Mark Pilgrim's piece does an excellent job of explaining why he is a whinging little shit that needs to get a life.
*whine* entrepreneurial company creates software "light years ahead of its competition" and gives us shitloads of mad permissions to do shit with it that it has no obligation to do, but it didn't give it away for free *whine*
*whine* everything open source sucked so I was forced to use their crap *whine*
*whine* I can still use their crap for free but if I want their new improved "even more crap" I have to pay for it *whine*
*whine* WordPress rocks, even when its not being developed, MT sucks. WordPress is mad free. Despite this I'm going to bitch about the price of MT, clearly showing that I don't really want to use WordPress because if I really thought it was better for me I would just change and not have to whine about how much MT would cost me to upgrade *whine*
*whine* In the long run freesoft rocks, because within just a few years you will be able to choose any one of 70 crap imitations of a crap product none of which will do most of what you want, but you'll love it anyway because its not Microsoft and you're happy as long as noone is allowed to make something cool without giving you his fucking code. *whine*
The saddest thing about Shuttleworth's Go-Opensource is that is makes no effort to indicate (or show respect for) any Free Software or Open Source foundation, or to acknowledge any of the (many) other South African initiatives that have been promoting OSS over the years.
Although the FAQ provides links to the Free Software Philosophy and the Open Source definition, there are no links to the home pages of gnu.org or opensource.org. In short, this "promotional campaign" doesn't even indicate where you can find authoratative information on what they are promoting.
For a person new to the concept of FLOSS, SourceForge and Freshmeat (the only suggestions for finding Open Source software given in the FAQ) are really bad places to start. They are riddled with poor quality software, and can give a really bad impression. Links to TheOpenCD or another site that lists specific, mature and useful software would be far more valuable.
The are various organisations in South Africa that support Open Source (to varying degrees). Bridges.org has offices in the country, and supports the use of free (as in beer) software of various types, including FLOSS. There are many LUGs around the country, and a wealth of information is available from TLUG in particular.
Ultimately go-opensource provides some pretty layout, but no meat, or even directions to a butchery.
What is happening here is that a competitor is "buying" an advert imprint on Google when the word "axa" is in the search criteria. Its pretty much the same thing as a billboard saying "Get your Coca Cola here" with an arrow down to a Pepsi fridge, or a table with your home-made lemonade.
This is, in fact, exactly what trademark laws are meant to prevent: the abuse of your good name by competitors, detractors and freeloaders.
Trademarks are, in fact, magic words (or phrases) that can't be used in many ways without permission. You can talk about Pepsi, refer to Pepsi, satirize Pepsi, but you can't use the name Pepsi to advertise your business or product, or claim to be Pepsi-compliant or Pepsi-approved, or basically abuse the (presumably) good reputation of Pepsi to bring gain to yourself or harm to the trademark holder.
What is being described here is a despicable business practice, and does not deserve the hand of support its getting from Slashdot. Trademarks and branding are important tools for product differentiation in mature markets, which is why they are strongly protected in capatalist economies.
That said, the guilty parties here are those that register trademarks (to which they have no right) as AdWords; not Google. This court action is comparable to holding a newspaper responsible because an advertiser illegally used a trademark, or holding a supermarket responsible for the illegal use of a trademark on its community advertising board.
The correct solution is to apply existing laws to a "new" domain. Google should, on request from someone who can offer prima facae proof that they are the legal trademark holder, supply the full contact details of all parties who have either currently or previously registered AdWords for that trademark. The trademark holder can then go after the infringer(s) directly. It should not be possible to request or get an injunction to force Google to remove the AdWord, for the legal reasons given below.
Unfortunately many countries are applying their only flavours of national and international law to the problem. This becomes particularly complicated in the case of trademarks, which typically are national in extent (although many countries have specific policies for "global" or "well known" international brands), and are also limited to a single domain.
Thus a single country could have two registered trademarks "XYZ", one for a soft drink and another for a range of security doors. Another country could also have a trademark "XYZ" for a soft drink, that is in no way related to the "XYZ" of the first country. This happens frequently, and must be absolute hell for companies like Google.
The problem goes deeper than authentication. Those familiar with Win32 service development should be aware that pipe communication (including SMB used for file sharing) "transparently" communicates the security principal of the caller, so that the service can impersonate the calling (temporarily reducing its effective permissions to those of the caller).
