Work is a human endeavour. The money you make is the fruit of your work, which is a human endeavour. I demand that you share your paycheck with me because it "properly belong(s) to all of humankind". When will you be sending me my money?
I already have. I pay my taxes. If you have been treated in a hospital, driven a car on the roads, thrown rubbish in a dustbin, seen by the light of a street lamp, been protected by the police, borrowed a book from a library or one of a million other things, then you may well have benefitted from the taxes I paid.
Just as the exsistance of money does not bestow upon you the right to have some, the mere exsistance of software bestows no rights upon you. If I create a piece of software, I owe you nothing and you have no rights to the software I created except the rights I give you, because it is MY software, not yours.
It is not your software. Just in order to create that software, you must already have benefitted from the sum of all human endeavour up to that time. For example, if you used GCC or emacs then you have benefitted from the work of Richard Stallman and the FSF. If you used a computer then you have benefitted from the work of Babbage, Turing, Von Neumann, Presper Eckert and Bill Mauchly, et al. For that matter, if you used anything at all electronic then you have benefitted from the work of Michael Faraday.
What gives you the right to suppose that the achievement represented by your software is so important that you deserve to dictate who may and who may not benefit from it?
You do not have the right to make copies of books or movies and give those copies away. If someone creates software doesn't give you the right to make copies of and give them away, you do not have that right.
Says the law, but then the law needs changing. Everybody knows how easy it is to copy books, music, videos, software &c.; and yet, they persist in doing so, knowing full well that they will not necessarily be paid for every copy made. If people are really all that bothered about getting paid, then they should insist on cash up-front before they write, sing or act.
I reject your manifesto and summarily deny you any rights to anything I create.
Then I repeat: Whenever these rights are violated, the use of reasonable force -- as little as possible, but as much as necessary -- in their pursuit is absolutely justified.
Let me quote another paragraph, by way of clarification of what "reasonable force" means:
We consider "reasonable force" to be the smallest amount of force consistent with obtaining our rights whilst minimising collateral damage. We believe that we are in a special position because one of the techniques at our disposal, viz. reverse engineering, will cause no harm to people or tangible property, only to false "intellectual property" -- the supposed right of software suppliers to commit acts of violence by infringing upon our natural rights to ENJOY, STUDY, SHARE and ADAPT the software we use.
We believe that every user of software has four basic rights: the right to ENJOY the software, the right to STUDY how the software works, the right to SHARE the software with others and the right to ADAPT the software to their needs. We believe that these rights spring directly from the existence of software, are fundamental and can never be signed away.
THE RIGHT TO ENJOY
We believe that everyone has the right to use software that they have legitimately acquired, for any purpose: it is for the user to determine whether it is suitable for a particular application. If the supplier of a program were somehow unfairly to impose their will upon the user, perhaps by stipulating that the program should not be used for certain purposes, that would constitute an act of violence.
THE RIGHT TO STUDY
We believe that every user of a program has the right to study how that program works. If the user of a program wishes to replicate a particular piece of functionality from that program, they have the right to examine the program in order to determine how the functionality is performed. Nobody should be forced to re-invent the wheel. The supplier of a program does not have the right to keep secret from any rightful user how the program works: by allowing someone else to use the program, they have invited that person in on the secret.
If the creator of a process wishes to keep secret the details of a process, then that is their prerogative. Effectively, they are providing a service: a customer supplies the materials; the provider of the service takes them away, does something secret, and later returns a finished product to the customer. The customer has certain rights in respect of the transaction, including the right to decline the transaction altogether based upon the level of secrecy expected by the supplier. Where the right to study a program is denied, the user {customer} is expected to provide the supplier with not just the raw materials {input to the program}, but also the resources to carry out the process {computer time and disk space}. This diminishes the quid pro quo, and so is potentially an unfair transaction.
Access to the source code is highly desirable in the exercise of this right.
THE RIGHT TO SHARE
We believe that all the fruits of all human endeavour properly belong to all of humankind.
Software can be shared without being diminished by the act of sharing: if I give a copy of a program to my neighbour, I still have a copy. {Of course, I no longer have the exclusive use of that software. This exclusivity is a form of artificial scarcity.} Nobody has the right to impose their will on my neighbour and say that they should not use a particular program: to do so would be a form of violence.
THE RIGHT TO ADAPT
We believe that every user of a program has the right to adapt that program to their own needs. Nobody should be forced to adapt their method of working to suit the way that someone else believes that the job should be done that would constitute unfairly imposing one's will on another, which is a form of violence.
Access to the source code is highly desirable in the exercise of this right.
