I live in Argentina where the election process is the same (if I understood correctly). A way in which vote coercion (and vote selling) can be done is as follows:
Votes are cast inside an envelope with the signature of a couple of representatives from the table (but not always all of them)... so first you get one of those envelopes outside of the place where the voting is being done. This is not necessarily easy, but could be done if you get someone to cast a vote with a fake envelope quickly enough so it's not checked before being put inside the box... or in some other fashion (you could copy or photograph the signatures, which are often very quick and careless, and reproduce them in a new envelope). Once you have a real and valid envelope you give it to the vote seller with the ballot inside and already sealed... he gets a new envelope from the table head, which he pockets, and casts the vote with the envelope he was given. Then goes outside with the empty envelope and the process is repeated.
The difference is that in the closed source world something as basic as a language pack would come with the same QA that the program... while Firefox doesn't give much assurance beyond what they directly produce, although the value of the product is directly connected to the availability of third party extensions.
In the same way, I'm pretty sure that the Ubuntu or Red Hat guys are giving me a good kernel and core libraries with their distro... but I find it hard to believe that any serious QA is done to the huge amount of packages that are distributed with any average distro... specially given that many of those don't hide the fact that they are experimental or beta-quality (when I had an aDSL connection that used PPPoA [PPP over ATM] the only linux package that supported this was slightly less than beta).
I guess the point is: "the fact that anyone could check the source code at any time should not replace proper QA, which shouldn't be all that different from the one done on commercial software".
I'm sure that Firefox has quite a bit of QA done to it... but it's usefulness relies too much on extensions, which we don't that many assurances about.
I've written lots of applications that use COM for IPC and it's incredibly easy to do... just define an object and it's methods on one side... instantiate and call in the other. If you use the right COM bindings (MFC, ATL, Visual Basic, JScript, etc) the code it's quite clean, short and to the point.... granted, COM has a very steep learning curve, just like RPC, Corba, etc... but I guess that although it wasn't the path I took, you can use just a small portion of COM (over ATL or VB) for IPC without worrying about the underlaying structure, apartment models, class factories, reference count, etc.
Other than that, the IPC primitives Win32 provides (message queues, pipes, etc.) are about the same complexity than UNIX's and really shouldn't take that much code.
No, we use or own in-house developed system based on the Dialogic APIs.
Since we did everything from the hardware APIs up, plus we always need to integrate the IVR system with the customer's own system (SAP, AS/400, propietary TCP/IP, etc.) there are always numerous places were open source would be useful.
Plus, I was interested in using open source VoiceXML, which would need my own custom integration to Dialogic hardware written (plus other stuff) and also poses the same problem.
Mmmmm...... the "weird" thing with the GPL is that it prevents you from getting someone else's source, adding your own work and selling it as closed software... so it hinders you from certain "closed" commercial uses...... but it still allows you to run commercial web sites over an Apache+MySQL+PHP stack on Linux, and pay nothing for it, and give nothing back to the community, nor help distribute the software you're using. Or just a regular non-web Linux server for whatever purpose you wish.
So, depending on what your business is, you might be able to get more or less advantage of Open Source.
Personally, I work in a very small company that does interactive telephony applications (IVR) and more that once I was unable to incorporate open source packages into my own developments because there's no way that clients will accept that source code for their small custom-made systems will be distributed... nor, for that matter, will my boss accept to hand over our developments to the competition (because, as I said, we're a very small company)...... so, you have to deal with the different ways of separating the open source from your own so that you're not legally obliged to distribute your own sources, etc.
Compare this with many business, like web hosting Providers, that can save tens of thousands of dollars using open source and are not hindered in any way by the GPL.
I recently had to help a client who based his web site on the Drupal Content Management System but then couldn't find a developer to finish the site after the original one stopped answering calls. There's a small but very active and vocal Drupal developer community here in Buenos Aires, but it's an error to assume that it's possible to find a developer based on the tool being popular, open source and quite easy to use.
To be fair, had the client not used Drupal and gone with a propietary PHP solution, the results would have probably been much worse... since the code would have been harder to modify, and the result would probably have less features, be less secure, not based on standards and good practices, and decent PHP coders are not THAT easy to come by.... yet, Drupal evangelists make it sound like a no-issue... and it's not much different from getting a developer to mantain your propietary platform. In fact, I think the problem is based on looking for Drupal developers instead of looking for good PHP developers who could probably figure out Drupal in a weekend. Same for anyone using Ruby on Rails and looking for experienced RoR developers instead of an eager "cowboy programmer" who's willing to save the day.