This is incredibly powerful, as it allows a service to seamlessly integrate with operating system (and by extension enterprise) security, without the service developer needing to reimplement access controls, or implement a new access control system.
What we need is a generic communication layer that includes:
Transparent channel setup, including exchange of credentials and initialisation of security parameters for integrity and/or confidentiality
A message-oriented protocol. Message-orientation can provide huge benefits in terms of security, especially if you have a standard daemon/service that handles message receipt and verification before passing it to "third party" code. Such a service can act as a first line of defense against buffer overflows and other data corruption attacks.
Allow the service end to impersonate the credentials of the client (temporarily drop permissions), so that there should be no need or excuse for any application to have to invent or implement its own access control system.
Provide sufficient hooks and feedback to allow the user to offer alternative authentication, prevent authentication (force anonimity), or reject the authentication of the server end.
Is extensible without being ridiculous. The need of certain frameworks to support 10 or 20 cryptographic mechanisms on the server is ridiculous. It makes servers bloated and difficult to develop. At any point in time only one well-considered mechanism is required per desired outcome (e.g. one sign-on and symmetric key negotiation protocol, one symmetric encryption and message authentication protocol).
Is easy to use in development. Complex frameworks, as a rule, are complex to use. Thus developers have a preference for reinventing the wheel, because a wheel is easy to understand, whereas a pneumatically endowed polybutadiene sheath of configurable pressure attached to a transverse axis situated at the vertical midpoint of the supporting plane and the bottom of the cart isn't quite so clear.
Strangely enough, I didn't avdocate socialism. I suggested a need for a "more socialist approach" that employs more labour-friendly laws.
I will admit at this point that I am not overly familiar with US law or employment. My knowledge comes from talking to US employees and hearing their experiences. Many of those people are right here on Slashdot, and I believe we are seeing labour-related issues on Ask Slashdot on an almost weekly basis. A lot of people are worried about how to handle problems with their employers, because they simply do not have sufficient legal protection.
So, should we protect slackers? No. A company shouldn't be expected to employ unproductive people. But a company should be expected to deal fairly with all of its employees. This is a fundamental human right in any democracy.
A forced performance grading, where some people have to perform below par, is clearly unfair. The problem is not statistics -- obviously some employees must perform below average, but an employee should have the right to know what performance is expected of him/her, and to be judged against those expectations.
A central concept in determining fairness is the idea of arbitrariness. If the justification for a decision involving a person is ultimately arbitrary, the decision is (potentially) unfair. This is one of the reasons that the death penalty has been scrapped in many countries: the imposition of the death penalty cannot be perfectly prescribed; it is ultimately the discression of a judge (or jury or council or other individual or group) applied to the situation and within the relevant guidelines that determines whether or not the death penalty will be imposed. This is necessarily arbitrary, and hence unfair. To put this more succinctly: two different people could commit murder in relatively identical circumstances, and one could be put to death while the other serves a length prison term. The result is clearly unfair.
Back to the matter at hand: not providing a guide to expectations, or arbitrarily deciding that a specific number or ratio of employees must be found to be lacking, is unfair, and thus against democratic principles and fundamental human rights. This is an example of an unfair labour practice.
What the US appears to lack (to my knowledge) is adequate protection of employees against unfair labour practice. Note that I am expressly talking about employees here, not former employees.
There appear to be laws covering maternity, leave (including sick leave), working hours, minimum wage and occupational health and safety. Neither the Equal Pay Act not the FLSA prohibit discrimination when hiring or retrenching, and the Civil Rights Act gives limited protection. I know of no federal laws that provide guidelines or frameworks for discipline, advancement, and fair procedures for hiring and retrenchment.
It is in the (I presume) missing bits of legislation that the problem lies. How can you prove unfair discrimination of there is no law that obligates the employer to provide a reason for not hiring you, for retrenching you, or for blocking your advancement? The Civil Rights Act (and others) prohibit the action but provide no labour mechanism to enable enforcement.
Discipline and advancement are also problem areas. Without a framework which requires employers to have clear policies and procedures for discipline, performance appraisal, promotion and so on, it is difficult to an employee to know where they stand, and how to protect themselves.
