Try Australia, or even India.
Australia used fully open source voting machines with a paper trail - electronic voting entirely transparent and accountable to the voters. The voting machines where made by a private company using requirements drawn up by an indpendent body. The resulting code was then made available on the internet for full public scutany (and several bugs where found and corrected due to public involvement), and company employees where not allowed anywhere near the machines or the voting - no late "patches", no special "help" from the company on voting day.
India went simple - in a country where many villages are only accessable by elephant or similar transportation, and where there is a huge population (the electorate alone is over 660 million, more then twice the US popultion), they chose to use voting machines with the simplest of components - no operating systems, no databases, just simple electronics designed to allow an official to release one vote at a time to a voting board (list of candidates with a button beside each one), and then close the unit (no more votes could be cast).
E-voting isn't the problem, it's American politics. Privatized elections carried out with minimal or no government regulation will give you privatized results - not only have private e-voting companies refused to fix major flaws in their software, made untested and unapproved patches to voting machines hours before elections, but the results from those voting machines have been highly suspect - not just that e-voting districts have been the only ones that are wildly out of line with exit polls, and always in favor of the same party, but instances where outright fraud in favor of that same party is obvious - district e-voting machines reporting impossible numbers like many more votes then actual voters, and often negative votes for a non-republican candidate (i.e. Volusia County whose diebold machines recorded -16,022 votes for the democratic candidate). In Ohio the numbers got as high as -25 million votes for democratic candidates.
Exploiting poorly designed editors
on
Rat Brains Fly Planes
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Now people aren't even bothering to camouflage it when they troll Slashdot by taking advantage of the laughable editorial standards.
Todays date: Dec 6, 2005 Article date: Dec 6/7, 2004 (7 in the text, 6 in the URL)
So, I'm guessing we'll be seeing a few dupes of this (though I'm sure it was on Slashdot last year too, so technically it's already a dupe), followed up by someone fooling the editors into posting a blatent advertisement or an update on the number of FireFox downloads.
These comments are despite the fact that Google does not place ads on their news service
That's because the news service is "beta" forever. In fact citing Google News is actually a direct prove of the outside assertion - Google has kept it beta for years (and isn't like to ever make it a "real" service) simply because there is no true model they could legally use. They are screen scraping other people's content and the second they let it be legally defined as anything but an academic exercise (by removing the beta mark or sticking ads on it) they will get hit with a million lawsuits and Google won't have a legal leg to stand on.
Google News, along with most other Google "services", are special cases. Unlike companies that are trying to make money from their services, Google's main goal is to use them to mine personal information from millions of visitors. So it doesn't matter if their software is beta forever, as long as they can have a system that reads your personal email and indexes all keywords found against the GUID that tracks you across every Google site, they will be happy because they can sell expensive targeted advertising on the main Google search and anywhere else that won't get them into legal trouble.
Didn't read the article, did you? Just spouting the same talking points over and over again. Microsoft didn't write the web application involved here (Google did), nor does the exploit have anything at all to do with Microsoft's use of IE for other purposes.
Now after reading the article, you'll see the issue being exploited involves the fact that css files are designed (by *all* major browsers) to be the one exception to the cross-domain rule, meaning that a page on site A can get the contents of a css file located on site B.
However IE can be exploited so that any file is a seen as a CSS file, just a very badly formatted one. Of course there are big limitations - namely that only valid css "data" from site B can be read by site A, so anything not formatted in name{stuff}; is invisible to site A.
This particular hack takes advantage of the fact that a person with Google Desktop installed will send a special cookie when they request most pages from Google. That cookie will cause a "desktop" link to be sent back to them somewhere on the page. This desktop link contains a secret password. As soon as you know that password, you basically have full access to that persons computer through Google Desktop uris, regardless of what browser (as long as that browser supports javascript, which IE, FireFox and Opera obviously do). In simple terms, if you gave a site this password that Google sends to you, they'd have full access (this misfeature of Google Desktop also creates a big proxy server/man in the middle attack vector against a persons PC, regardless of what browser they use).
The attack vector to obtain the password in this case is the IE css bug. A specific page on Google, Google News, puts the desktop link in such a place that if you provide a specific search query, it will end up making a section of the page around the special desktop link look like a valid css value. Because of this, site A can read the data inside that value, including the Google password. Once it has the password from that random junk of "css data", it can start accessing Google Desktop at will.
Oh well. I hope Microsoft is paying you good money to make OSS proponents look like idiots by spouting this kind of completely uninformed bs. The sea of white noise helps to hide any real, intelligent points brought up against Microsoft or its products.
Why would Microsoft want to block a book like this? Take a look around, even in this thread on *Slashdot*. This kind of foaming at the mouth "Linux is good BECAUSE M$ IS THE DEVIL!!" is exactly the thing that turns businesses off Linux and OSS.
If Masters Choice Cola where to run a nation wide ad campaign, which would be more effective: "COCA COLA IS AN EVVVVIIIIL COMPANY", or "MC Cola tastes as good as Coke at half the price". Negative advertising doesn't improve ones position - the one place where it is used, US elections, works only because they are after ratio rather then size - US voter turnout is tiny due to the effect of negative campaigning, because a negative ad about Candidate A doesn't make people suddenly want to vote for Candidate B, it just means they might walk away from the election altogether.
