"... claiming that he was sacked for a "philosophical belief" in contravention of employment law and the European Human Rights Act."
I think he's right. He may be at a serious disadvantage having been at his job for only a week, but if his employer explicitly said his opinions OUTSIDE WORK were the reason for firing him, they're in trouble.
The HRA does only bind the government, I'm told, but UK employment law is quite sensible about this sort of thing.
The manufacturers make it very hard to support wireless cards. If you had a hypothetical wireless card that wasn't supported by Windows, you'd give up and not spend ages faffing around. If your current card had manufacturer-supported Free drivers, you wouldn't have to think about it.
(In the enterprise, what platform is used is mostly dependant on (a) what the staff know and (b) what applications you want to run; hardware support isn't really an issue these days, although you need to be careful with RAID cards and bleeding-edge motherboard chipsets)
What security goal are you trying to achieve? What is an "official" package anyway? What happens is somebody wants to fork the code?
Debian signs binary packages with the public key of the individual maintainer who made the upload. Those keys are then linked in a web of trust. There is also an archive key held by the release managers.
.. and it sucks very badly. While VC in a file system would be useful (ITS and VMS had it in the '70s), it's not a substitute for the discipline of manually checking in a group of files as a changeset tagged with a useful description of what it does.
While reading the./ article I thought, "hmm, this sounds like Andrew Orlowski's work". And lo and behold, it's his byline at the Reg article. Orlowski is a pure contrarian: he writes anti-blog articles and pro-DRM articles, knowing that outraged people will link to them and drive traffic to the Register. And it works!
Something similar happened in Northern Ireland about a decade ago: a car failed to stop for a checkpoint, the troops there fired at it, and continued firing once it had passed. There were three teenage joyriders in the car, one of whom was shot dead. The soldier who did it served time for manslaughter.
Actually, the fee is only payable for televisions, radios don't need a license. BBC radio is paid for out of the TV license fee. BBC World Service radio is paid for by the government Foreign Office as a propaganda service (it does a very good job as well).
Firstly, thanks for a civilised response to my rather blunt original post - I wasn't expecting courtesy on slashdot...
I've been reading the FreeCiv website, which appears to be a bit slashdotted at the moment, but I don't agree that Freeciv is a "total copy". For example, it's multiplayer, which neither Civ 1 or 2 was & there's a screenshot of it using hextiles. Those changes are at least as big as the differences between the various original Sid Meier Civs. I suppose neither idea is completely new either, but they do make for a different game.
The other thing about Freeciv is its much larger support for platforms and languages. If I want to play original Civ I have to dig out the four floppies the game came on (or pirate it) and run it in DOS emulation mode, which will eventually go away and is in any case not available to people with Macs. Freeciv preserves the game by keeping it alive, so that people can play this definitive strategy game in the future.
It's also available in languages like Catalan, which may not seem very important but speakers of those languages really appreciate and indeed would probably find "innovative".
Good luck with pursuing innovation, I hope it works out.
Of those, only 2 are not actually sequels or expansion packs to last year's popular games: Brothers in Arms, World of Warcraft, and Halo. Those "new" games are a team FPS, a MMORPG, and an FPS. Do you really think those are innovative?
And if you were to actually work in a games company you'd know how low a value is actually put on innovation. The big money is, like films, in replicating hits. Innovation is generally to be found more in (a) mods (who innovated CounterStrike?) and (b) free small timewasting flash games (which are free to be totally wacky as people aren't paying £35 for them).
The article claims that Windows is a "platform" for application development, and that UNIX of all kinds is a "non-platform". He then goes on to say that OSX+Java is a platform. Huh?
Clearly he's not heard of the LAMP way of building applications, which could just as easily be called a "platform".
Every piece of the file is a derivative work of the original and is still copyrighted. If this stuff actually takes off attempts will be made to ban it wholesale.
And the RIAA already can get private search warrants and do their own raids in certain circumstances in the UK and Australia (see Anton Pillar Orders)
FIRST, build a revision control system based on what you think people want. Collect hate mail and suggestions for improvement. Meanwhile, people work with the imperfect (but existing!) solution.
Then deploy phase 2: what people ACTUALLY want based on experience of the first product.
Phase 3 is a marketing campaign to change people's expectations of revision control systems to match what your software does. This is particularly easy when things like "change" are so ill-defined to start with.
The result is a system that a majority of people are comfortable with and understand.
The magic phrases are "Nothing that is not patentable now will be made patentable by the directive" and "software as such".
Firstly, patents for software are already being issued by many European patent offices. They are phrased as patents on a storage medium (a physical object) containing software with has a technical effect on the computer. In practice, this is a patent on the software.