Finally, you point at one of the greatest failures of the US labour market when you talk about people sueing former employers. First because it is necessary for the employment relationship to be destroyed before the employee can take meaningful action to protect themselves or recover from damages caused by the employer. Second because an unfair labour practice is a delict as well as a crime. Or at least it should be -- if it is not a crime it is too easy for
Thanks for the information -- I wasn't aware of Garrett's work before, and his vocabulary is rather interesting.
That said, I have to make several counter-points:
First up, I never said "traditional flowcharting". If you ask Google for a definition or check the Wikipedia you will find that a flowchart is a concept indicating a graphical representation of a sequence of operations in a process.
Garrett's vocabulary includes a number of notations to contextualise a process, but the process itself is depicted graphically using blocks and arrows/connectors, with specific notation for choice points. At its core, this is pretty clearly a flowchart notation.
One issue I have with Garrett's vocabulary is that labelling (of connectors) appears to be discouraged.
Connectors and arrows can also be labeled, but the use of these should be limited to cases in which the action taken by the user needs to be clarified
This, IMHO, makes the diagram less readable; it is necessary to inspect all navigable blocks to determine what actions the user has available. There also an assumption made that the action required to navigate to a particular block is obvious from the description of the block -- this is not always true.
The lack of labels weakens the notation. State Diagrams (Finite and Nondeterministic) use a concept of states and transitions. When labels (transitions) are removed it is necessary for states to assume a dual role -- a state can be a transition ("You clicked 'Help' so go this way"), a state ("You are now in 'Help' mode"), or both ("This is 'Help' mode so you must have clicked 'Help'").
Garrett's Figure 10 illustrates this uncertainty. Looking at this figure in the context of web pages (the intended use of Garrett's vocabulary) it would be reasonable to assume that an error during login will take you to an error page, whereas success will take you to the member home. Now consider the following scenarios:
A. There is no error page; you are returned to the login page with an error message. This vocabulary cannot describe that situation without using labels.
B. There is a Help page after the decision point. How does the developer know when to display the Help page instead of the Error page?
Reflecting on this we find that labels are vital in many places to avoid assumptions and/or to clarify (as permitted by Garrett). We then have an inconsistency in notation -- sometimes the navigation must be assumed from the target block, and sometimes it is explicit in the label.
Finally we have to acknowledge that flowcharting in any form (even if you don't want to call it flowcharting) is a form of communication. The purpose of this communication in software development is to precisely describe a process so that it may be agreed upon and understood by various role-players, including the end-user, customer, architectect, designer and developer.
The need is thus for the communication to be simple, obvious and deterministic. It has to be understandable to a wide audience including non-technical personnel, and must not leave any ambiguity or room for interpretation by the implementor.
Having spoken to a few friends and colleagues, I am not convinced that Garrett's vocabulary is sufficiently understandable to non-technical personnel, not that it is unambiguious in its description of a process. It does however provide context (which is missing from many other notations) and various aspects of it make it more suited to the web environment (which is of course its target environment) than other notations. But I wouldn't use this vocabulary for any other form of user interface.
Flowcharts are an incredibly useful tool, but as with all tools the trick is not knowing how to use them, but when to use them.
There are at least two core areas where flowcharts are still pertinent in modern development:
Modeling user interaction.
UML does not offer an adequate solution for modeling user interaction. A Use Case gives a high level name to interaction, and can be described, but often the description is inadequate to satisfy the user's requirements. Sequence and collaboration diagrams present the message flow between objects, but do not succinctly present the user experience.
In the analysis phase, understanding the user expierience is vital. Developers and non-technical customers can easily understand Use Case diagrams (what you can do with the system) and flowcharts of interaction explaining the Use Cases (how you do it).
Modeling atomic processes or algorithms.
Under the hood, every OO language has a core that provides for sequential execution of instructions with branching and looping. A flowchart can graphically clarify a complex process or algorithm that cannot be further reduced into objects (at best it may be functionally decomposed), and would be poorly described by pseudocode.
Web interfaces and embedded systems are examples of other areas where flowcharting can be invaluable.
In the case of user interaction (the more common use of flowcharts Information Systems) a developer will seldom see or directly use the flowchart. Instead the interaction described by the flowchart will be translated by a designed into class, sequence and collaboration diagrams that describe the implementation of the operation the user is trying to achieve.
