaries from trusted sources and verify them with checksums, or to download the source, inspect it, and recompile.
His conclusion that applications from proprietary sources are therefore inherently more secure because they cannot be recompiled, however, is INCORRECT. From a security standpoint, using a binary file requires a higher level of trust because it is more opaque. It is far easier to to hide an attack in a binary file precisely because one cannot inspect it as easily as one can a source file.
The threat order, from most threatening to least, is:
Binary from an untrusted agent, no checksum
Binary from untrusted agent, with checksum
Binary from trusted agent, no checksum
Binary from trusted agent, with checksum
Source code from untrusted agent, with no checksum, scanned for security, recompiled
Source code from trusted agent, with checksum, scanned for security, recompiled with a new checksum.
The point is, NOTHING should be accepted without verifiable trust. Being able to personally inspect the source code provides an additional level of protection, and is therefore SAFER from a security standpoint.
For personal use, I trust everything at level 3 and higher (binary from trusted agent, no checksum). That's fairly risky, but acceptable for a single machine. If I were in charge of the corporate desktop, I would elevate to level 4 (binary from trusted agent, with checksum). This is the level that Microsoft products are distributed at, for example. If I really were concerned about the security of an application -- say, if I were in charge of writing voting machine software -- I would insist on elevating all the way to level 6 (source from trusted agent, with checksum, scanned by me and recompiled with a new checksum.)
I love the idea of spending $54M on Linux PCs for schoolchildren. Maybe some kids coming out of that experience will want to see Linux grow into a respectable gaming platform. Who knows? The next great game of 2025 might just come from Australia...
On a stock Dell low-end Dimension C521 running Vista Business, Open Office Writer loads in 9 seconds the first time, and in 1 second thereafter. Not really an issue anymore. Most of my apps take 5-10 seconds to start on this box.
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We don't need $200 spread around to 10,000 people, we need $2,000,000 concentrated on funding a few good developers to pay full-time attention to whatever FOSS project the government itself needs.
Paraphrasing the wonderful Iron Man movie script, "That's the way Dad did it, that's the way the Internet does it ... and it's worked out pretty good so far."
How about funding the full-time development of an open, transparent, computer-assisted voting system for a start? That might could help.
This is a wonderfully-written comment, and it's a shame, really, to try and poke any holes in it. But this is slashdot, after all, and we're here just to have a good time. Beers all around!
The argument relies on a bit of a strawman: that we can either leave licensing to private individuals, or enrich the general welfare, but not both. But this does not have to be case at all.
In fact, I can give you a very good example of a private licensing arrangement that not only is compatible with enriching the general welfare, it is primarily designed to accomplish exactly that purpose: the Creative Commons license.
So, the distinction we need to draw isn't between those agreements entered into privately vs. those entered into with the general public, it's between those written for broad distribution (the network model) vs. limited distribution (the restricted-use model.)
I would argue that the restricted-use model is simply an outdated, unsustainable business practice. It no longer captures the right revenue from the right people, and is therefore a poor business choice.
We have moved into an age where the network model is needed to properly monetize a work. Vastly more money is possible to be made from distributing a work widely than from restricting use. The fact that the music industry has completely failed to learn how to leverage the network effect has very little to do with licensing, and everything to do with having the WRONG kind of license.
Ain't nothing wrong with doing a sequel. "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" was the third movie in a trilogy, and was by far the best. It often takes several passes through a creative landscape before all the elements find their place and the whole thing jells.
Sequels don't have to have the same characters or plot. It can be enough to just take the basic idea and feel of the first movie, and run with it in a new direction.
For example, I'd love to see someone explore the idea of replication much deeper. What if Replicants weren't time-limited, but made perpetual instead? What if memory could be captured and re-implanted in one generation of Replicant after another, so that consciousness would span several lifetimes/bodies? What if anyone could make a copy of themselves, on demand? Say you want to try what it feels like to jump out of an airplane -- without a parachute. Do you make a replica, and then toss yourself?
A sequel doesn't have to be bad....
Sure, of course I found Word's similar feature. However, it a) did not allow independent chapter documents, b) did not separate style information cleanly, so people's stylesheets were overwriting each other, and c) just plain did not work well -- corrupted files, numbering was a nightmare, even pagination did not work properly.