DELEGATION OF RIGHTS
We further believe that any user who is not skilled in the art of computer programming, or who simply desires to delegate the task to another, has the right to employ a competent programmer [2] of their choice and whom they trust, to assist them in the exercise of their rights to enjoy, study, share and adapt computer software; and that every competent programmer has the right to run a business based on providing such services in a free market. These services might include independent appraisal of the program to determine its suitability for a particular application {which is contingent upon the right to study}; modification to tailor the program to the customer's working
Most of the time people don't do things for religion. Generally religion is used as a scapegoat, excuse, reason etc. The only people that can be controlled by religion are the same people that can be controlled by anyone with charisma.
Yes, I'm with you to a point. But I say if you take away the religion, then people will have a harder time justifying what they are doing. When the majority of the population consider that belief in god == mental defect, then it is easier to spot attempts to justify atrocities in the name of religion.
Well, scientists have an unspoken faith in the immutability of the laws of Nature. It's just that there is plenty of circumstantial evidence in favour of this and no counterexamples. Everytime something far away looks smaller than something close up, that is evidence for light travellig in straight lines. Everytime something stays where it is, that is evidence for Newton's First Law, and everytime you pick something up and can feel its weight, that is evidence for the Third. And other examples too numerous to mention.
So the fundamental tenets of a scientist's faith are being continuously re-affirmed. And since the Laws of Nature are presumed to be as simple as possible, we can suppose that confirmatory evidence for one corollary of a fundamental law is confirmatory evidence for the underlying fundamental law itself; particularly in the light of evidence for several phenomena which would follow from the same fundamental law.
There are tons of great and nice people out there willing to make the system better and help fix holes, but there are others looking for the holes and trying to exploit them.
These people should not be allowed to have computers. Plain and simple.
Where I work, we have been using close to 100% LAMP since before that name was even invented. Everything is done using custom, in-house-written Perl {or, nowadays, sometimes PHP} scripts on a central server, and shoved into an SQL database. I don't believe we've spent a single penny on software licencing since before we moved premises, and that was a year ago.
Once you've written a couple of LAMP applications, it's easy enough just to copy the important functions out of a past one, spend an afternoon tinkering with it and have a new one up and running. The most important thing is to get procedures in place for doing something by hand first, before you even think about computerising it.
But, I know we're exceptional. Some of the firms we have to deal with, employ people basically to copy and paste stuff from an e-mail or Word document into an Excel spreadsheet. They think they're doing something clever, even going so far as to describe their operations as sophisticated and computerised. Go figure.....
Open Source just doesn't go far enough. Open Source still means nothing to computer illiterates, who still constitute the majority of the population.
The "paper record" thing does not properly address the problem, which is that the vote must be recorded {which you are trying to address in (2)} without there being anything, anywhere in the world that links the voter with their chosen candidate after their vote is cast. If what you are seeking to address is unreliability in the recording of the votes, then consider this premise: If the vote recording is sufficiently reliable, then there is no requirement for a backup -- and the problem then is not how to make a backup, but how to record votes reliably enough not to need a backup.
As for (3), you may need a record of the fact that you have voted for someone, but that must not show who you voted for. Otherwise, notwithstanding the probability that the two records may disagree {by accident or on purpose}, you create an opportunity to discriminate on the basis of for whom a person voted. Beside which, you can't expect everyone to bring in their voting receipts if a severe anomaly is discovered after the event.
That's why I designed a Direct Recording Electromechanical system for first-past-the-post elections. It replaces pen-and-paper ballots, it still needs two staff {a presiding officer and a poll clerk} to operate, but it gives near-instantaneous results {some mental arithmetic - one subtraction per candidate - is required, due to the use of non-resetting counters}. Your vote has as much chance of being traced back to you as any one of the pulses of electricity which ever caused a solenoid counter to advance. The equipment could be made available for public scrutiny almost right up to the moment it was required for use. Finally -- and IMHO crucially -- the entire principle of operation can be understood by anyone with GCSE physics.
Well, in the UK we use pencil and paper for about 50 million voters. The trick is just to arrange it so that polling stations are numerous, and only a few thousand people vote in each one. For 200 million voters, you will need 50 000-100 000 polling stations. It doesn't take that long to count 2000-4000 votes by hand and telephone the numbers through. The existence of so many separate polling stations makes it (1) harder to bribe everyone involved, and (2) less likely for one bodged result materially to affect the outcome.
The processes of democracy are sacrosanct. If the voters cannot have absolute trust in the way elections are conducted, then there is no democracy. No individual or corporation's proprietary secrets are worth more than the democratic process, and no amount of physical or mental labour is too much for the democratic process.
Back in the day it was probably never seen as important; because everybody understood exactly how a pencil, paper and a wooden box with a slot in the top -- which are still used in many countries, and for exactly this reason -- worked.