So, while all the capatalists prepare their ammo, let me explain briefly. The US has extremely labour-unfriendly laws. Depending on your state you have little protection against anything, including retrenchment, being fired without a reason, sexual harassment, poor working conditions, etc. The Free Market philosophy says that sooner or later a job becomes too unacceptable for anyone to do, and the employer has to improve the situation.
Problem is, in the race for the Almighty Buck, this just ain't true. There are too many people out there willing to make a lousy attempt at doing your job for half your salary and in worse conditions. And then there's India.
So the only way you're going to make headway into a solution to this problem, as opposed to an interim company-by-company work-around, is to take a more socialist approach to labour.
But that's just my 2c, and all your Slashdot-reading scholars, students and unemployed serial webophiles are welcome to disagree;)
OT, but I thought I'd share;) Unfortunately, people tend to be REALLY stupid.
A few years ago I had a loyalty membership that gave you a free movie for every 5 that you saw. With great fanfare the loyalty scheme announced a superbe upgrade in benefits for its members -- instead of one free movie per five that you saw, now you get one per TEN! Twice the benefit, same price.
You know what? They bought it. And I got a special phone call to explain to me how I was mistaken when I complained.
So when Joe Average reads that MS Word requires 128Mb+ of RAM, its obvious that it must be at least twice as good as OpenOffice which only required 64Mb RAM.
The second example of purchasing a silent track isn't as ridiculous as it sounds (pun intended). There are people who will intentionally pay for what they consider to be art, or at least to reward the creator(s) of what they consider to be art. A silent track certainly falls into this category.
What you failed to mention is that the track violates Copyright law. Here's a note about a related case concerning silence, plus a thread on SlashNOT that includes links to the CNN article. That is the part that is really sad.
Unless your development team has only one member, you're interfacing to someone else's code.
Designs are able to be changed. That's the whole point of using flexible patterns. But if you don't have a design to begin with then nobody knows where you are planning to end up, or has a framework in which to control the change.
There is nothing special about game development that isn't part of any other software development process.
There is an assumption amongst "focused publishers" of games that leading edge (techniques, graphics, sound, action) counts. It is an assumption that holds true for (probably) most of the gaming market. Nevertheless, the current gaming market is arguably a niche market, and "focused publishers" either aren't aware of this or at a loss to exploit the bulk of the market.
A market means having (a) customers who want your product (b) who have money (c) enough to afford the price which is dictated (at minimum) by your development costs.
The current game publishers are pretty good at (a). There are millions of gamers out there who want the product. The problem is that the vast majority of those gamers do not earn an income. Those that do eventually find that they have less time for gaming in order to do something called "living" or "working" or "getting a wife and kids". Slashdotisms aside, the age profile of gamers is heavily slanted in towards youth and lack of income.
In other words, current publishers aren't a whole lot of good at (b) or (c), or "finding the deep pockets". Games are pirated or obtained occasionally via Mommy or Daddy's money.
So where are the publishers going wrong? To me that's simple. I don't play games anymore because I don't have much time to, and few modern games are entertaining for a person who only plays occasionally. Games are written for gamers, and gamers are highly skilled addicts. This means they get their "hit" from the challenge and, to get value for their money, they require game that is lengthy to complete. Something challenging to a skilled gamer is, even on easy levels, not very entertaining to me when I want to relax for half an hour.
TW is, by comparison, an entertainment company. While many people (especially here) can't stand them, they nevertheless understand how to cater to the mass market... and I'm guessing they're going to do just that.
Why play in the highly competitive leading edge games market when you can combine non-interactive media with yesterday's techniques (that have been made into a Microsoft SDK), at a fraction of the cost, and target a far larger market that also happens to have money?
Its all about understanding your market. People who earn money (more particularly those who have "responsibilities") tend to be more price sensitive when it comes to products they aren't sure they will get their money's worth from. You may not be able to sell a $50 game to such people except at Christmas, but a $10 game a month will slip right under their radar.
There are also other markets that aren't currently served by game publishers. Do you remember interactive fiction books? They give you a paragraph or two, you decide what to do, and get a "goto" for another paragraph. There's thousands of them out there, and children and young teens love them. It would take one such book, a week of VB, and one day in your average TV series studio to turn the book into multimedia interactive fiction (30 second clips rather than paragraphs). TW could flog off stuff like that at a quarter the price of a game and still make a killing.