As long as the OSS community is ruled and represented by the loudest, most "us vs. them" inciting zealots, it will never be respected outside it's little cluster of basement dwelling geeks. I wouldn't be surprised at all if Microsoft wrote this book, or even ran Slashdot itself (after all, look at all the MS ads that frequently appear). Loud, comically biased, out of touch OSS zealots are Microsoft's best friends (Much like how Microsoft has actually helped Apple in the past to make sure it survived as their main competitor - they know Apple's policies will prevent them from ever growing out of a niche PC market, yet at the same time their presence helps prevent any real competition from moving into the number #2 slot and challenging Microsoft directly).
believe that Apple has showed the industry exactly the business model to follow for media distribution, so, provided a fair and reasonable DRM policy like that of iTunes
Could you explain that point further? If you want everyone to follow Apple's "Fairplay(TM)" DRM model, what is it specifically about that model that makes it more attractive then the others? What where your logical reasons for choosing that as the best DRM solution?
It can't be the robustness of the data - if the latest iTunes update (or OS X update) kills your harddrive (again), or the computer simply dies as they sometimes do, it's Apple's policy to charge you for the music all over again, even though they have the records showing you legally own it. Apple DRM certainly isn't making digital music as long lasting as the physical disk technology. Even Apple's closest competitor offers a partial though far from perfect solution - the proof of ownership can be backed up seperate from the music (meaning you can make as many copies as you want), and then can be used to obtain the music without being charged again if you suffer a harddrive crash.
It can't be the number of copies you're allowed - most other DRM schemes also allow 3 copies (again, Apple's closest competitor allows any number of copies to be specified, and can even allow the ability to create "lending" copies - you can give a time limited copy to a someone to try out, and you don't have to worry about them returning the licence to you)
It can't be the ability to burn to CD - again, Apple's competitors support this too.
It can't be the future proofness of the format - "Fairplay" is currently glued to Apple, you can't play Apple DRM music on anything that doesn't have an Apple logo. One of the best arguments for open source is that closed source software leads to documents that can no longer be opened because the application required only exists for an obsolete platform. With "Fairplay", all the eggs are with one company - if Apple, just one company, disappeared, your music would left stuck in a format dieing of player entropy. This is what we call "vender lockin", and it's a bad thing. Some of Apple's competitors avoid this through partially open standards, other avoid this by spreading the format to as many companies as possible - if one dies, the others can fill the gap.
So please help us understand what specific, technological or contract, parts of Apple DRM we should be trying to make more widespread. Why is "Fairplay(TM)" so superior, other then the fact that it lives within the safe confines of the Apple reality distortion field, guarded by a phalanx of Apple fanbois?
Regardless of any arguments over who invented it, you still have to give Apple credit for recognizing the technology, obtaining industry partners, and bringing it to market, where they promptly screwed it over by taking an ego trip on the Firewire name, resulting a naming mess that let USB own everything but digital video cameras and a few external harddrives (Apple then released Mac OS 10.3 to get rid of most of the harddrives too)
The main reason for that seems to be that AMD isn't releasing "low end" dual cores like Intel is (they partially relented by offering one as low as 3800+, but that's in comparison to Intel making the Pentium D range from 2800mhz to just 3200mhz).
Most likely they don't want to have their dual cores competing/overlapping with their regular Athlon 64 line (the "high value for low money" group). They'd rather have all their processors targeted at seperate groups - 64 for joe consumer and budget gamer, FX for extreme gamer, X2 for media creation and other heavy data processing, and the Opteron for high performance 2 way/4 way servers.
Almost every database out there impliments an ISO or similar SQL standard as it's base (SQL-92 in most cases). They then build on top of that by adding their own features, while still supporting the common SQL syntax. It's not about being a barebones implimentation of a standard, it's about supporting the standard as your base.
PostgreSQL supports SQL-92, while adding it's own extra features (which describes most other databases like Oracle and MS SQL too), including the support of the "LIMIT" statement. MySQL doesn't support any standard base, instead existing as an arbitrary mish mash of standard and propritary SQL. It wasn't until the current version, 4, that MySQL even bothered to add support for UNION.
With every other database you can start working safe in the knowledge that while having it's own extensions, you're working with a normal "SQL" database. MySQL, while posing as SQL, has little if anything in common (in particular see threads about optimization - getting fast code in MySQL means learning an entirely new system filled with quirks and vomit inducing workarounds to solve language faults)
MySQL has finally caught up to the state of the enterprise relational database industry...as it was in 1999. Points for effort, but everyone else is still ahead with core features like integrity, leaving them free to build on new and better features. Bundling with PHP will only get you so far.
Then use Delphi, or better yet, C#. (or even Python and a few other choices)
Faster productivity, less bugs, no ram guzzling 5 minute startup. Java isn't the only language that reduces development time, it's just the only one (besides VB) that makes you sacrifice big things to get it.
Ignoring the fact that this seems like more speculation (already well discussed with less then 10 comments), how exactly is this a threat to Microsoft and its Office family? Microsoft's main customer for it's 500$+ office suite is not home users, but businesses. Taking away some home users (half of whom where likely running pirated copies) is like a drop in the barrel.