Requiring Open Source Software to be used is a good step in the right direction, but it does not go far enough. The requirements of democracy have not been satisfied if only a minority of the population is actually capable of verifying election machinery. Therefore, I would go so far as to say that:
No mechanical or electronic device employed in the course of elections may contain any technology which is deemed to be beyond the understanding of a school-leaver with good passing grades in mathematics and science.
Without this restriction, it would be too easy for manufacturers to bamboozle voters with technology. Everybody must be allowed to play with -- and try to break -- genuinely representative samples of the equipment used in elections, and the ability to understand how it actually works is crucial. Even if it means that counting votes becomes a labour-intensive process, this is a fair price to pay for democracy.
Alas, PDFs do not really count; because, at least according to the Microsoft mentality, everybody has MS Word and so can open a.doc file without messing around downloading Adobe Acrobat Reader.
What you have done is to exercise what in most countries would be considered a protected statutory right. If you asked them for the information {which you are entitled to by law: if you own the device, then you are privy to any secret it may embody} and they refused, then that might even be considered estoppel authorising the use of reasonable force. So publish the information on a server located outside the USA. Get your code tried out on other OSes, including the BSDs. Have someone else, preferably also located outside the USA, publish a review of the device in question and specifically mention your code by way of Linux compatibility.
Of course, if you have the balls, just send a copy of your work to the manufacturers and ask them to include it for download on their website and with future revisions of the driver CD.
Order your "Strike In a Box" pack. This contains everything you need to organise an effective industrial dispute:
200 blank ballot forms seeking approval for industrial action
200 pre-crossed ballot forms approving industrial action
20 assorted placards
2 loud-hailers
CD of protest chants, songs and slogans (incl. "Maggie Thatcher Has One, Ian McGregor Is One" and "Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle All the Way, I'd Sooner Be a Picket Than a Scab on Christmas Day")
200 matching song sheets
1 Easy-Light Brazier
500m. "Official Picket Line - Do Not Cross" tape
1 Order form for additional items incl. extra ballot forms, flying pickets (available by the coachload) &c.
1 voucher for support from local Socialist Worker
Go on strike
Claim strike pay
NB. You must become a member of a Trade Union at least 24 hours in advance of any industrial action. You will not be eligible for strike pay unless a ballot has been conducted and voted in favour of action. A picket line is not official unless a brazier is kept alight at all times.
I personally think WYSIWYG is severely over-rated -- at best a distraction and at worst an obstacle.
Back in the day when the BBC model B was king, I used Wordwise Plus. This was a word processor with a built-in BBC-BASIC-like macro-language. It had the slightly weird quirk of using MODE 7 {40 x 25 char mapped with spacing embedded attributes -- 1KB frame buffer} for editing, and printing to an 80- or 132-column printer. You could preview in MODE 3 {80 x 25 bit mapped -- 16KB frame buffer} if your document was small enough. It wasn't Open Source, there not being much of an Open Source movement in those days; but it would fit into a 27C128 and anyone with any fluency in 6502 assembler could, and sometimes did, hack it.
On the editing screen, you had your text, obviously; and markup {for doing things like bold/italic/underline, setting the margins and conditionally throwing new pages. Displayed in green to set it apart}. This meant that you had to think first and foremost about the text, and let the computer deal with the presentation.
Now you have WYSIWYG getting in the way all the time, people are devoting too much attention to the presentation and not enough to the content.
VAX/VMS included version control at the file system level, back when I first used it in 1989. IMHO, file system level is where something that fundamental really belongs. Version control at the application level is always going to be vulnerable to some degree of accidental or deliberate munging -- it would be akin to trying to emulate long filenames on a system designed from the ground up as 8.3.
I don't know off the top of my head if any Linux file systems have version control {ext3 has yet to let me down} but if there is one such, it might be more worthwhile using that as opposed to trying to slap on layer after layer of bodge.
The "dinosaur" adverts aren't slagging off OpenOffice.org -- they're slagging off older versions of Microsoft Office.
When you buy a car, one day the engine or the transmission will wear out. When you buy a VCR, one day the rubber tyre on the idler wheel will wear out. When you buy a steam iron, one day the water passages will clog up irretrievably with limescale. When you buy a microwave oven, one day the magnetron will fail. You get the idea: real, physical appliances wear out with use. To some extent this behaviour is designed-in {a short MTBF increases the number of units sold}; in a free and fair marketplace, it is not likely to be overused {a long MTBF adds perceived value; people generally will not buy from a company whom they believe to have short-changed them}.
