They have a client plug-in (not free) that lets you use entirely free software on the server to implement all the shared calendaring etc. functions. It works pretty well, and it's about 1/10 the cost of Exchange.
I saw him at a conference in 2000 on "Collaboration and Ownership in the Digital Environment" - a big multidisciplinary thing on IP. He was as you say, a prepared, coherent and persuasive speaker.
Then the next speaker came on, an EU patent lawyer, to describe the current system. He pointed out that you can already patent software in the EU, you just have to use the right phrasing. Somewhere in the middle of this, RMS went bersek and started ranting from the audience. People had to persuade him to leave before the lawyer could continue.
If that had been, say, an internal EU consultation on patents, someone would have called security and that would have been the end of the Free Software community's involvement in the process.
RMS is not always a zealot, but flashes of zealotry are just too inappropriate for the modern political environment. A different representative is needed for that, and one has not yet appeared.
The "everybody has access to it" argument makes a certain amount of sense, although it's extremely controvertial in the computer security world. But that also applies to Windows and all other COTS software: enemy governments can get hold of that as well. The Chinese govt. has a Windows source license.
Point (2): Firstly, they don't just "have the money anyway" - it is either from the people in taxes, borrowed from the banks and pension funds, or taken from savers through inflation if they print more bills.
Secondly, if you're going to stimulate the economy by throwing money around arbirarily, why not stimulate the inner cities by funding education instead? It doesn't have to go to the World's Richest Man. You could even have a dividend tax cut and spread government money more evenly among the super-rich.
(If you're trying to troll and weren't making an argument, you might like to remove inflammatory language from your posts like "You know I'm right")
See http://www.jobstats.co.uk/ , which tracks job adverts. It shows very clearly what happened to offered salaries over the past two years: a huge rise followed by a huge fall.
This sort of thing was common in the middle ages, when it was driven by the Guilds. The idea of a powerful group of people getting together to suppress competition is as old as business, and the problems it causes to the rest of us are why we have antitrust laws and the idea of free trade.
Best explanation of price discrimination
on
Which Price is Right?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
James Boyle is, apart from being a very smart economist, one of the Good Guys in the copyright debate. His paper explains why price discrimination happens and some of the effects it produces.
It has not been conclusively established in the courts that it is legal to rip music to mp3. Some people quote the American Home Recording Act, which applies to video tape and not audio. In the UK, the situation is the same: it's a copy, it's not exempt, there's no case law, so it's "illegal".
If you write your core logic in ANSI C, or Perl, with the POSIX library functions, your program will be portable to any UNIX system with almost no trouble.
If your program is modular, then you can put all the non-portable stuff into abstraction modules. Targeting another system just means porting the abstraction, not the whole program.
Finally, open the source to your program and people will fix the portability problems for you if they want to use your program.
Unfortunately, it's written into my contract, and those of many others in the technology industry, that if I come up with a good idea, my employer owns it and gets the patent.
Like not having my acre of land to be self sufficient, it's not really practical for me to be independant by living off patents. And I don't get recognition from them either.
The activity is NOT theft. Go read the copyright
laws; it's INFRINGEMENT, and it's a civil offence.
You cannot go to jail or be fined for copying a
single song. The FBI cannot touch you for copying
small amounts; only the rightholder can sue you.
Copying is only a criminal offence if (a) you do it
for profit or (b) you do it "on such a scale as to
adversely affect the rightholder."
It has been confirmed recently in court that selling modchips that circumvent copy protection systems is actionable under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (yes, 88).
Sony sued someone who was selling them, and won. This was a civil action, so it wasn't "illegal", but the law is certainly against modchips.
Illegal in UK
on
Spy v. Spy
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The Computer Misuse Act makes it a criminal offence to alter the behaviour of a computer system without the permission of the owner.
You do realise that this means that the Perl processes have no idea of the remote IP? or of the SSL connection information?
A second apache also requires a second set of configuration files and virtual servers which have to be maintained and provisioned. It's just a waste of time, although it does reduce the stupid memory requirements somewhat...
Re:Xcom was TURN BASED. RTS = REAL TIME Strategy!
on
HIstory of RTS Games
·
· Score: 1
Xcom Apocalypse gave you the option of real-time or turn-based.