Any you would not, in any circumstance, buy or let anyone you can influence buy a car sold with a computerised engine management system without the full interface specification for said management system being published and readily available (preferably completely open sourced), right?
You can't service your average BMW, Opel, Mercedes or any other modern computer-managed car without the appropriate equipment to interact with and (more importantly) reset the engine management computer.
And those that are silly enough to try it end up finding that they could have done the service a lot cheaper by going to an approved agent, where the management computer simply says "Flush the oil properly this time and reset me", rather than attempting to replace the oil, oil filter, air filter, carb, belts, etc. Yes, I do know someone who has done this.
The fact is that, for anything but low-range models, it doesn't matter if you have access under the hood unless you can interact with the engine management computer.
As a taxpayer who doesn't fund the space program (different country) I think that the public/private argument is a hard one to make from any perspective.
There is potential for huge amounts of money to be wasted and, let's face it, we have huge problems on earth that need solving a whole lot sooner than GUT. But at the same time the space program has provided a huge number of benefits to humanity.
Historically we have seen that markets tend to be poor innovators but good at creating markets for new technology. More importantly it would be impossible to convince many small companies to collaborate on a risky venture (with little opportunity for return), and those companies with enough capital tend not to be interested.
One solution may be for the government to fund a large project, but to "outsource" a lot of the development of component parts to private corporations.
That's very disturbing, coming from a music business lawyer! Maybe he's looking for more people to sue;)
Seriously, the music industry goes after hundreds of people every year for resampling and remixing (which are copying implementation) as well as recreating identifiable bits of music (not sure quite the right words to use, but e.g. a rapper using an immediately identifiable intro of another song in a remix, wihtout permission, even if it has been recreated without using the original).
The important thing about music is that the actual recording is protected separately to the musical score (if I can put it that way) is protected separately to the words. So using any significant and identifiable part of any of those aspects could infringe copyright.
That is not to say that I support this is any way;) And I certainly do not support software patents (in general) because most don't meet the criteria for inventiveness (they are not new in their field to an expert -- give any expert the same problem and they will most likely arrive at a similar, if not identical, solution).
Why not be a non-traditional Slashdot poster and find out what you're talking about before commenting?
IP laws protect ideas, not implementation. Patents do this directly -- any implementation can infringe a patent. Copyright also protects ideas. It is a complete misconception that only a specific implementation is protected ; the copyright on a book (for example) effectively prohibits a screenplay or movie based on the book, or a derivative work (including other works using the same core scenario, characters and/or storylines). Trademarks protect a word or phrase, irrespective or how or where you express it.
I suppose that depends on how good the doctor is and how good Joe Average is, doesn't it?
Doctors tend to diagnose based on a tiny amount of information. They don't ask the right questions to determine if other symptoms are (or are not) present. So you regularly see pneumonia misdiagnosed as influenza or bronchitis; lactose intolerance becomes a visit for stomach cramps, another for acne, another for sinus headaches. A good doctor should insist that you come back if your "cold" hasn't cleared from your chest in three days, and should always check your medical history and consider relationships between complaints. But few do.
The list above isn't sucked from my thumb. It is misdiagnoses that have caused serious later-life problems for close friends of mine; and I have plenty more examples. In only one cause did visiting a second doctor result in a different diagnosis.
Doctors are just like lawyers. They practice. They tend to get simple things right, but when it really counts they have to go before a judge. So tell me... how often do lawyers lose?
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The sad part is that this should not be a joke. If a patient is insisting something is wrong with him then either:
There is, and the doctor just isn't doing the right tests (and this happens with ludicrous regularity); or
There is, but its psychological and causing the believe that something is physically wrong, and that requires treatment (but doctors don't like referring people to psychologists because "shrinks don't know what they're doing").
D&D is what you make it. The very fact that it doesn't have rules to control every situation and almost any dice-based resolution comes down attributes and the DM's decision makes the game incredibly flexible and easy. This makes role playing in the D&D environment a whole lot easier than in some systems which micro-manage characters with their rules. Besides which D&D has a very poor combat system for anything even vaguely strategic (like wargaming).