Secondly, there is a blurry area for hardware controlled by software. An official has cited to me the example of an ABS system that might traditionally have been implemented from electrical components (patentable) being replaced by a microcontroller+software. He thought the replacement should still be patentable. The problem is that allowing this allows people to patent the combination of software+general purpose PC; the effect of that is that you can write equivalent software as long as you never run it on a computer.
The ISPs don't want people to have NAT in their ASDL/cable connections because they want to discourage them from using networks behind the NAT, presumably they expect people to sign up for second broadband connections like they used to sign up for second phone lines...
Over time, people do build quite solid buildings to replace the shelters. Their problem is stopping the government demolishing their slums and telling them to "go away". In an ideal world the governments would provide somewhere for them to go, but they often aren't interested.
This is why open source is useful
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If you have source, binary compatibility isn't such a big deal.
Certainly in the US, UK and other Common Law legal systems, law is made in the courts; rulings are precedents which must be followed. Statutes are statements about what the legislature wants the law to be. They seldom cover every possible situation in detail. So the law is made by the court which interprets the statutes in line with precedents and common sense.
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4175555.html is a patent on a set of screw threads. Patented fasteners are quite common. However, most people use the non-patented fasteners so this problem doesn't arise.
The difference with software is we've had a chance to see just how innovation flourishes in a non-patentable environment, and don't want to go to an environment where you have to wait 25 years for someone else's patent to expire before you can make an incremental improvement to it.
"software that is part of hardware" in patentese means any software that is stored in a computer or on a disk or anything computer-readable that is also a physical object. There are already software patents being granted in many EU countries under this loophole.
One of the important battles over the EU text is to force them to define the word "technical"...
The person willing to pay most money gets the item. You should bid your real maximum and walk away. If you don't get the item - well, it was too expensive anyway. There'll be another one along soon.
What I'd like to see is some sensible way of handling the auctions where shops sell hundreds of identical items at hourly intervals. I want one of them, but I don't care which one - so I want to bid on only those items which are not being bid on.
Slashdot Mirror
From the Grauniad article:
"... claiming that he was sacked for a "philosophical belief" in contravention of employment law and the European Human Rights Act."
I think he's right. He may be at a serious disadvantage having been at his job for only a week, but if his employer explicitly said his opinions OUTSIDE WORK were the reason for firing him, they're in trouble.
The HRA does only bind the government, I'm told, but UK employment law is quite sensible about this sort of thing.
The manufacturers make it very hard to support wireless cards. If you had a hypothetical wireless card that wasn't supported by Windows, you'd give up and not spend ages faffing around. If your current card had manufacturer-supported Free drivers, you wouldn't have to think about it.
(In the enterprise, what platform is used is mostly dependant on (a) what the staff know and (b) what applications you want to run; hardware support isn't really an issue these days, although you need to be careful with RAID cards and bleeding-edge motherboard chipsets)
What security goal are you trying to achieve? What is an "official" package anyway? What happens is somebody wants to fork the code?
Debian signs binary packages with the public key of the individual maintainer who made the upload. Those keys are then linked in a web of trust. There is also an archive key held by the release managers.
.. and it sucks very badly. While VC in a file system would be useful (ITS and VMS had it in the '70s), it's not a substitute for the discipline of manually checking in a group of files as a changeset tagged with a useful description of what it does.
While reading the ./ article I thought, "hmm, this sounds like Andrew Orlowski's work". And lo and behold, it's his byline at the Reg article. Orlowski is a pure contrarian: he writes anti-blog articles and pro-DRM articles, knowing that outraged people will link to them and drive traffic to the Register. And it works!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/295068.stm
Something similar happened in Northern Ireland about a decade ago: a car failed to stop for a checkpoint, the troops there fired at it, and continued firing once it had passed. There were three teenage joyriders in the car, one of whom was shot dead. The soldier who did it served time for manslaughter.
Actually, the fee is only payable for televisions, radios don't need a license. BBC radio is paid for out of the TV license fee. BBC World Service radio is paid for by the government Foreign Office as a propaganda service (it does a very good job as well).
Firstly, thanks for a civilised response to my rather blunt original post - I wasn't expecting courtesy on slashdot ...
I've been reading the FreeCiv website, which appears to be a bit slashdotted at the moment, but I don't agree that Freeciv is a "total copy". For example, it's multiplayer, which neither Civ 1 or 2 was & there's a screenshot of it using hextiles. Those changes are at least as big as the differences between the various original Sid Meier Civs. I suppose neither idea is completely new either, but they do make for a different game.