For a business, dropping out $500 isn't much, especially when compared to wages (this is something OSS needs to understand when they try and convince businesses they're cheaper - the initial cost is meaningless, they want figures on the support cost). On the other hand, having your critical work depend on a network connection to some internet server is quite a huge risk (especially if you can't call up that internet server and demand instant human support for any little problem).
And that's before you figure in the fact that Google's whole business model is personal information data mining. Even if Google is going to give their song and dance that they won't use it for evil, most companies aren't going to let a 3rd party store their documents, let alone run an automated program over every document they have mining out key information.
As has been shown in the past "Google Hacking" is often used to get to information you weren't supposed to see. Can you imagine "Google Hacking" used for corporate espionage? A company wants to know if their competitor is looking into sprockets. So they take out an "ad" on Google specifically targeted at that keyword, but with completely different ad text. They then record IPs from incoming clicks to gauge if that ad was shown to people in the target company a lot, indicating that Google had mined that phrase from many of their documents and emails (gmail). And that's before you consider the fact that Google becomes a serious hacking target (even to hostile foreign governments), since a breach would affect tens of thousands of companies. With so many eggs in one basket it might be enough to warrent a physical breakin, stealing the data of thousands of companies, which are then sold to competitors or held for blackmail.
It's not that it sucks, it's that it just doesn't stack up.
The added features of MySQL 5, if put into the context of the auto industry, would be like a car manufacturer announcing that some of their 2005 models would now come with airbags and anti-lock breaks. Yes, it shows improvement, and yes, it may plug some longstanding criticisms, but in the larger picture it still means that company is years behind everyone else.
MySQL 5 would have been a great advancement to put it in serious technological competition with other databases...if it had been released in 1999 or 2000. The reality is that Postgre is in version 8 with serious Windows support, Oracle is at 10g with gobs of new features 1% of DBAs will use, and Microsoft is in the process of unleashing a major new version of SQL Server onto a world that has done it no wrong. MySQL has only managed to catchup to where the industry was 5 years ago. Everyone else has kept moving.
Real DBA's don't like MySQL for the same reason real web developers don't like IE. They're both behind the times, fail to live up to standards (CSS/ACID), and only got to where they are because of aggressive bundling. IE is "popular" because it's preinstalled and thus used by the average joe who doesn't know any other "internet". MySQL has made sure it is sitting on every free and cheap LAxP host out there, resulting in droves of kiddie web developers whose experience involves a few web tutorial on PHP and MySQL being locked into its heavily proprietary interfaces and dodgy "optimizations".
Or more specifically ISO SQL-92, or any other SQL standard. Everyone else seems to be smart enough to be able to implement a well documented industry wide standard as their base. MySQL didn't even start supporting UNION until version 4.
Yes, they have a server mode, but can't hold a candle to MySQL
Please, I think we all appreciate input and honest criticisms good or bad, but there is no reason for you to go out your way to insult the nice folks behind Cloudscape/Derby with that kind of statement.
How about you ("The Company") give the technology to Apple
Not to burst your Apple is glorious, evil record companies are to blame, but you've read that statement completely backwards. Apple owns FairPlay. Apple has refused to licence their fairplay protection to other companies so someone else can produce iPod compatible music (which is what Sony is asking to do here), and Apple has refused to equip the iPod with the freely licenced DRM the rest of the MP3 industry (players and online stores) are using.
Even when it would be the one recieving the money, Apple has refused to allow any world other then the one in which iTunes protected music can only be played on an iPod, and an iPod can only play protected music from iTunes. So unless you're a fanboy who changes his opinion based on whose his buddies are, you'll want to correct that to be a demand for Apple to "give" their fairplay technology to Sony, so Sony can make music that is compatible with the iPod. Frankly I don't care for either one of those companies, but I do like to see some accuracy from the local fanatics.
One has to wonder if the above is really just some smart ass attempting to make Mac zealots look really, really stupid. I mean, I know there are some people that are just so totally ignorent that they assume what they see today is what things where always like (in game development, it's people wondering what OpenGL calls Quake 1 used).
But the second paragraph "...they just refined it" (especially the three dot wait) makes you wonder if the person is attempting to caricature a Mac zealot struggling for an excuse, rather then being the real deal. (for reference, check out screenshots of Xerox Star GUI from 1981, Apple's from 1983, and Microsoft's 1985 Windows - 2 of these have a desktop with icons on the left, a trashcan on the buttom and file folders you can open up into new windows to navigate. 1 of them is an MDI task manager interface with none of the above elements)
They have over 30,000 patents to date. By comparison Microsoft (who Slashdot seems to agree is patenting too much) has a little over 3000, and most of them where made in the last few years after Microsoft hired IBM's own vice-president in charge of IP. Before that IBM was patenting more then twice as many patents a year as Microsoft had total (for example in 2001 they filed over 2800).
Now truthfully both IBM and Microsoft are throwing gobs money at patent reform (especially Microsoft, as it has become a regular target for money seeking submarine patent companies). But that doesn't mean they've stopped taking out lots of crazy patents - until the Reagan patent system can be abolished and replaced with either the original "must be innovative" or some new "no business process/software" system everyone wants to make sure they control the crazy patents, rather then some litigator that would use them as a weapon.