Well... that inspires me... We send the guy on a one way trip to mars, and once he gets there he opens a blog were he can share his experiences with people all over the world. Until the food runs out...
I got good clothes ruined by careless mom-and-pop-style dry cleaners...... I wouldn't expect a big corporation to show the same kind of negligence...... yet I would never send good clothes to a big-corporation-style dry cleaners.
Defining UI through XUL it's not too different from how you do it in a Windows application (or an ActiveX control) through a Dialog definition in a.res file. Vulnerabilities in ActiveX don't have anything to do with UI... but rather with the exported interface.
With Firefox you really program most of the extension through JS... XUL just provides the UI that glues it together. But it's a bit like assuming that web pages are safe because you define them mostly through HTML... vulnerabilities through the use of JS and PHP still exist, and these are analogous to the ones you could have with Firefox extensions.
The difficulty in exploiting an add-on is that you can't normally excercise their code with arbitrary parameters through web content, like you can with plug-ins.
Installation of Firefox add-ons (via XPI files) is just a "Yes/No" dialog away. The dialog appears when you attempt to navigate to an XPI file.
Also, toolbars and other stuff in Firefox DO have executable code... usually it's just JS, but they can be made to use native DLLs as well. Perhaps you're confusing the fact that their layout is handled through XUL (which is an XML language akin to an HTML for UI layouts), but all interaction and functionality is provided through executable code.
I'm not familiar enough with Firefox's security model, but I don't see why a vulnerable Firefox Add-on couldn't be exploited... through their APi they can access the filesystem, get full access to your browser's content, cookies, inject content in 3rd party pages, etc. so the potential is there.
It's much easier to exploit vulnerabilities in plug-ins (either Firefox plug-ins or IE Active X) because a page can usually force execution of its functionality by itself... whereas most FF add-ons are activated by the user through the UI, and not by the web content (though popular exceptions to the rule exist, like Ad-Block).
Windows 2000 is not yet supported by Silverlight , although it seems there'll be support in the next version. I assume that's enough reason for MS to avoid it at the moment.
Plus, the software development process is anything but perfect.
Law and lawmaking has existed for thousands of years, and developed its best practices all along... software engineering is still struggling because its a new discipline trying to hit a moving target.
Perhaps not in the US, but they do in the rest of the world.
At least here in Argentina most home and small office users have pirated copies of Windows. Although it's bundled in brand computers, most people buy computers assembled by small computer shops or by themselves, because there are much much cheaper than buying Dell, Compaq, etc.
OEM copies of Windows, though much cheaper than boxed versions, are expensive enough to have a big impact in the price of a custom-built PC.
Not my experience, nor the one of many people I know... I live in Argentina, and it sometimes happens that stuff gets lost in the mail, or in customs. Over the years I placed probably more than 20 orders to Amazon, and quite a bit of them (4 or 5 at least) had missing shipments... whenever this was the case, Amazon replaced the order at no cost. The same thing happened to friends of mine, who had the same response from Amazon. It's actually automated behaviour... they don't question your complaint, or beat around the bush, just apologize and re-ship.
XUL is quite a nice platform, conceptually, and somewhat pleasurable to program if you have a background in DHTML. However, I must warn, that documentation is SEVERELY lacking... almost non-existant if you compare it to.NET, Java, MFC, etc.
Nah, when they developed the Vista GUI they also did a red-herring GUI to hide the real one until the official announcement. I doubt you can get an actual screenshot of whatever Windows 7 will look like right now.
Actually, from my experience as a programmer I'd much rather have someone come with a spreadsheet he worked with for a year, and very specific requirements such as "we want some people to be able to see these fields, some people to be able to edit these columns" and so... than to have someone with a vague notion of what he needs and then turning that into a relational database.
Even if spreadsheets seem awful, a year's user experience with a fast prototyping tool (i.e. the spreadsheet) is priceless.
I thought the same, until I read somewhere that the reason would be that it would drive some competitors (Borland was one, at the time I read this) out of business... and that wasn't good, because a wide choice of compilers and developing tools makes a platform better supported, which is good in the eyes of IT managers. That could also explain why MS eventually started giving VS Express away for free... since in the current dev tool landscape it'll hardly drive away any competitors (PHP, Python, GNU compilers, etc.)
Don't know about Japan, but when Tower Records came to Argentina it was as a franchise AFAIK, since it was owned by local investors and it even changed hands one or two times during its life. I don't see how franchising can be bad for a company, since it means it's getting money for its brand.