It really wasn't a matter of the exact same feature being done better in one product vs another. The OpenOffice designers had re-thought the whole process, and come up with a simpler, cleaner design that was flexible and didn't break.
My point about switching, then, is that for all the things people love about Word, there is a TON of cruft in that product, even now. My company saved a lot of time and money by adopting a cleaner solution, and that ought to go into the ROI calculation.
To get the full value out of OpenOffice, think about going beyond merely swapping out Word. If you take advantage of some of OpenOffice's unique features, it might get you a quicker ROI.
For example, I once had to pull together the technical response to a large RFP. We had over a dozen authors. Rather than shlepping copies of the whole response doc back and forth to everyone (my nightmare scenario), I used Open Office's Master Document feature to create a live, compound document: a Master Document for the entire response, and a separate Chapter Document for each section. Since the Chapters were separate documents, the various authors could work on them independently. Once a week I would refresh the Master Document, which would automatically pull in all the work thus far.
This worked really well, and the way Open Office cleanly separated the master from the sub-documents was very impressive. The point is, we got a lot of bang for the buck out of that experience, and that one project pretty much sold everyone on the value of making the switch to Open Office.
I can't believe the number of posts here from people claiming how "obvious" it was that the OLPC would never work, and if Negroponte would just fix this or that aspect of the development strategy, the hardware, the software, the pricing, or the partner program, then everything would turn up roses.
There was nothing obvious about the adventures of the OLPC. They were defining an entirely new class of machine that, even now, has no true competitor (and no, none of the current netbook offerings have it right yet: they cost too much, they draw too much power, they can't be used in full daylight, and they aren't nearly rugged enough.)
When you are charting something this new, it attracts the best and brightest. These kind of people have huge egos, that's part of the package. So the fact that there have been lots of sparks flying is no surprise.
When you are trying to change the status quo this completely, it attracts intense opposition from the entrenched competition. I doubt any of us would enjoy putting up with the hammering, back-stabbing, broken promises and endless fight for oxygen that is probably a daily experience for the OLPC executives.
So, I say, cut these people some slack. Go buy a OLPC, and see what all the talk is about. I've been using an OLPC for a year now, and am daily impressed with how very different it is from any other device out there.
When you find yourself reading an ebook, and pass from the deep gloom of a subway station into the direct sunlight without even thinking about the fact that a normal PC can't do that, then you're graduated to the new OLPC world.
When you find yourself grabbing your XO without a case, walking in the rain to your car and throwing it on the back seat without a second thought, then you've graduated to the new OLPC world.
When you find yourself propping your XO up on a bowl in the kitchen so you can browse recipies on the web while you cook, and don't worry for a second about what might happen if you spill something all over it (been there, done that), then you've graduated.
This thing is really different. Give it a chance.
Asking how to restrict the laptops is the wrong place to start. By thinking about how you WON'T use the laptops, you've already lost the battle.
You need to first think about how the laptops WILL be used. For each class where the laptop will be used, the instructors must know exactly how to leverage them well enough to make their use an essential aspect of learning. If a student is busy using a laptop for a legitimate, in-class purpose, then they won't be off browsing p0rn -- at least not without the teacher noticing.
At any other time when the use of the laptop is not essential, simply turn it off and put it away. Don't allow the laptops out on the playground, or in the lunch room. They are strictly for classroom or home use only.
The point is to treat a laptop like a No. 2 pencil. It's just a tool, useful only in a certain context, and outside that context, we don't use it.
Just purchased the MP3 version. It is, as claimed, mpga 320K, DRM-free. In addition to the tracks, you get cover artwork and liner notes as jpgs.
The range of purchase options is very interesting. $8.99 for MP3 files and artwork, $12.99 for a CD, $29.99 for a direct metal mastered double vinyl record, and $79.99 for a DVD containing 24bit 96Khz tracks, and a second DVD containing multi-track session files for a selection of the album tracks.
The purchasing experience was flawless: create an account, give a credit card (with optional choice of saving the number or not; I chose not), get a zipfile of the downloads. Not a wasted keystroke or mouse click.
This really is the way I want to purchase my music. Two big thumbs up from the consumer angle. Lots of choices, low prices, immediate downloads, supports the artists.
The perfect shopping experience.
The way this is set up, you can either download the file for free, or buy the book (hardcover). I don't want a book, I want a file -- but I also want to financially support the author and his publisher.