Apple sweating at the possiblity that Microsoft (unlikely) or Creative (possiblity) could use their music device patents against Apple is fair turn around. After all, Apple is the one that actually uses its parents (mostly design patents, i.e. "computer in gay lime colored case" or "image of wire wastebasket" [actual Apple patent]) to bully around competition (while everyone remembers when Apple sued Microsoft in the 80s over the idea of a GUI, people seem to forget Apple targeted a lot of smaller companies for the same thing, many of whom where unable to pay for the litigation and went out of business. As a fair share of these where x86 based OSs, Apple effectively cleared out much of Microsoft's competition during Windows infancy, allowing it to become the dominent OS on the PC platform)
You are aware, I trust, that the Mozilla foundation frequently sits on vulnerabilities for some time before offering patches.
As an example, rather then just making an unsubstantiated allegation, the most recent patch, 1.0.5, fixed a critical vulnerability ("Code execution through shared function objects") that Mozilla had been sitting on for 2 months, and a high vulnerability ("Content-generated event vulnerabilities") that Mozilla had been sitting on for 3 months.
There where also additional vulnerabilities ranging from High to Low patched in that update that had been known to Mozilla for 2 or more months.
And this is only recent. Before FireFox 1.1, Mozilla was far less forth coming about vulnerabities, often patching them at their leisure and then silently introducing them into builds without any advisory to let people protect themselves; go look at the disclosure list - you'll find pages of dangerous vulnerabilities you where never told existed and for which you remained unprotected against unless you where downloading builds on a nightly basis (and reading the list wouldn't help you - Mozilla used to intentionally keep it 2 major versions behind).
Mozilla built its reputation for security (a reputation that is dimishing as each new FireFox vulnerability is announced) by hiding its flaws and promoting fanboys (like the parent). Now that it has broken into the mainstream, it has to play like everyone else, without the special treatment and fanboy reality distortion fields to protect it.
I doubt they'd want to do this. As explained in the article, some of these sites seem to be "on the inside" - when a zero day vulnerability was found by one, it was shared with the others. This suggests they are part of one community (messageboard/mailing list/IRC room/Usenet group).
By not telling the blackhats that they've been found out, Microsoft gains the ability to spy on their activities. This means the next time one of them finds a zero day vulnerability, Microsoft will know about it within hours when one of their monkey machines rechecks it.
In politics, the goals are reversed too. In business, the goal is to make as much profit as possible. That means making 50m while your competitor makes 51m, is considered better then making 25m while your competitor makes 24m.
Politics work the other way around (especially in the US's two party system). It doesn't matter how many votes you get, as long as the other guy got less. In politics, getting 2 votes while your competitor got 1 vote is considered better then getting 1000 votes, while your competitor got 1001.
In the end though the bad karma does come back to bite them in the ass.
As a forward, there are three levels of advertising:
Advertising how good your product is
Advertising how much better your product is compared to a specific competitors product
Advertising how bad your competitors product is
The effectiveness of these three levels is the same as the order above.
Focusing on your product leaves the impression that your product is strong; most companies that are at the top of their industry (like Coke) advertise like this. It's the old "he's so confident he must be good" that's also used by politicians.
Comparing your product to your competitors is not as effective, but for companies in tight competition it can work; it sacrifices some of the spotlight from your product in an attempt to reduce your main competitors market.
The bottom level, attacking a specific competitor, is rarely practiced and usually only out of desperation. First, as an obviously biased source, the audience is only going to put so much trust into your evaluation of the competitor. Second, and more importantly, is that your preoccupation with your competitors product makes it seem like you are not very confident about your own product. The end result is that while consumers may be slightly put off the competitors product by your claims, they will be even more put off your own product. In the same way as the top level, the percieved level of confidence in your own product is pushing the consumers opinion, rather then the claims you make (the consumer already knows you aren't going to say anything bad about your own product or anything good about a competitor).
And how all this ties into zealots...
OSS has no official recognized advertising campaign. Instead the advertising campaign the business world sees for OSS is the "word of mouth" of places like Slashdot and other pro OSS gatherings. And what they see there are the zealots screaming out daily about some absurd new conspiracy about Microsoft/(insert other OSS devil figure) doing something evil for the sake of being evil. I think you can guess which level of advertising the OSS campaign has been pushed into by the outspoken zealots, as well as the general 14 year old "look at me, I'm cool, I'm a rebel, I bash M$ and praise Linux (even though I use XP Home on my Dell)" who seem to tag along because they don't have any real friends.
It's really too bad the realists (who compose the majority of those doing actual work in the OSS community) aren't willing to kick off their loud, rowdy entourage.
Ah yes, the response of the prototypical "I'm cool because I promote OSS" fanboy, quick to attack anyone who dares question his beloved OSS software (I'm surprised there wasn't some conspiracy minded anti-Microsoft in there too).