I've just finished playing XCom: Apocalypse, and it's the most gripping strategy game I've played. Possibly because it's not totally real-time: the economics of equipping your troops and researching aliens are done seperately from the close combat. And you can pause the game at any time to issue a new bunch of orders.
Also, this game is HARD. Any mission can turn into a disaster if you let your people get seperated, out in the open, or forgetting to watch their backs. The aliens have devastating weapons which they know how to use.
Much better than a tank rush any day:)
IHow did we ever manage without those 24Mb RAM?
on
Last Word on Loki
·
· Score: 1
How about doom?
How about all those Spectrum and Amiga games? Why did anyone ever play them, with their limited user interfaces, low polygon counts (often zero!), blocky textures (remember colour clash?) and 48k of memory?
Most games are more plagiarism than revolution. Getting gameplay that is both great and new is hard.
Planning to port does mean that you avoid trying to do certain things, but you stick the platform-dependant code in small abstraction modules and save a lot of pain. Look at the Quake source sometime, it does this very well.
Invisible things that do what you want _are_ good useability. An OS that needs no configuration or maintenance is much more useable than one that needs constant baby-sitting...
It takes many man-years to design a quality product with good "fit and finish", which is pleasing, and which is well thought out for the task it is intended for.
However, in the computing world, network effects almost totally dominate all other considerations. A low-quality early product will beat out an incompatible late-arriving better product. What people want from their tools varies rapidly over time, so flexibility is more important than static perfection.
If no new hardware or software technologies were invented for the next five years, people probably would start to migrate towards choosing hardware and software for aesthetic and lifestyle reasons; might be able to make valid long-term comparisons of what they feel like to use; might be able to better justify changing the way they do things.
And taking it out again (or hacking it to let you fast-forward pass the trailers) would take one programmer about half an hour. That's why there can't be DRM in Linux - the user can alter either the DRM software or the entire system around it in order to take content out of the DRM wrapper.
Somewhere I have a 1985 copy of Personal Computer World magazine with an article describing how to build one of these things around the Sinclair ZX81...
Slashdot Mirror
Your wish list is all very well, but what happens when someone wants to join your internet who disagrees with your ideals?
They have a client plug-in (not free) that lets you use entirely free software on the server to implement all the shared calendaring etc. functions. It works pretty well, and it's about 1/10 the cost of Exchange.
I saw him at a conference in 2000 on "Collaboration and Ownership in the Digital Environment" - a big multidisciplinary thing on IP. He was as you say, a prepared, coherent and persuasive speaker.
Then the next speaker came on, an EU patent lawyer, to describe the current system. He pointed out that you can already patent software in the EU, you just have to use the right phrasing. Somewhere in the middle of this, RMS went bersek and started ranting from the audience. People had to persuade him to leave before the lawyer could continue.
If that had been, say, an internal EU consultation on patents, someone would have called security and that would have been the end of the Free Software community's involvement in the process.
RMS is not always a zealot, but flashes of zealotry are just too inappropriate for the modern political environment. A different representative is needed for that, and one has not yet appeared.
The "everybody has access to it" argument makes a certain amount of sense, although it's extremely controvertial in the computer security world. But that also applies to Windows and all other COTS software: enemy governments can get hold of that as well. The Chinese govt. has a Windows source license.
Point (2): Firstly, they don't just "have the money anyway" - it is either from the people in taxes, borrowed from the banks and pension funds, or taken from savers through inflation if they print more bills.
Secondly, if you're going to stimulate the economy by throwing money around arbirarily, why not stimulate the inner cities by funding education instead? It doesn't have to go to the World's Richest Man. You could even have a dividend tax cut and spread government money more evenly among the super-rich.
(If you're trying to troll and weren't making an argument, you might like to remove inflammatory language from your posts like "You know I'm right")
See http://www.jobstats.co.uk/ , which tracks job adverts. It shows very clearly what happened to offered salaries over the past two years: a huge rise followed by a huge fall.
This sort of thing was common in the middle ages, when it was driven by the Guilds. The idea of a powerful group of people getting together to suppress competition is as old as business, and the problems it causes to the rest of us are why we have antitrust laws and the idea of free trade.