The other thing about Freeciv is its much larger support for platforms and languages. If I want to play original Civ I have to dig out the four floppies the game came on (or pirate it) and run it in DOS emulation mode, which will eventually go away and is in any case not available to people with Macs. Freeciv preserves the game by keeping it alive, so that people can play this definitive strategy game in the future.
It's also available in languages like Catalan, which may not seem very important but speakers of those languages really appreciate and indeed would probably find "innovative".
Good luck with pursuing innovation, I hope it works out.
Microsoft's chart of the top 10 games for Windows.
Of those, only 2 are not actually sequels or expansion packs to last year's popular games: Brothers in Arms, World of Warcraft, and Halo. Those "new" games are a team FPS, a MMORPG, and an FPS. Do you really think those are innovative?
And if you were to actually work in a games company you'd know how low a value is actually put on innovation. The big money is, like films, in replicating hits. Innovation is generally to be found more in (a) mods (who innovated CounterStrike?) and (b) free small timewasting flash games (which are free to be totally wacky as people aren't paying £35 for them).
The article claims that Windows is a "platform" for application development, and that UNIX of all kinds is a "non-platform". He then goes on to say that OSX+Java is a platform. Huh?
Clearly he's not heard of the LAMP way of building applications, which could just as easily be called a "platform".
Anyone care to define "platform" sensibly?
This is the Ninth Doctor; the way it's always been handled in the past is that the Doctor regenerates into a new body at intervals.
Every piece of the file is a derivative work of the original and is still copyrighted. If this stuff actually takes off attempts will be made to ban it wholesale.
And the RIAA already can get private search warrants and do their own raids in certain circumstances in the UK and Australia (see Anton Pillar Orders)
FIRST, build a revision control system based on what you think people want. Collect hate mail and suggestions for improvement. Meanwhile, people work with the imperfect (but existing!) solution.
Then deploy phase 2: what people ACTUALLY want based on experience of the first product.
Phase 3 is a marketing campaign to change people's expectations of revision control systems to match what your software does. This is particularly easy when things like "change" are so ill-defined to start with.
The result is a system that a majority of people are comfortable with and understand.
The magic phrases are "Nothing that is not patentable now will be made patentable by the directive" and "software as such".
Firstly, patents for software are already being issued by many European patent offices. They are phrased as patents on a storage medium (a physical object) containing software with has a technical effect on the computer. In practice, this is a patent on the software.
Secondly, there is a blurry area for hardware controlled by software. An official has cited to me the example of an ABS system that might traditionally have been implemented from electrical components (patentable) being replaced by a microcontroller+software. He thought the replacement should still be patentable. The problem is that allowing this allows people to patent the combination of software+general purpose PC; the effect of that is that you can write equivalent software as long as you never run it on a computer.
The ISPs don't want people to have NAT in their ASDL/cable connections because they want to discourage them from using networks behind the NAT, presumably they expect people to sign up for second broadband connections like they used to sign up for second phone lines...
Over time, people do build quite solid buildings to replace the shelters. Their problem is stopping the government demolishing their slums and telling them to "go away". In an ideal world the governments would provide somewhere for them to go, but they often aren't interested.
If you have source, binary compatibility isn't such a big deal.
Certainly in the US, UK and other Common Law legal systems, law is made in the courts; rulings are precedents which must be followed. Statutes are statements about what the legislature wants the law to be. They seldom cover every possible situation in detail. So the law is made by the court which interprets the statutes in line with precedents and common sense.
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4175555.html is a patent on a set of screw threads. Patented fasteners are quite common. However, most people use the non-patented fasteners so this problem doesn't arise.
The difference with software is we've had a chance to see just how innovation flourishes in a non-patentable environment, and don't want to go to an environment where you have to wait 25 years for someone else's patent to expire before you can make an incremental improvement to it.
"software that is part of hardware" in patentese means any software that is stored in a computer or on a disk or anything computer-readable that is also a physical object. There are already software patents being granted in many EU countries under this loophole.
One of the important battles over the EU text is to force them to define the word "technical"...
You'll probably be OK if you're acting like an ISP, but you may well still have to go to court (mostly to prove it wasn't you).
The person willing to pay most money gets the item. You should bid your real maximum and walk away. If you don't get the item - well, it was too expensive anyway. There'll be another one along soon.
What I'd like to see is some sensible way of handling the auctions where shops sell hundreds of identical items at hourly intervals. I want one of them, but I don't care which one - so I want to bid on only those items which are not being bid on.
Really. I have no idea what you are trying to say, but there must be something there because you've been moderated +5 and you have a low UID.
The goal - the bizplan - of FF and OOo is not to make money, it's to make products.
http://cbbrowne.com/info/xbloat.html