Of course if you're wondering who Rich Bowen is, you can find a little bit about him here (or in plain english, he probably knows more about Apache then the parent and 95% of everyone reading this post - combined)
Slashdot Mirror
Try Australia, or even India. Australia used fully open source voting machines with a paper trail - electronic voting entirely transparent and accountable to the voters. The voting machines where made by a private company using requirements drawn up by an indpendent body. The resulting code was then made available on the internet for full public scutany (and several bugs where found and corrected due to public involvement), and company employees where not allowed anywhere near the machines or the voting - no late "patches", no special "help" from the company on voting day.
India went simple - in a country where many villages are only accessable by elephant or similar transportation, and where there is a huge population (the electorate alone is over 660 million, more then twice the US popultion), they chose to use voting machines with the simplest of components - no operating systems, no databases, just simple electronics designed to allow an official to release one vote at a time to a voting board (list of candidates with a button beside each one), and then close the unit (no more votes could be cast).
E-voting isn't the problem, it's American politics. Privatized elections carried out with minimal or no government regulation will give you privatized results - not only have private e-voting companies refused to fix major flaws in their software, made untested and unapproved patches to voting machines hours before elections, but the results from those voting machines have been highly suspect - not just that e-voting districts have been the only ones that are wildly out of line with exit polls, and always in favor of the same party, but instances where outright fraud in favor of that same party is obvious - district e-voting machines reporting impossible numbers like many more votes then actual voters, and often negative votes for a non-republican candidate (i.e. Volusia County whose diebold machines recorded -16,022 votes for the democratic candidate). In Ohio the numbers got as high as -25 million votes for democratic candidates.
Now people aren't even bothering to camouflage it when they troll Slashdot by taking advantage of the laughable editorial standards.
Todays date: Dec 6, 2005
Article date: Dec 6/7, 2004 (7 in the text, 6 in the URL)
So, I'm guessing we'll be seeing a few dupes of this (though I'm sure it was on Slashdot last year too, so technically it's already a dupe), followed up by someone fooling the editors into posting a blatent advertisement or an update on the number of FireFox downloads.
These comments are despite the fact that Google does not place ads on their news service
That's because the news service is "beta" forever. In fact citing Google News is actually a direct prove of the outside assertion - Google has kept it beta for years (and isn't like to ever make it a "real" service) simply because there is no true model they could legally use. They are screen scraping other people's content and the second they let it be legally defined as anything but an academic exercise (by removing the beta mark or sticking ads on it) they will get hit with a million lawsuits and Google won't have a legal leg to stand on.
Google News, along with most other Google "services", are special cases. Unlike companies that are trying to make money from their services, Google's main goal is to use them to mine personal information from millions of visitors. So it doesn't matter if their software is beta forever, as long as they can have a system that reads your personal email and indexes all keywords found against the GUID that tracks you across every Google site, they will be happy because they can sell expensive targeted advertising on the main Google search and anywhere else that won't get them into legal trouble.
Didn't read the article, did you? Just spouting the same talking points over and over again. Microsoft didn't write the web application involved here (Google did), nor does the exploit have anything at all to do with Microsoft's use of IE for other purposes.
Now after reading the article, you'll see the issue being exploited involves the fact that css files are designed (by *all* major browsers) to be the one exception to the cross-domain rule, meaning that a page on site A can get the contents of a css file located on site B.
However IE can be exploited so that any file is a seen as a CSS file, just a very badly formatted one. Of course there are big limitations - namely that only valid css "data" from site B can be read by site A, so anything not formatted in name{stuff}; is invisible to site A.
This particular hack takes advantage of the fact that a person with Google Desktop installed will send a special cookie when they request most pages from Google. That cookie will cause a "desktop" link to be sent back to them somewhere on the page. This desktop link contains a secret password. As soon as you know that password, you basically have full access to that persons computer through Google Desktop uris, regardless of what browser (as long as that browser supports javascript, which IE, FireFox and Opera obviously do). In simple terms, if you gave a site this password that Google sends to you, they'd have full access (this misfeature of Google Desktop also creates a big proxy server/man in the middle attack vector against a persons PC, regardless of what browser they use).
The attack vector to obtain the password in this case is the IE css bug. A specific page on Google, Google News, puts the desktop link in such a place that if you provide a specific search query, it will end up making a section of the page around the special desktop link look like a valid css value. Because of this, site A can read the data inside that value, including the Google password. Once it has the password from that random junk of "css data", it can start accessing Google Desktop at will.
Oh well. I hope Microsoft is paying you good money to make OSS proponents look like idiots by spouting this kind of completely uninformed bs. The sea of white noise helps to hide any real, intelligent points brought up against Microsoft or its products.
Why would Microsoft want to block a book like this? Take a look around, even in this thread on *Slashdot*. This kind of foaming at the mouth "Linux is good BECAUSE M$ IS THE DEVIL!!" is exactly the thing that turns businesses off Linux and OSS.
If Masters Choice Cola where to run a nation wide ad campaign, which would be more effective: "COCA COLA IS AN EVVVVIIIIL COMPANY", or "MC Cola tastes as good as Coke at half the price". Negative advertising doesn't improve ones position - the one place where it is used, US elections, works only because they are after ratio rather then size - US voter turnout is tiny due to the effect of negative campaigning, because a negative ad about Candidate A doesn't make people suddenly want to vote for Candidate B, it just means they might walk away from the election altogether.