Software is not susceptible to this kind of in-built obsolescence, since once a user has obtained a copy they have it forever; and in any case the closed-source software marketplace is neither free nor fair. In-built obsolescence instead has to be crudely emulated through the introduction of new features and incompatible saved file formats. The new features will necessarily get more and more obscure, esoteric and useless. File formats are the important one. As long as you can persuade someone to get a new version of Word, then you can always get a new and incompatible version of.doc out there. It's worth giving away a few legitimate copies with new PCs and swallowing the cost of piracy by home users, just to get corporate users {for whom neither piracy nor going without are viable options} to part with more money. I think the biggest real reason anyone has for upgrading from Office 97 is outsiders sending in.doc files too new for '97 to open. The cynic in me suspects that, at least to some extent, the format changes are built-in dog-in-a-manger-isms: MS planned in advance that the file format would change in future and used a header to indicate "Old versions, please do not open up this file".
Long-term solution: Document exporter written in MS Office's own macro language {which provides access to every feature of a document in an object-oriented style, a bit like the DOM in HTML/JavaScript but different}. Step through existing document, inserting text representing XML representation of document into a new, blank document which will export cleanly though under protest as plain text. If macro language is Internet-aware, give exporter the power to: talk to a server on the LAN; download Office 2007 document {extracted from incoming e-mail} from server; translate to alternate format; and re-upload to server which then makes translated document available to intended user. One MS Office and Windows licence required for translation machine. Rest of office LAN can run 100% OSS. Saving depends how many MS Office licences your business was using. {In middle term, as soon as a reliable exporter is ready, run similar service as bureau where customers e-mail in documents. Experience of doing job by hand will be valuable in determining how best to automate.}
If you want a decent cross-platform Exchange/Outlook replacement, try porting Exim4, Fetchmail and Evolution to Windows.
Seriously. Unix already had a blinding mail system before Windows ever existed. Exim is an MTA, also known as an SMTP daemon, which is to say that it does exactly what sendmail does {look that up elsewhere}; but it has a slightly nicer config file syntax than sendmail {note, I am biased: sendmail's unwieldy configuration was what drove me to try exim in the first place}. Evolution can use the native unix mailbox system instead of a POP3 server {which is no more than an alternative interface to native unix mailboxes on a remote machine} and a local MTA {an SMTP server is just an SMTP server.} Exim can be configured to look up other people's POP3 servers and deliver direct to them, as though it were a real unix mail server on the internet; or funnel all your mail through one SMTP server as though it were Outlook Express. Fetchmail is a POP3 client which grabs your mail from some remote system and puts it in your mailbox on the local system, so it integrates tightly.
OpenOffice.org is suffering precisely because it is attempting to play catch-up to Microsoft Office. The dogged insistence upon keeping the UI similar basically means duplicating one-for-one the same mistakes that Microsoft has already made.
MS Office is a great lumbering beast. It has too many features that ordinary users -- the ones who do document layout using rows of spaces, type out tables of contents by hand and use spreadsheets as a substitute for databases -- are almost never going to use. It needs these features, because it is closed-source software sold for profit and every new version must have something that was absent from previous versions. {Software doesn't naturally wear out like cars or VCRs or steam irons, so alternative and possibly underhand methods are required to force users to replace old software with new versions.} The proliferation of "wizards" should already be sounding an alarm bell: if a task needs a "wizard" at all, then maybe, just maybe, some part of the user interface was badly designed in the first place. But the MS Office user interface is sacrosanct: if MS change it even slightly, then the alternatives will automatically become less unattractive {learning a new UI, vs learning a new UI and paying for the experience to boot}.
If OOo is ever to do anything other than play second fiddle, then it needs to innovate -- do something Microsoft Office cannot do. If the devs are canny, they will introduce a really useful new feature which would be very difficult to implement in Microsoft Office. {Note, I am not above a little "exercise of reasonable force" in the course of achieving this}.
I also think that my abovementioned pet peeves such as spaces-based layout are holding people back in ways they will never realise -- precisely because one of the things they are holding themselves back from, is understanding what they could be achieving. There needs to be a way to tell users "there is a better way to do this" -- and to figure out what they were trying to do, and do it properly. Preferably not by Clippit saying "It looks like you are trying to....." Part of the problem is the ruler. In WordPerfect, you indicated tab stops and margins by typing a line of punctuation marks which represented the margins and left-, right- and fractional point-aligned tabs. The "ruler" metaphor was retained in the graphical word processors, but the ruler was moved to the top of the editing window. This avoids cluttering up the text with unprintables {basically good} but now each paragraph has its own tab settings {as it always had, since a ruler could be inserted anywhere} and it is not obvious how to apply tab and margin changes globally to a document {bad}. {I would suggest that a paragraph's own, private ruler should appear in the blank line which precedes the paragraph, with the global ruler above the editing window. But IANAUID.} In the WP days, it was relatively easy to deal with this once you had grasped the concept of the ruler: just block-select the "old" ruler {which behaved exactly as text in the "editing" ways, if not in the "printing" ways} and then block-insert it below the paragraph with the private ruler.