Linux has to make it onto the office desktop before it will make it onto the home desktop.
Most people still learn to use computers in an work context (but computing in schools is making this less prevalent) and at work or in school the desktop is (by and large) Windows. This gives the advantage of familiarity to the Windows OS, and people will typically choose something familiar.
Related to this is the lack of Linux software in stores. When you walk into a computer store you see plenty of software and games for Windows. Nothing for Linux. Not everyone can download hundreds of megs of free stuff from the 'net; not everyone wants to; not everyone knows. But more importantly its the perception: "hey, there's nothing here for that Linux thing, its obviously not well supported, I probably won't be able to get the software I need".
Its all about perception. You don't see Linux, you don't know Linux, and you don't have a warm fuzzy feeling that Linux will do what you want.
Finally, don't underestimate the value of a vast amount of crappy software -- there are a lot of Windows utilities out there that offer a lot of nifty features that end users like, and they have a lot of choice. Linux also offers a lot of choice but often more aimed at geeks than non-techie end users.
In particular a lot of the available Linux software is not "polished". Please don't misread this: most of the base applications in distributions qualifies as "polished", but a lot of the alternatives (that offer choice and nifty features) are not.
A lot of this comes down to the market maturity of Linux. Windows has a massive software market with a strong base: there are many tool and component providers. Application developers can easily develop powerful applications, concentrating on functionality and usability and leaving the details of components (especially GUI widgets) to third party developers. In addition the Windows model is economic: there are literally tens of thousands of shareware developers out there who have incentive to provide what end users want, as opposed to what they personally would like to make (which is typical of Open Source).
There are relatively few development tools and third party components for Linux (in fact Linux doens't have a strong and consistent component model). The choice present at the basic levels of the OS (e.g. KDE vs GNOME vs vanilla X) is a huge obstacle that fractures the commercial development community. All of this increases the difficulty of development, the liklihood of bugs, and thus the cost. Most Linux users appear to be against paying for software, so there is not a strong shareware model.
In short, there are few Linux developments that are focused squarely on the end-user and "too hell with the geeks". And this is a problem for end users. Aside: something most OSS developers don't seem to understand is that your average end user wants choice of applications, not choice of functionality of an application. A mail client that has twenty configuration screens is just not something they want to play with, not matter how powerful or useful it may be in the long run. The more settings that can be assumed (or at least hidden for advanced users only) the better.
I don't think they are patenting XML, but they've patented every possibly way of combining multiple scripts into a single file and allowing one or more to be extracted and executed. One of the file formats specifically described is XML.
In other words they've patented using any form of electronic data storage and retrieval mechanism (file, database, etc) for storing scripts. This is complete bullshit. You would be violating this patent by using a loopback mount for/etc/rc.d.
Hi. Nice project, but I think you could be violating the GPL. I'm too rabidly Stallmanist to bother reading other licenses, and my statement is based entirely on hearsay anyway, but I'm making it your responsibility to address my problems.
By not even bothering to find out about the other licenses, or if the source code is really unavailable, you are showing complete disrespect for the time, effort and finance that has gone into this project.
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Mark Pilgrim's piece does an excellent job of explaining why he is a whinging little shit that needs to get a life.
*whine* entrepreneurial company creates software "light years ahead of its competition" and gives us shitloads of mad permissions to do shit with it that it has no obligation to do, but it didn't give it away for free *whine*
*whine* everything open source sucked so I was forced to use their crap *whine*
*whine* I can still use their crap for free but if I want their new improved "even more crap" I have to pay for it *whine*
*whine* WordPress rocks, even when its not being developed, MT sucks. WordPress is mad free. Despite this I'm going to bitch about the price of MT, clearly showing that I don't really want to use WordPress because if I really thought it was better for me I would just change and not have to whine about how much MT would cost me to upgrade *whine*
*whine* In the long run freesoft rocks, because within just a few years you will be able to choose any one of 70 crap imitations of a crap product none of which will do most of what you want, but you'll love it anyway because its not Microsoft and you're happy as long as noone is allowed to make something cool without giving you his fucking code. *whine*
*whine* And finally, No, your mother.