How about a "download with donation" option, with a 50/50 split to the author and the publisher? (For those who might object to giving the publisher anything, just ask any author how much work goes into getting a book ready for publication. Splitting the donation is plenty fair, I can assure you.)
At last, a sensible bit of advice! Talk to your employer first.
First, there's no way to avoid legal entanglements if you take ANYTHING from your employer that they have paid you to produce. The only clean, legal route you have to code happiness is through your employer.
Second, actually selling a successful product requires at least three legs on the stool: development, sales, and corporate support (finance, IT, HR, and executive). OK, you've got one leg -- who's going to provide the rest?
Lastly, just trying to get your current employer to let you set up shop internally can provoke changes for the better. Your employer might wake up and ask themselves whey those geeks from development are clamoring for a shot at selling a new product.
they are committing the cardinal sin of software development, they are letting the marketing department develop their systems.
No argument here about that! Marketing shouldn't be developing, end of story. But is that what we're seeing here? Isn't it more like marketing telling engineering, "oh yeah, and guys, there's one more thing: make sure the UI for Windows 7 doesn't stink. It's gotta be fast, I mean, blazing; as fast as you can make it. People love that stuff!"
Of course a snappy UI is a huge deal. Users spend a lot of time navigating before they actually run anything. And, keeping the UI snappy even when the CPU is under heavy load is an especially important user experience requirement.
There's nothing illegitimate or sneaky about optimizing the hardware to better serve the user.
No, not in Virginia. Each party running for office can send a select number of observers, the candidates themselves can observe (but only for a short amount of time), and the media can come in and take pictures. The orderliness of the polling place is extremely well-protected in Virginia law. The poll workers are even given limited police powers -- including the power to put someone under a form of house arrest for up to 24 hours -- to guard the polling place, if need be.
From the interview with Dr. Simons:
"You know I've heard people make claims that various elections have been stolen on these machines. It's a difficult--it's not a claim I would make because I think it's risky to make a claim when you can't prove it nor would I say that no elections have ever been stolen on these machines as some other people claim because you can't prove that either. And I think the problem is when we find ourselves in the situation where we can neither prove nor disprove that the election was--would be tabulated--recorded and tabulated and what we need to do is move to systems where we can prove things. And I think that's what we have to do and the fact that the 2008 Presidential election has not been contested the way that for example the 2000 election was contested doesn't mean we're out of the woods. There will be other contested races as we're seeing in Minnesota although there they're going to count it and there we will find out."
I think she's got this spot on. We need to move to system where one can prove the result. Once we can prove that a machine count and a human count produce the same result, it doesn't matter what's inside the "black box". We know it's producing the right outcome, so we can trust it.
As far as I know, none of the voting systems and procedures we have now -- optical scan included -- are designed around this concept of proof.
Another complicating factor is that the United States is a federation of 50 independent state governments. The states run their own elections, with very little input or control by the federal government. The actual elections themselves are administered by the dozens of local boards of election within each state.
So, that's 50 sets of voting rules, written by 50 state legislatures, adjudicated by 50 state courts overseeing dozens of local boards of election each.
People from outside the US often think of America as a single people with a single form of government, and that's really only partially true.
See Measuring TV 'White Space' Available for Unlicensed Wireless Broadband. Dense urban markets like Boston will have ~30% underused, medium markets like Portland will have ~60%, and rural markets like Fargo will have ~80%.
This is undoubtedly the right technical move. There is a huge amount of underused bandwidth in this part of the spectrum. As long as there is a reliable way to avoid the licensed operators, it would be stupid not to optimize our usage. Not optimizing our bandwidth is one of the reasons why we're slipping in broadband adoption compared to the rest of the world.
At work, I am the resident "crazy open source guy" who is always raising the red flag on vendor lock-in. However, I have absolutely zero emotional attachment to technologies. To me, a computer is like a No. 2 pencil: it's just a tool with a particular set of capabilities and costs. Whatever provides the most value, use it.
It just so happens that to most of my firm's customers, the Microsoft product line provides the best value. However, nothing is forever, and I can certainly imagine a future where other vendors might begin to compete. Therefore, avoiding vendor lock-in -- with any vendor, not just Microsoft -- is a vital principle.