It should also be borne in mind that OOo is no longer the only alternative to MS Office. KOffice is maturing rapidly, and has the advantage of having been Free Software from Day One -- there is no legacy closed-source codebase lurking in there to spoil things. As a part of the popular KDE desktop environment, it can easily find its way into many distributions. I have high hopes and great expectations for KOffice. Gnumeric and Abiword should not be discounted either -- they really fly on modern hardware, and Abiword can still hold its own on a Pentium 133.
And you forgot to log in, so we can't even congratulate you.
Why can't we have Slashdot set up so that ACs can't post until a logged-in user has made the first post? That would put an end to the riduculous "first post" trolls.
Slashdot Mirror
What gives you the right to suppose that the achievement represented by your software is so important that you deserve to dictate who may and who may not benefit from it? Says the law, but then the law needs changing. Everybody knows how easy it is to copy books, music, videos, software &c.; and yet, they persist in doing so, knowing full well that they will not necessarily be paid for every copy made. If people are really all that bothered about getting paid, then they should insist on cash up-front before they write, sing or act. Then I repeat: Whenever these rights are violated, the use of reasonable force -- as little as possible, but as much as necessary -- in their pursuit is absolutely justified.
Let me quote another paragraph, by way of clarification of what "reasonable force" means:
We consider "reasonable force" to be the smallest amount of force consistent with obtaining our rights whilst minimising collateral damage. We believe that we are in a special position because one of the techniques at our disposal, viz. reverse engineering, will cause no harm to people or tangible property, only to false "intellectual property" -- the supposed right of software suppliers to commit acts of violence by infringing upon our natural rights to ENJOY, STUDY, SHARE and ADAPT the software we use.
We believe that every user of software has four basic rights: the right to ENJOY the software, the right to STUDY how the software works, the right to SHARE the software with others and the right to ADAPT the software to their needs. We believe that these rights spring directly from the existence of software, are fundamental and can never be signed away.
THE RIGHT TO ENJOY
We believe that everyone has the right to use software that they have legitimately acquired, for any purpose: it is for the user to determine whether it is suitable for a particular application. If the supplier of a program were somehow unfairly to impose their will upon the user, perhaps by stipulating that the program should not be used for certain purposes, that would constitute an act of violence.
THE RIGHT TO STUDY
We believe that every user of a program has the right to study how that program works. If the user of a program wishes to replicate a particular piece of functionality from that program, they have the right to examine the program in order to determine how the functionality is performed. Nobody should be forced to re-invent the wheel. The supplier of a program does not have the right to keep secret from any rightful user how the program works: by allowing someone else to use the program, they have invited that person in on the secret.
If the creator of a process wishes to keep secret the details of a process, then that is their prerogative. Effectively, they are providing a service: a customer supplies the materials; the provider of the service takes them away, does something secret, and later returns a finished product to the customer. The customer has certain rights in respect of the transaction, including the right to decline the transaction altogether based upon the level of secrecy expected by the supplier. Where the right to study a program is denied, the user {customer} is expected to provide the supplier with not just the raw materials {input to the program}, but also the resources to carry out the process {computer time and disk space}. This diminishes the quid pro quo, and so is potentially an unfair transaction.
Access to the source code is highly desirable in the exercise of this right.
THE RIGHT TO SHARE
We believe that all the fruits of all human endeavour properly belong to all of humankind.
Software can be shared without being diminished by the act of sharing: if I give a copy of a program to my neighbour, I still have a copy. {Of course, I no longer have the exclusive use of that software. This exclusivity is a form of artificial scarcity.} Nobody has the right to impose their will on my neighbour and say that they should not use a particular program: to do so would be a form of violence.
THE RIGHT TO ADAPT
We believe that every user of a program has the right to adapt that program to their own needs. Nobody should be forced to adapt their method of working to suit the way that someone else believes that the job should be done that would constitute unfairly imposing one's will on another, which is a form of violence.
Access to the source code is highly desirable in the exercise of this right.
DELEGATION OF RIGHTS
We further believe that any user who is not skilled in the art of computer programming, or who simply desires to delegate the task to another, has the right to employ a competent programmer [2] of their choice and whom they trust, to assist them in the exercise of their rights to enjoy, study, share and adapt computer software; and that every competent programmer has the right to run a business based on providing such services in a free market. These services might include independent appraisal of the program to determine its suitability for a particular application {which is contingent upon the right to study}; modification to tailor the program to the customer's working
Which is as good an argument as any for using coins. You can't embed RFID tags in something conductive .....
Well, I see it more like a reversal of the traditional crime-detection process.
100 years ago, a detective would start with the scene of a crime, and look for clues to help them establish who might have committed that crime.