The saddest thing about Shuttleworth's Go-Opensource is that is makes no effort to indicate (or show respect for) any Free Software or Open Source foundation, or to acknowledge any of the (many) other South African initiatives that have been promoting OSS over the years.
Although the FAQ provides links to the Free Software Philosophy and the Open Source definition, there are no links to the home pages of gnu.org or opensource.org. In short, this "promotional campaign" doesn't even indicate where you can find authoratative information on what they are promoting.
For a person new to the concept of FLOSS, SourceForge and Freshmeat (the only suggestions for finding Open Source software given in the FAQ) are really bad places to start. They are riddled with poor quality software, and can give a really bad impression. Links to TheOpenCD or another site that lists specific, mature and useful software would be far more valuable.
The are various organisations in South Africa that support Open Source (to varying degrees). Bridges.org has offices in the country, and supports the use of free (as in beer) software of various types, including FLOSS. There are many LUGs around the country, and a wealth of information is available from TLUG in particular.
Ultimately go-opensource provides some pretty layout, but no meat, or even directions to a butchery.
What is happening here is that a competitor is "buying" an advert imprint on Google when the word "axa" is in the search criteria. Its pretty much the same thing as a billboard saying "Get your Coca Cola here" with an arrow down to a Pepsi fridge, or a table with your home-made lemonade.
This is, in fact, exactly what trademark laws are meant to prevent: the abuse of your good name by competitors, detractors and freeloaders.
Trademarks are, in fact, magic words (or phrases) that can't be used in many ways without permission. You can talk about Pepsi, refer to Pepsi, satirize Pepsi, but you can't use the name Pepsi to advertise your business or product, or claim to be Pepsi-compliant or Pepsi-approved, or basically abuse the (presumably) good reputation of Pepsi to bring gain to yourself or harm to the trademark holder.
What is being described here is a despicable business practice, and does not deserve the hand of support its getting from Slashdot. Trademarks and branding are important tools for product differentiation in mature markets, which is why they are strongly protected in capatalist economies.
That said, the guilty parties here are those that register trademarks (to which they have no right) as AdWords; not Google. This court action is comparable to holding a newspaper responsible because an advertiser illegally used a trademark, or holding a supermarket responsible for the illegal use of a trademark on its community advertising board.
The correct solution is to apply existing laws to a "new" domain. Google should, on request from someone who can offer prima facae proof that they are the legal trademark holder, supply the full contact details of all parties who have either currently or previously registered AdWords for that trademark. The trademark holder can then go after the infringer(s) directly. It should not be possible to request or get an injunction to force Google to remove the AdWord, for the legal reasons given below.
Unfortunately many countries are applying their only flavours of national and international law to the problem. This becomes particularly complicated in the case of trademarks, which typically are national in extent (although many countries have specific policies for "global" or "well known" international brands), and are also limited to a single domain.
Thus a single country could have two registered trademarks "XYZ", one for a soft drink and another for a range of security doors. Another country could also have a trademark "XYZ" for a soft drink, that is in no way related to the "XYZ" of the first country. This happens frequently, and must be absolute hell for companies like Google.
The problem goes deeper than authentication. Those familiar with Win32 service development should be aware that pipe communication (including SMB used for file sharing) "transparently" communicates the security principal of the caller, so that the service can impersonate the calling (temporarily reducing its effective permissions to those of the caller).
This is incredibly powerful, as it allows a service to seamlessly integrate with operating system (and by extension enterprise) security, without the service developer needing to reimplement access controls, or implement a new access control system.
What we need is a generic communication layer that includes:
But that's just my 2c.
Strangely enough, I didn't avdocate socialism. I suggested a need for a "more socialist approach" that employs more labour-friendly laws.
I will admit at this point that I am not overly familiar with US law or employment. My knowledge comes from talking to US employees and hearing their experiences. Many of those people are right here on Slashdot, and I believe we are seeing labour-related issues on Ask Slashdot on an almost weekly basis. A lot of people are worried about how to handle problems with their employers, because they simply do not have sufficient legal protection.
So, should we protect slackers? No. A company shouldn't be expected to employ unproductive people. But a company should be expected to deal fairly with all of its employees. This is a fundamental human right in any democracy.
A forced performance grading, where some people have to perform below par, is clearly unfair. The problem is not statistics -- obviously some employees must perform below average, but an employee should have the right to know what performance is expected of him/her, and to be judged against those expectations.