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I live in Argentina where the election process is the same (if I understood correctly). A way in which vote coercion (and vote selling) can be done is as follows: Votes are cast inside an envelope with the signature of a couple of representatives from the table (but not always all of them)... so first you get one of those envelopes outside of the place where the voting is being done. This is not necessarily easy, but could be done if you get someone to cast a vote with a fake envelope quickly enough so it's not checked before being put inside the box... or in some other fashion (you could copy or photograph the signatures, which are often very quick and careless, and reproduce them in a new envelope). Once you have a real and valid envelope you give it to the vote seller with the ballot inside and already sealed... he gets a new envelope from the table head, which he pockets, and casts the vote with the envelope he was given. Then goes outside with the empty envelope and the process is repeated.
Running third party software through an antivirus is not QA.
I don't even begin to understand how a trojan can be slipped inside a LANGUAGE pack.
The difference is that in the closed source world something as basic as a language pack would come with the same QA that the program... while Firefox doesn't give much assurance beyond what they directly produce, although the value of the product is directly connected to the availability of third party extensions.
In the same way, I'm pretty sure that the Ubuntu or Red Hat guys are giving me a good kernel and core libraries with their distro... but I find it hard to believe that any serious QA is done to the huge amount of packages that are distributed with any average distro... specially given that many of those don't hide the fact that they are experimental or beta-quality (when I had an aDSL connection that used PPPoA [PPP over ATM] the only linux package that supported this was slightly less than beta).
I guess the point is: "the fact that anyone could check the source code at any time should not replace proper QA, which shouldn't be all that different from the one done on commercial software".
I'm sure that Firefox has quite a bit of QA done to it... but it's usefulness relies too much on extensions, which we don't that many assurances about.
I've written lots of applications that use COM for IPC and it's incredibly easy to do... just define an object and it's methods on one side... instantiate and call in the other. If you use the right COM bindings (MFC, ATL, Visual Basic, JScript, etc) the code it's quite clean, short and to the point. ... granted, COM has a very steep learning curve, just like RPC, Corba, etc... but I guess that although it wasn't the path I took, you can use just a small portion of COM (over ATL or VB) for IPC without worrying about the underlaying structure, apartment models, class factories, reference count, etc.
Other than that, the IPC primitives Win32 provides (message queues, pipes, etc.) are about the same complexity than UNIX's and really shouldn't take that much code.
No, we use or own in-house developed system based on the Dialogic APIs.
Since we did everything from the hardware APIs up, plus we always need to integrate the IVR system with the customer's own system (SAP, AS/400, propietary TCP/IP, etc.) there are always numerous places were open source would be useful.
Plus, I was interested in using open source VoiceXML, which would need my own custom integration to Dialogic hardware written (plus other stuff) and also poses the same problem.
Mmmmm... ... the "weird" thing with the GPL is that it prevents you from getting someone else's source, adding your own work and selling it as closed software... so it hinders you from certain "closed" commercial uses... ... but it still allows you to run commercial web sites over an Apache+MySQL+PHP stack on Linux, and pay nothing for it, and give nothing back to the community, nor help distribute the software you're using. Or just a regular non-web Linux server for whatever purpose you wish.
... so, you have to deal with the different ways of separating the open source from your own so that you're not legally obliged to distribute your own sources, etc.
So, depending on what your business is, you might be able to get more or less advantage of Open Source.
Personally, I work in a very small company that does interactive telephony applications (IVR) and more that once I was unable to incorporate open source packages into my own developments because there's no way that clients will accept that source code for their small custom-made systems will be distributed... nor, for that matter, will my boss accept to hand over our developments to the competition (because, as I said, we're a very small company)...
Compare this with many business, like web hosting Providers, that can save tens of thousands of dollars using open source and are not hindered in any way by the GPL.
Who cares what the film says or doesn't?
Did the web site incite violence itself?
Network Solutions analyzing the film's content is overstepping its bounds.
I already have a QGPU in my computer, though I think it died... I should pop open the case and take a look.
I recently had to help a client who based his web site on the Drupal Content Management System but then couldn't find a developer to finish the site after the original one stopped answering calls. There's a small but very active and vocal Drupal developer community here in Buenos Aires, but it's an error to assume that it's possible to find a developer based on the tool being popular, open source and quite easy to use.
... yet, Drupal evangelists make it sound like a no-issue... and it's not much different from getting a developer to mantain your propietary platform. In fact, I think the problem is based on looking for Drupal developers instead of looking for good PHP developers who could probably figure out Drupal in a weekend. Same for anyone using Ruby on Rails and looking for experienced RoR developers instead of an eager "cowboy programmer" who's willing to save the day.
To be fair, had the client not used Drupal and gone with a propietary PHP solution, the results would have probably been much worse... since the code would have been harder to modify, and the result would probably have less features, be less secure, not based on standards and good practices, and decent PHP coders are not THAT easy to come by.