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/Law/lawreview/vol536/boy le.pdf
James Boyle is, apart from being a very smart economist, one of the Good Guys in the copyright debate. His paper explains why price discrimination happens and some of the effects it produces.
It has not been conclusively established in the courts that it is legal to rip music to mp3. Some people quote the American Home Recording Act, which applies to video tape and not audio. In the UK, the situation is the same: it's a copy, it's not exempt, there's no case law, so it's "illegal".
I'd reccomend "The Unix Programming Environment". Despite being written in 1978, it's still an extremely good introductory text.
If you write your core logic in ANSI C, or Perl, with the POSIX library functions, your program will be portable to any UNIX system with almost no trouble.
If your program is modular, then you can put all the non-portable stuff into abstraction modules. Targeting another system just means porting the abstraction, not the whole program.
Finally, open the source to your program and people will fix the portability problems for you if they want to use your program.
So does every importer of DVDs and players need to register? Cool - great way to slow down the adoption of DRM!
Unfortunately, it's written into my contract, and those of many others in the technology industry, that if I come up with a good idea, my employer owns it and gets the patent.
Like not having my acre of land to be self sufficient, it's not really practical for me to be independant by living off patents. And I don't get recognition from them either.
Read the biography of James Dyson sometime.
Copying is only a criminal offence if (a) you do it for profit or (b) you do it "on such a scale as to adversely affect the rightholder."
It has been confirmed recently in court that selling modchips that circumvent copy protection systems is actionable under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (yes, 88).
Sony sued someone who was selling them, and won. This was a civil action, so it wasn't "illegal", but the law is certainly against modchips.
The Computer Misuse Act makes it a criminal offence to alter the behaviour of a computer system without the permission of the owner.
The difficulty here is in getting it to court...
You do realise that this means that the Perl processes have no idea of the remote IP? or of the SSL connection information?
A second apache also requires a second set of configuration files and virtual servers which have to be maintained and provisioned. It's just a waste of time, although it does reduce the stupid memory requirements somewhat...
Xcom Apocalypse gave you the option of real-time or turn-based.
I've just finished playing XCom: Apocalypse, and it's the most gripping strategy game I've played. Possibly because it's not totally real-time: the economics of equipping your troops and researching aliens are done seperately from the close combat. And you can pause the game at any time to issue a new bunch of orders.
:)
Also, this game is HARD. Any mission can turn into a disaster if you let your people get seperated, out in the open, or forgetting to watch their backs. The aliens have devastating weapons which they know how to use.
Much better than a tank rush any day
How about doom?
How about all those Spectrum and Amiga games? Why did anyone ever play them, with their limited user interfaces, low polygon counts (often zero!), blocky textures (remember colour clash?) and 48k of memory?
Most games are more plagiarism than revolution. Getting gameplay that is both great and new is hard.
Planning to port does mean that you avoid trying to do certain things, but you stick the platform-dependant code in small abstraction modules and save a lot of pain. Look at the Quake source sometime, it does this very well.
And with the same art too...
Invisible things that do what you want _are_ good useability. An OS that needs no configuration or maintenance is much more useable than one that needs constant baby-sitting...
It takes many man-years to design a quality product with good "fit and finish", which is pleasing, and which is well thought out for the task it is intended for.
However, in the computing world, network effects almost totally dominate all other considerations. A low-quality early product will beat out an incompatible late-arriving better product. What people want from their tools varies rapidly over time, so flexibility is more important than static perfection.
If no new hardware or software technologies were invented for the next five years, people probably would start to migrate towards choosing hardware and software for aesthetic and lifestyle reasons; might be able to make valid long-term comparisons of what they feel like to use; might be able to better justify changing the way they do things.
But not any time soon.
And taking it out again (or hacking it to let you fast-forward pass the trailers) would take one programmer about half an hour. That's why there can't be DRM in Linux - the user can alter either the DRM software or the entire system around it in order to take content out of the DRM wrapper.
That statement has been true for at least the past 20 years.
Unfortunately, there isn't much benefit for most people from a 3D interface because they don't see or think in 3D.
Somewhere I have a 1985 copy of Personal Computer World magazine with an article describing how to build one of these things around the Sinclair ZX81 ...
Who have a press release here