Today, detectives start with a person, and look for clues to help them establish what crimes that person may commit.
Well, scientists have an unspoken faith in the immutability of the laws of Nature. It's just that there is plenty of circumstantial evidence in favour of this and no counterexamples. Everytime something far away looks smaller than something close up, that is evidence for light travellig in straight lines. Everytime something stays where it is, that is evidence for Newton's First Law, and everytime you pick something up and can feel its weight, that is evidence for the Third. And other examples too numerous to mention.
So the fundamental tenets of a scientist's faith are being continuously re-affirmed. And since the Laws of Nature are presumed to be as simple as possible, we can suppose that confirmatory evidence for one corollary of a fundamental law is confirmatory evidence for the underlying fundamental law itself; particularly in the light of evidence for several phenomena which would follow from the same fundamental law.
Janis Joplin did not write that song -- it was Kris Kristofferson.
These people should not be allowed to have computers. Plain and simple.
.....
Where I work, we have been using close to 100% LAMP since before that name was even invented. Everything is done using custom, in-house-written Perl {or, nowadays, sometimes PHP} scripts on a central server, and shoved into an SQL database. I don't believe we've spent a single penny on software licencing since before we moved premises, and that was a year ago.
Once you've written a couple of LAMP applications, it's easy enough just to copy the important functions out of a past one, spend an afternoon tinkering with it and have a new one up and running. The most important thing is to get procedures in place for doing something by hand first, before you even think about computerising it.
But, I know we're exceptional. Some of the firms we have to deal with, employ people basically to copy and paste stuff from an e-mail or Word document into an Excel spreadsheet. They think they're doing something clever, even going so far as to describe their operations as sophisticated and computerised. Go figure
Sounds expensive ..... I would have thought you could get a pencil for eleven pence if you went to the right place!
Open Source just doesn't go far enough. Open Source still means nothing to computer illiterates, who still constitute the majority of the population.
The "paper record" thing does not properly address the problem, which is that the vote must be recorded {which you are trying to address in (2)} without there being anything, anywhere in the world that links the voter with their chosen candidate after their vote is cast. If what you are seeking to address is unreliability in the recording of the votes, then consider this premise: If the vote recording is sufficiently reliable, then there is no requirement for a backup -- and the problem then is not how to make a backup, but how to record votes reliably enough not to need a backup.
As for (3), you may need a record of the fact that you have voted for someone, but that must not show who you voted for. Otherwise, notwithstanding the probability that the two records may disagree {by accident or on purpose}, you create an opportunity to discriminate on the basis of for whom a person voted. Beside which, you can't expect everyone to bring in their voting receipts if a severe anomaly is discovered after the event.
That's why I designed a Direct Recording Electromechanical system for first-past-the-post elections. It replaces pen-and-paper ballots, it still needs two staff {a presiding officer and a poll clerk} to operate, but it gives near-instantaneous results {some mental arithmetic - one subtraction per candidate - is required, due to the use of non-resetting counters}. Your vote has as much chance of being traced back to you as any one of the pulses of electricity which ever caused a solenoid counter to advance. The equipment could be made available for public scrutiny almost right up to the moment it was required for use. Finally -- and IMHO crucially -- the entire principle of operation can be understood by anyone with GCSE physics.
Well, in the UK we use pencil and paper for about 50 million voters. The trick is just to arrange it so that polling stations are numerous, and only a few thousand people vote in each one. For 200 million voters, you will need 50 000-100 000 polling stations. It doesn't take that long to count 2000-4000 votes by hand and telephone the numbers through. The existence of so many separate polling stations makes it (1) harder to bribe everyone involved, and (2) less likely for one bodged result materially to affect the outcome.
Back in the day it was probably never seen as important; because everybody understood exactly how a pencil, paper and a wooden box with a slot in the top -- which are still used in many countries, and for exactly this reason -- worked.
Requiring Open Source Software to be used is a good step in the right direction, but it does not go far enough. The requirements of democracy have not been satisfied if only a minority of the population is actually capable of verifying election machinery. Therefore, I would go so far as to say that: Without this restriction, it would be too easy for manufacturers to bamboozle voters with technology. Everybody must be allowed to play with -- and try to break -- genuinely representative samples of the equipment used in elections, and the ability to understand how it actually works is crucial. Even if it means that counting votes becomes a labour-intensive process, this is a fair price to pay for democracy.
This is already possible -- you can try it. There are even 1GB and 2GB sticks available now that can hold a full-featured Linux distribution with OOo.
Alas, PDFs do not really count; because, at least according to the Microsoft mentality, everybody has MS Word and so can open a .doc file without messing around downloading Adobe Acrobat Reader.