As long as the OSS community is ruled and represented by the loudest, most "us vs. them" inciting zealots, it will never be respected outside it's little cluster of basement dwelling geeks. I wouldn't be surprised at all if Microsoft wrote this book, or even ran Slashdot itself (after all, look at all the MS ads that frequently appear). Loud, comically biased, out of touch OSS zealots are Microsoft's best friends (Much like how Microsoft has actually helped Apple in the past to make sure it survived as their main competitor - they know Apple's policies will prevent them from ever growing out of a niche PC market, yet at the same time their presence helps prevent any real competition from moving into the number #2 slot and challenging Microsoft directly).
believe that Apple has showed the industry exactly the business model to follow for media distribution, so, provided a fair and reasonable DRM policy like that of iTunes
Could you explain that point further? If you want everyone to follow Apple's "Fairplay(TM)" DRM model, what is it specifically about that model that makes it more attractive then the others? What where your logical reasons for choosing that as the best DRM solution?
It can't be the robustness of the data - if the latest iTunes update (or OS X update) kills your harddrive (again), or the computer simply dies as they sometimes do, it's Apple's policy to charge you for the music all over again, even though they have the records showing you legally own it. Apple DRM certainly isn't making digital music as long lasting as the physical disk technology. Even Apple's closest competitor offers a partial though far from perfect solution - the proof of ownership can be backed up seperate from the music (meaning you can make as many copies as you want), and then can be used to obtain the music without being charged again if you suffer a harddrive crash.
It can't be the number of copies you're allowed - most other DRM schemes also allow 3 copies (again, Apple's closest competitor allows any number of copies to be specified, and can even allow the ability to create "lending" copies - you can give a time limited copy to a someone to try out, and you don't have to worry about them returning the licence to you)
It can't be the ability to burn to CD - again, Apple's competitors support this too.
It can't be the future proofness of the format - "Fairplay" is currently glued to Apple, you can't play Apple DRM music on anything that doesn't have an Apple logo. One of the best arguments for open source is that closed source software leads to documents that can no longer be opened because the application required only exists for an obsolete platform. With "Fairplay", all the eggs are with one company - if Apple, just one company, disappeared, your music would left stuck in a format dieing of player entropy. This is what we call "vender lockin", and it's a bad thing. Some of Apple's competitors avoid this through partially open standards, other avoid this by spreading the format to as many companies as possible - if one dies, the others can fill the gap.
So please help us understand what specific, technological or contract, parts of Apple DRM we should be trying to make more widespread. Why is "Fairplay(TM)" so superior, other then the fact that it lives within the safe confines of the Apple reality distortion field, guarded by a phalanx of Apple fanbois?
Regardless of any arguments over who invented it, you still have to give Apple credit for recognizing the technology, obtaining industry partners, and bringing it to market, where they promptly screwed it over by taking an ego trip on the Firewire name, resulting a naming mess that let USB own everything but digital video cameras and a few external harddrives (Apple then released Mac OS 10.3 to get rid of most of the harddrives too)
The main reason for that seems to be that AMD isn't releasing "low end" dual cores like Intel is (they partially relented by offering one as low as 3800+, but that's in comparison to Intel making the Pentium D range from 2800mhz to just 3200mhz).
Most likely they don't want to have their dual cores competing/overlapping with their regular Athlon 64 line (the "high value for low money" group). They'd rather have all their processors targeted at seperate groups - 64 for joe consumer and budget gamer, FX for extreme gamer, X2 for media creation and other heavy data processing, and the Opteron for high performance 2 way/4 way servers.
Almost every database out there impliments an ISO or similar SQL standard as it's base (SQL-92 in most cases). They then build on top of that by adding their own features, while still supporting the common SQL syntax. It's not about being a barebones implimentation of a standard, it's about supporting the standard as your base.
PostgreSQL supports SQL-92, while adding it's own extra features (which describes most other databases like Oracle and MS SQL too), including the support of the "LIMIT" statement. MySQL doesn't support any standard base, instead existing as an arbitrary mish mash of standard and propritary SQL. It wasn't until the current version, 4, that MySQL even bothered to add support for UNION.
With every other database you can start working safe in the knowledge that while having it's own extensions, you're working with a normal "SQL" database. MySQL, while posing as SQL, has little if anything in common (in particular see threads about optimization - getting fast code in MySQL means learning an entirely new system filled with quirks and vomit inducing workarounds to solve language faults)
MySQL has finally caught up to the state of the enterprise relational database industry...as it was in 1999. Points for effort, but everyone else is still ahead with core features like integrity, leaving them free to build on new and better features. Bundling with PHP will only get you so far.
Then use Delphi, or better yet, C#. (or even Python and a few other choices)
Faster productivity, less bugs, no ram guzzling 5 minute startup. Java isn't the only language that reduces development time, it's just the only one (besides VB) that makes you sacrifice big things to get it.
Ignoring the fact that this seems like more speculation (already well discussed with less then 10 comments), how exactly is this a threat to Microsoft and its Office family? Microsoft's main customer for it's 500$+ office suite is not home users, but businesses. Taking away some home users (half of whom where likely running pirated copies) is like a drop in the barrel.