Well... that inspires me... We send the guy on a one way trip to mars, and once he gets there he opens a blog were he can share his experiences with people all over the world. Until the food runs out...
I got good clothes ruined by careless mom-and-pop-style dry cleaners... ... I wouldn't expect a big corporation to show the same kind of negligence... ... yet I would never send good clothes to a big-corporation-style dry cleaners.
Defining UI through XUL it's not too different from how you do it in a Windows application (or an ActiveX control) through a Dialog definition in a .res file. Vulnerabilities in ActiveX don't have anything to do with UI... but rather with the exported interface.
With Firefox you really program most of the extension through JS... XUL just provides the UI that glues it together. But it's a bit like assuming that web pages are safe because you define them mostly through HTML... vulnerabilities through the use of JS and PHP still exist, and these are analogous to the ones you could have with Firefox extensions.
The difficulty in exploiting an add-on is that you can't normally excercise their code with arbitrary parameters through web content, like you can with plug-ins.
Installation of Firefox add-ons (via XPI files) is just a "Yes/No" dialog away. The dialog appears when you attempt to navigate to an XPI file. Also, toolbars and other stuff in Firefox DO have executable code... usually it's just JS, but they can be made to use native DLLs as well. Perhaps you're confusing the fact that their layout is handled through XUL (which is an XML language akin to an HTML for UI layouts), but all interaction and functionality is provided through executable code. I'm not familiar enough with Firefox's security model, but I don't see why a vulnerable Firefox Add-on couldn't be exploited... through their APi they can access the filesystem, get full access to your browser's content, cookies, inject content in 3rd party pages, etc. so the potential is there. It's much easier to exploit vulnerabilities in plug-ins (either Firefox plug-ins or IE Active X) because a page can usually force execution of its functionality by itself... whereas most FF add-ons are activated by the user through the UI, and not by the web content (though popular exceptions to the rule exist, like Ad-Block).
Windows 2000 is not yet supported by Silverlight , although it seems there'll be support in the next version. I assume that's enough reason for MS to avoid it at the moment.
Plus, the software development process is anything but perfect. Law and lawmaking has existed for thousands of years, and developed its best practices all along... software engineering is still struggling because its a new discipline trying to hit a moving target.
Perhaps not in the US, but they do in the rest of the world.
At least here in Argentina most home and small office users have pirated copies of Windows. Although it's bundled in brand computers, most people buy computers assembled by small computer shops or by themselves, because there are much much cheaper than buying Dell, Compaq, etc.
OEM copies of Windows, though much cheaper than boxed versions, are expensive enough to have a big impact in the price of a custom-built PC.
Not my experience, nor the one of many people I know... I live in Argentina, and it sometimes happens that stuff gets lost in the mail, or in customs. Over the years I placed probably more than 20 orders to Amazon, and quite a bit of them (4 or 5 at least) had missing shipments... whenever this was the case, Amazon replaced the order at no cost. The same thing happened to friends of mine, who had the same response from Amazon. It's actually automated behaviour... they don't question your complaint, or beat around the bush, just apologize and re-ship.
XUL is quite a nice platform, conceptually, and somewhat pleasurable to program if you have a background in DHTML. However, I must warn, that documentation is SEVERELY lacking... almost non-existant if you compare it to .NET, Java, MFC, etc.
Nah, when they developed the Vista GUI they also did a red-herring GUI to hide the real one until the official announcement. I doubt you can get an actual screenshot of whatever Windows 7 will look like right now.
Simple... use carbon nanotube paper!
Actually, from my experience as a programmer I'd much rather have someone come with a spreadsheet he worked with for a year, and very specific requirements such as "we want some people to be able to see these fields, some people to be able to edit these columns" and so... than to have someone with a vague notion of what he needs and then turning that into a relational database. Even if spreadsheets seem awful, a year's user experience with a fast prototyping tool (i.e. the spreadsheet) is priceless.
I thought the same, until I read somewhere that the reason would be that it would drive some competitors (Borland was one, at the time I read this) out of business... and that wasn't good, because a wide choice of compilers and developing tools makes a platform better supported, which is good in the eyes of IT managers. That could also explain why MS eventually started giving VS Express away for free... since in the current dev tool landscape it'll hardly drive away any competitors (PHP, Python, GNU compilers, etc.)
But as usual, no Duke Nukem Forever.
Don't know about Japan, but when Tower Records came to Argentina it was as a franchise AFAIK, since it was owned by local investors and it even changed hands one or two times during its life. I don't see how franchising can be bad for a company, since it means it's getting money for its brand.