What you have done is to exercise what in most countries would be considered a protected statutory right. If you asked them for the information {which you are entitled to by law: if you own the device, then you are privy to any secret it may embody} and they refused, then that might even be considered estoppel authorising the use of reasonable force. So publish the information on a server located outside the USA. Get your code tried out on other OSes, including the BSDs. Have someone else, preferably also located outside the USA, publish a review of the device in question and specifically mention your code by way of Linux compatibility.
Of course, if you have the balls, just send a copy of your work to the manufacturers and ask them to include it for download on their website and with future revisions of the driver CD.
- Join a trade union.
- Wait statutory 24 hours.
- Order your "Strike In a Box" pack. This contains everything you need to organise an effective industrial dispute:
- 200 blank ballot forms seeking approval for industrial action
- 200 pre-crossed ballot forms approving industrial action
- 20 assorted placards
- 2 loud-hailers
- CD of protest chants, songs and slogans (incl. "Maggie Thatcher Has One, Ian McGregor Is One" and "Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle All the Way, I'd Sooner Be a Picket Than a Scab on Christmas Day")
- 200 matching song sheets
- 1 Easy-Light Brazier
- 500m. "Official Picket Line - Do Not Cross" tape
- 1 Order form for additional items incl. extra ballot forms, flying pickets (available by the coachload) &c.
- 1 voucher for support from local Socialist Worker
- Go on strike
- Claim strike pay
NB. You must become a member of a Trade Union at least 24 hours in advance of any industrial action. You will not be eligible for strike pay unless a ballot has been conducted and voted in favour of action. A picket line is not official unless a brazier is kept alight at all times.Can't they spell "emerge ircd" then?
I personally think WYSIWYG is severely over-rated -- at best a distraction and at worst an obstacle.
Back in the day when the BBC model B was king, I used Wordwise Plus. This was a word processor with a built-in BBC-BASIC-like macro-language. It had the slightly weird quirk of using MODE 7 {40 x 25 char mapped with spacing embedded attributes -- 1KB frame buffer} for editing, and printing to an 80- or 132-column printer. You could preview in MODE 3 {80 x 25 bit mapped -- 16KB frame buffer} if your document was small enough. It wasn't Open Source, there not being much of an Open Source movement in those days; but it would fit into a 27C128 and anyone with any fluency in 6502 assembler could, and sometimes did, hack it.
On the editing screen, you had your text, obviously; and markup {for doing things like bold/italic/underline, setting the margins and conditionally throwing new pages. Displayed in green to set it apart}. This meant that you had to think first and foremost about the text, and let the computer deal with the presentation.
Now you have WYSIWYG getting in the way all the time, people are devoting too much attention to the presentation and not enough to the content.
VAX/VMS included version control at the file system level, back when I first used it in 1989. IMHO, file system level is where something that fundamental really belongs. Version control at the application level is always going to be vulnerable to some degree of accidental or deliberate munging -- it would be akin to trying to emulate long filenames on a system designed from the ground up as 8.3.
I don't know off the top of my head if any Linux file systems have version control {ext3 has yet to let me down} but if there is one such, it might be more worthwhile using that as opposed to trying to slap on layer after layer of bodge.
The "dinosaur" adverts aren't slagging off OpenOffice.org -- they're slagging off older versions of Microsoft Office.
.doc out there. It's worth giving away a few legitimate copies with new PCs and swallowing the cost of piracy by home users, just to get corporate users {for whom neither piracy nor going without are viable options} to part with more money. I think the biggest real reason anyone has for upgrading from Office 97 is outsiders sending in .doc files too new for '97 to open. The cynic in me suspects that, at least to some extent, the format changes are built-in dog-in-a-manger-isms: MS planned in advance that the file format would change in future and used a header to indicate "Old versions, please do not open up this file".
When you buy a car, one day the engine or the transmission will wear out. When you buy a VCR, one day the rubber tyre on the idler wheel will wear out. When you buy a steam iron, one day the water passages will clog up irretrievably with limescale. When you buy a microwave oven, one day the magnetron will fail. You get the idea: real, physical appliances wear out with use. To some extent this behaviour is designed-in {a short MTBF increases the number of units sold}; in a free and fair marketplace, it is not likely to be overused {a long MTBF adds perceived value; people generally will not buy from a company whom they believe to have short-changed them}.