For a business, dropping out $500 isn't much, especially when compared to wages (this is something OSS needs to understand when they try and convince businesses they're cheaper - the initial cost is meaningless, they want figures on the support cost). On the other hand, having your critical work depend on a network connection to some internet server is quite a huge risk (especially if you can't call up that internet server and demand instant human support for any little problem). And that's before you figure in the fact that Google's whole business model is personal information data mining. Even if Google is going to give their song and dance that they won't use it for evil, most companies aren't going to let a 3rd party store their documents, let alone run an automated program over every document they have mining out key information. As has been shown in the past "Google Hacking" is often used to get to information you weren't supposed to see. Can you imagine "Google Hacking" used for corporate espionage? A company wants to know if their competitor is looking into sprockets. So they take out an "ad" on Google specifically targeted at that keyword, but with completely different ad text. They then record IPs from incoming clicks to gauge if that ad was shown to people in the target company a lot, indicating that Google had mined that phrase from many of their documents and emails (gmail). And that's before you consider the fact that Google becomes a serious hacking target (even to hostile foreign governments), since a breach would affect tens of thousands of companies. With so many eggs in one basket it might be enough to warrent a physical breakin, stealing the data of thousands of companies, which are then sold to competitors or held for blackmail.
It's not that it sucks, it's that it just doesn't stack up.
The added features of MySQL 5, if put into the context of the auto industry, would be like a car manufacturer announcing that some of their 2005 models would now come with airbags and anti-lock breaks. Yes, it shows improvement, and yes, it may plug some longstanding criticisms, but in the larger picture it still means that company is years behind everyone else.
MySQL 5 would have been a great advancement to put it in serious technological competition with other databases...if it had been released in 1999 or 2000. The reality is that Postgre is in version 8 with serious Windows support, Oracle is at 10g with gobs of new features 1% of DBAs will use, and Microsoft is in the process of unleashing a major new version of SQL Server onto a world that has done it no wrong. MySQL has only managed to catchup to where the industry was 5 years ago. Everyone else has kept moving.
Real DBA's don't like MySQL for the same reason real web developers don't like IE. They're both behind the times, fail to live up to standards (CSS/ACID), and only got to where they are because of aggressive bundling. IE is "popular" because it's preinstalled and thus used by the average joe who doesn't know any other "internet". MySQL has made sure it is sitting on every free and cheap LAxP host out there, resulting in droves of kiddie web developers whose experience involves a few web tutorial on PHP and MySQL being locked into its heavily proprietary interfaces and dodgy "optimizations".
Or more specifically ISO SQL-92, or any other SQL standard. Everyone else seems to be smart enough to be able to implement a well documented industry wide standard as their base. MySQL didn't even start supporting UNION until version 4.
Yes, they have a server mode, but can't hold a candle to MySQL
Please, I think we all appreciate input and honest criticisms good or bad, but there is no reason for you to go out your way to insult the nice folks behind Cloudscape/Derby with that kind of statement.
How about you ("The Company") give the technology to Apple
Not to burst your Apple is glorious, evil record companies are to blame, but you've read that statement completely backwards. Apple owns FairPlay. Apple has refused to licence their fairplay protection to other companies so someone else can produce iPod compatible music (which is what Sony is asking to do here), and Apple has refused to equip the iPod with the freely licenced DRM the rest of the MP3 industry (players and online stores) are using.
Even when it would be the one recieving the money, Apple has refused to allow any world other then the one in which iTunes protected music can only be played on an iPod, and an iPod can only play protected music from iTunes. So unless you're a fanboy who changes his opinion based on whose his buddies are, you'll want to correct that to be a demand for Apple to "give" their fairplay technology to Sony, so Sony can make music that is compatible with the iPod. Frankly I don't care for either one of those companies, but I do like to see some accuracy from the local fanatics.
I think you spelled that wrong. It's spelt Slapper, or Lion, or Santy, or Adore, or...
One has to wonder if the above is really just some smart ass attempting to make Mac zealots look really, really stupid. I mean, I know there are some people that are just so totally ignorent that they assume what they see today is what things where always like (in game development, it's people wondering what OpenGL calls Quake 1 used).
But the second paragraph "...they just refined it" (especially the three dot wait) makes you wonder if the person is attempting to caricature a Mac zealot struggling for an excuse, rather then being the real deal. (for reference, check out screenshots of Xerox Star GUI from 1981, Apple's from 1983, and Microsoft's 1985 Windows - 2 of these have a desktop with icons on the left, a trashcan on the buttom and file folders you can open up into new windows to navigate. 1 of them is an MDI task manager interface with none of the above elements)
You want IBM to cleanup the over patenting mess?
They have over 30,000 patents to date. By comparison Microsoft (who Slashdot seems to agree is patenting too much) has a little over 3000, and most of them where made in the last few years after Microsoft hired IBM's own vice-president in charge of IP. Before that IBM was patenting more then twice as many patents a year as Microsoft had total (for example in 2001 they filed over 2800).
Now truthfully both IBM and Microsoft are throwing gobs money at patent reform (especially Microsoft, as it has become a regular target for money seeking submarine patent companies). But that doesn't mean they've stopped taking out lots of crazy patents - until the Reagan patent system can be abolished and replaced with either the original "must be innovative" or some new "no business process/software" system everyone wants to make sure they control the crazy patents, rather then some litigator that would use them as a weapon.