I was at the PDC, and my impression is that Microsoft has finally "joined the conversation" with regards to using open source protocols. They have adopted a completely RESTian approach to services, with AtomPub as the foundation for CRUD operations. For anyone who has been playing in the Web 2.0 world, using Azure is going to be very simple to work with.
Microsoft is also writing a whole new layer of .Net wrappers to help existing MS developers reuse their existing skills in the web services world. The wrappers let .Net developers write in "comfortable" .Net Oo concepts, then transform into underlying, lowest-common-denominator service calls based on open protocols such as HTTP.
My take is that as long as MS keeps supporting the open standards faithfully, it will be easy to interoperate with them. However, I don't think it makes much sense to rely on helper code, like a crutch. Developers should just bite the bullet and learn how to talk to standards-based services in the first place. It really isn't that hard.
I was actually quite excited by what I saw at PDC. It's a bold, sweeping move by MS. The web really is quite a tangle, and if MS makes it easier for all those legions of corporate developers to really start playing in web services, that would be a huge benefit.
Please stop making this completely false analogy.
Sorry, but I remain unconvinced. The point of the analogy is to show that using machines is widely recognized as a way of increasing confidence in records-keeping. Nothing in what you've said argues otherwise.
But let's take this discussion in a slightly different direction. Rather than talking about how one might implement a system, let's talk about its requirements. I think we can all agree that the business requirement is to to prove the completeness and accuracy of any count.
Is paper really the only way to implement this requirement? There is nothing else we can think of to help us, other than to mark a physical piece of media, with all the issues and problems that entails? I think not.
As a poll worker, I love having an electronic machine to help people cast votes.
For all those wanting to go back to a paper-based system, I would merely point out that the business world has been working for the past 30 years to move away from paper records. Would you want your banker to revert to keeping your records in hand-written ledger books? Hardly.
Voting machines are very, very useful.
The _only_ practicable and moderately secure way to do an election is by pen and paper and manual counting. It's done all over the world and it works near flawlessly.
Paper ballots are prone to all the problems inherent in any physical writing medium: stuffing, tampering, switching, loss, defacement, mutilation, illegibility ... just to name a few.
Manual counting is so notoriously difficult to do without error, that one must perform multiple, independent counts just to verify the accuracy of a tally.
Paper ballots are no panacea, and have their own, very long history of problems, abuses, and issues.
Some interesting counterpoints, but I'm not entirely convinced.
I take your point that unless one has the background and the tools to do a thorough scan of source code, then it is of little practical use. However, if your argument is that in order to enjoy the benefits of a capability, one must be able to in fact use it, then I would say your point is really more in the way of a practical observation than it is a specific critique. Naturally, my ordering presumes that one CAN do something useful with a scan of the source code.
It sounds like his argument against FOSS is fact-based, not political. Address the facts.
He believes that anyone can change the source of an open source application and recompile it. That is TRUE. He is right to identify that as a vulnerability. The mitigation is to only download binaries from trusted sources and verify them with checksums, or to download the source, inspect it, and recompile.
His conclusion that applications from proprietary sources are therefore inherently more secure because they cannot be recompiled, however, is INCORRECT. From a security standpoint, using a binary file requires a higher level of trust because it is more opaque. It is far easier to to hide an attack in a binary file precisely because one cannot inspect it as easily as one can a source file.
The threat order, from most threatening to least, is:
The point is, NOTHING should be accepted without verifiable trust. Being able to personally inspect the source code provides an additional level of protection, and is therefore SAFER from a security standpoint.
For personal use, I trust everything at level 3 and higher (binary from trusted agent, no checksum). That's fairly risky, but acceptable for a single machine. If I were in charge of the corporate desktop, I would elevate to level 4 (binary from trusted agent, with checksum). This is the level that Microsoft products are distributed at, for example. If I really were concerned about the security of an application -- say, if I were in charge of writing voting machine software -- I would insist on elevating all the way to level 6 (source from trusted agent, with checksum, scanned by me and recompiled with a new checksum.)
I love the idea of spending $54M on Linux PCs for schoolchildren. Maybe some kids coming out of that experience will want to see Linux grow into a respectable gaming platform. Who knows? The next great game of 2025 might just come from Australia...
On a stock Dell low-end Dimension C521 running Vista Business, Open Office Writer loads in 9 seconds the first time, and in 1 second thereafter. Not really an issue anymore. Most of my apps take 5-10 seconds to start on this box.