Software is not susceptible to this kind of in-built obsolescence, since once a user has obtained a copy they have it forever; and in any case the closed-source software marketplace is neither free nor fair. In-built obsolescence instead has to be crudely emulated through the introduction of new features and incompatible saved file formats. The new features will necessarily get more and more obscure, esoteric and useless. File formats are the important one. As long as you can persuade someone to get a new version of Word, then you can always get a new and incompatible version of
Long-term solution: Document exporter written in MS Office's own macro language {which provides access to every feature of a document in an object-oriented style, a bit like the DOM in HTML/JavaScript but different}. Step through existing document, inserting text representing XML representation of document into a new, blank document which will export cleanly though under protest as plain text. If macro language is Internet-aware, give exporter the power to: talk to a server on the LAN; download Office 2007 document {extracted from incoming e-mail} from server; translate to alternate format; and re-upload to server which then makes translated document available to intended user. One MS Office and Windows licence required for translation machine. Rest of office LAN can run 100% OSS. Saving depends how many MS Office licences your business was using. {In middle term, as soon as a reliable exporter is ready, run similar service as bureau where customers e-mail in documents. Experience of doing job by hand will be valuable in determining how best to automate.}
If you want a decent cross-platform Exchange/Outlook replacement, try porting Exim4, Fetchmail and Evolution to Windows.
Seriously. Unix already had a blinding mail system before Windows ever existed. Exim is an MTA, also known as an SMTP daemon, which is to say that it does exactly what sendmail does {look that up elsewhere}; but it has a slightly nicer config file syntax than sendmail {note, I am biased: sendmail's unwieldy configuration was what drove me to try exim in the first place}. Evolution can use the native unix mailbox system instead of a POP3 server {which is no more than an alternative interface to native unix mailboxes on a remote machine} and a local MTA {an SMTP server is just an SMTP server.} Exim can be configured to look up other people's POP3 servers and deliver direct to them, as though it were a real unix mail server on the internet; or funnel all your mail through one SMTP server as though it were Outlook Express. Fetchmail is a POP3 client which grabs your mail from some remote system and puts it in your mailbox on the local system, so it integrates tightly.
OpenOffice.org is suffering precisely because it is attempting to play catch-up to Microsoft Office. The dogged insistence upon keeping the UI similar basically means duplicating one-for-one the same mistakes that Microsoft has already made.
....." Part of the problem is the ruler. In WordPerfect, you indicated tab stops and margins by typing a line of punctuation marks which represented the margins and left-, right- and fractional point-aligned tabs. The "ruler" metaphor was retained in the graphical word processors, but the ruler was moved to the top of the editing window. This avoids cluttering up the text with unprintables {basically good} but now each paragraph has its own tab settings {as it always had, since a ruler could be inserted anywhere} and it is not obvious how to apply tab and margin changes globally to a document {bad}. {I would suggest that a paragraph's own, private ruler should appear in the blank line which precedes the paragraph, with the global ruler above the editing window. But IANAUID.} In the WP days, it was relatively easy to deal with this once you had grasped the concept of the ruler: just block-select the "old" ruler {which behaved exactly as text in the "editing" ways, if not in the "printing" ways} and then block-insert it below the paragraph with the private ruler.
MS Office is a great lumbering beast. It has too many features that ordinary users -- the ones who do document layout using rows of spaces, type out tables of contents by hand and use spreadsheets as a substitute for databases -- are almost never going to use. It needs these features, because it is closed-source software sold for profit and every new version must have something that was absent from previous versions. {Software doesn't naturally wear out like cars or VCRs or steam irons, so alternative and possibly underhand methods are required to force users to replace old software with new versions.} The proliferation of "wizards" should already be sounding an alarm bell: if a task needs a "wizard" at all, then maybe, just maybe, some part of the user interface was badly designed in the first place. But the MS Office user interface is sacrosanct: if MS change it even slightly, then the alternatives will automatically become less unattractive {learning a new UI, vs learning a new UI and paying for the experience to boot}.
If OOo is ever to do anything other than play second fiddle, then it needs to innovate -- do something Microsoft Office cannot do. If the devs are canny, they will introduce a really useful new feature which would be very difficult to implement in Microsoft Office. {Note, I am not above a little "exercise of reasonable force" in the course of achieving this}.
I also think that my abovementioned pet peeves such as spaces-based layout are holding people back in ways they will never realise -- precisely because one of the things they are holding themselves back from, is understanding what they could be achieving. There needs to be a way to tell users "there is a better way to do this" -- and to figure out what they were trying to do, and do it properly. Preferably not by Clippit saying "It looks like you are trying to
It should also be borne in mind that OOo is no longer the only alternative to MS Office. KOffice is maturing rapidly, and has the advantage of having been Free Software from Day One -- there is no legacy closed-source codebase lurking in there to spoil things. As a part of the popular KDE desktop environment, it can easily find its way into many distributions. I have high hopes and great expectations for KOffice. Gnumeric and Abiword should not be discounted either -- they really fly on modern hardware, and Abiword can still hold its own on a Pentium 133.
And you forgot to log in, so we can't even congratulate you.
Why can't we have Slashdot set up so that ACs can't post until a logged-in user has made the first post? That would put an end to the riduculous "first post" trolls.