Apple sweating at the possiblity that Microsoft (unlikely) or Creative (possiblity) could use their music device patents against Apple is fair turn around. After all, Apple is the one that actually uses its parents (mostly design patents, i.e. "computer in gay lime colored case" or "image of wire wastebasket" [actual Apple patent]) to bully around competition (while everyone remembers when Apple sued Microsoft in the 80s over the idea of a GUI, people seem to forget Apple targeted a lot of smaller companies for the same thing, many of whom where unable to pay for the litigation and went out of business. As a fair share of these where x86 based OSs, Apple effectively cleared out much of Microsoft's competition during Windows infancy, allowing it to become the dominent OS on the PC platform)
You are aware, I trust, that the Mozilla foundation frequently sits on vulnerabilities for some time before offering patches.
As an example, rather then just making an unsubstantiated allegation, the most recent patch, 1.0.5, fixed a critical vulnerability ("Code execution through shared function objects") that Mozilla had been sitting on for 2 months, and a high vulnerability ("Content-generated event vulnerabilities") that Mozilla had been sitting on for 3 months.
There where also additional vulnerabilities ranging from High to Low patched in that update that had been known to Mozilla for 2 or more months.
And this is only recent. Before FireFox 1.1, Mozilla was far less forth coming about vulnerabities, often patching them at their leisure and then silently introducing them into builds without any advisory to let people protect themselves; go look at the disclosure list - you'll find pages of dangerous vulnerabilities you where never told existed and for which you remained unprotected against unless you where downloading builds on a nightly basis (and reading the list wouldn't help you - Mozilla used to intentionally keep it 2 major versions behind).
Mozilla built its reputation for security (a reputation that is dimishing as each new FireFox vulnerability is announced) by hiding its flaws and promoting fanboys (like the parent). Now that it has broken into the mainstream, it has to play like everyone else, without the special treatment and fanboy reality distortion fields to protect it.
I doubt they'd want to do this. As explained in the article, some of these sites seem to be "on the inside" - when a zero day vulnerability was found by one, it was shared with the others. This suggests they are part of one community (messageboard/mailing list/IRC room/Usenet group).
By not telling the blackhats that they've been found out, Microsoft gains the ability to spy on their activities. This means the next time one of them finds a zero day vulnerability, Microsoft will know about it within hours when one of their monkey machines rechecks it.
In politics, the goals are reversed too. In business, the goal is to make as much profit as possible. That means making 50m while your competitor makes 51m, is considered better then making 25m while your competitor makes 24m.
Politics work the other way around (especially in the US's two party system). It doesn't matter how many votes you get, as long as the other guy got less. In politics, getting 2 votes while your competitor got 1 vote is considered better then getting 1000 votes, while your competitor got 1001.
As a forward, there are three levels of advertising:
- Advertising how good your product is
- Advertising how much better your product is compared to a specific competitors product
- Advertising how bad your competitors product is
The effectiveness of these three levels is the same as the order above.Focusing on your product leaves the impression that your product is strong; most companies that are at the top of their industry (like Coke) advertise like this. It's the old "he's so confident he must be good" that's also used by politicians.
Comparing your product to your competitors is not as effective, but for companies in tight competition it can work; it sacrifices some of the spotlight from your product in an attempt to reduce your main competitors market.
The bottom level, attacking a specific competitor, is rarely practiced and usually only out of desperation. First, as an obviously biased source, the audience is only going to put so much trust into your evaluation of the competitor. Second, and more importantly, is that your preoccupation with your competitors product makes it seem like you are not very confident about your own product. The end result is that while consumers may be slightly put off the competitors product by your claims, they will be even more put off your own product. In the same way as the top level, the percieved level of confidence in your own product is pushing the consumers opinion, rather then the claims you make (the consumer already knows you aren't going to say anything bad about your own product or anything good about a competitor).
And how all this ties into zealots...
OSS has no official recognized advertising campaign. Instead the advertising campaign the business world sees for OSS is the "word of mouth" of places like Slashdot and other pro OSS gatherings. And what they see there are the zealots screaming out daily about some absurd new conspiracy about Microsoft/(insert other OSS devil figure) doing something evil for the sake of being evil. I think you can guess which level of advertising the OSS campaign has been pushed into by the outspoken zealots, as well as the general 14 year old "look at me, I'm cool, I'm a rebel, I bash M$ and praise Linux (even though I use XP Home on my Dell)" who seem to tag along because they don't have any real friends.
It's really too bad the realists (who compose the majority of those doing actual work in the OSS community) aren't willing to kick off their loud, rowdy entourage.
Ah yes, the response of the prototypical "I'm cool because I promote OSS" fanboy, quick to attack anyone who dares question his beloved OSS software (I'm surprised there wasn't some conspiracy minded anti-Microsoft in there too).
Of course if you're wondering who Rich Bowen is, you can find a little bit about him here (or in plain english, he probably knows more about Apache then the parent and 95% of everyone reading this post - combined)
All you need is a moltex to floppy adapter (it's basically the same cable, only with a different connector). For example here is one for $1.69.