A central concept in determining fairness is the idea of arbitrariness. If the justification for a decision involving a person is ultimately arbitrary, the decision is (potentially) unfair. This is one of the reasons that the death penalty has been scrapped in many countries: the imposition of the death penalty cannot be perfectly prescribed; it is ultimately the discression of a judge (or jury or council or other individual or group) applied to the situation and within the relevant guidelines that determines whether or not the death penalty will be imposed. This is necessarily arbitrary, and hence unfair. To put this more succinctly: two different people could commit murder in relatively identical circumstances, and one could be put to death while the other serves a length prison term. The result is clearly unfair.
Back to the matter at hand: not providing a guide to expectations, or arbitrarily deciding that a specific number or ratio of employees must be found to be lacking, is unfair, and thus against democratic principles and fundamental human rights. This is an example of an unfair labour practice.
What the US appears to lack (to my knowledge) is adequate protection of employees against unfair labour practice. Note that I am expressly talking about employees here, not former employees.
There appear to be laws covering maternity, leave (including sick leave), working hours, minimum wage and occupational health and safety. Neither the Equal Pay Act not the FLSA prohibit discrimination when hiring or retrenching, and the Civil Rights Act gives limited protection. I know of no federal laws that provide guidelines or frameworks for discipline, advancement, and fair procedures for hiring and retrenchment.
It is in the (I presume) missing bits of legislation that the problem lies. How can you prove unfair discrimination of there is no law that obligates the employer to provide a reason for not hiring you, for retrenching you, or for blocking your advancement? The Civil Rights Act (and others) prohibit the action but provide no labour mechanism to enable enforcement.
Discipline and advancement are also problem areas. Without a framework which requires employers to have clear policies and procedures for discipline, performance appraisal, promotion and so on, it is difficult to an employee to know where they stand, and how to protect themselves.
Finally, you point at one of the greatest failures of the US labour market when you talk about people sueing former employers. First because it is necessary for the employment relationship to be destroyed before the employee can take meaningful action to protect themselves or recover from damages caused by the employer. Second because an unfair labour practice is a delict as well as a crime. Or at least it should be -- if it is not a crime it is too easy for
Thanks for the information -- I wasn't aware of Garrett's work before, and his vocabulary is rather interesting.
That said, I have to make several counter-points:
Garrett's Figure 10 illustrates this uncertainty. Looking at this figure in the context of web pages (the intended use of Garrett's vocabulary) it would be reasonable to assume that an error during login will take you to an error page, whereas success will take you to the member home. Now consider the following scenarios:
A. There is no error page; you are returned to the login page with an error message. This vocabulary cannot describe that situation without using labels.
B. There is a Help page after the decision point. How does the developer know when to display the Help page instead of the Error page?
Reflecting on this we find that labels are vital in many places to avoid assumptions and/or to clarify (as permitted by Garrett). We then have an inconsistency in notation -- sometimes the navigation must be assumed from the target block, and sometimes it is explicit in the label.
The need is thus for the communication to be simple, obvious and deterministic. It has to be understandable to a wide audience including non-technical personnel, and must not leave any ambiguity or room for interpretation by the implementor.
Having spoken to a few friends and colleagues, I am not convinced that Garrett's vocabulary is sufficiently understandable to non-technical personnel, not that it is unambiguious in its description of a process. It does however provide context (which is missing from many other notations) and various aspects of it make it more suited to the web environment (which is of course its target environment) than other notations. But I wouldn't use this vocabulary for any other form of user interface.
You're probably a troll, but I'll bite.
Flowcharts are an incredibly useful tool, but as with all tools the trick is not knowing how to use them, but when to use them.
There are at least two core areas where flowcharts are still pertinent in modern development:
UML does not offer an adequate solution for modeling user interaction. A Use Case gives a high level name to interaction, and can be described, but often the description is inadequate to satisfy the user's requirements. Sequence and collaboration diagrams present the message flow between objects, but do not succinctly present the user experience.
In the analysis phase, understanding the user expierience is vital. Developers and non-technical customers can easily understand Use Case diagrams (what you can do with the system) and flowcharts of interaction explaining the Use Cases (how you do it).
Under the hood, every OO language has a core that provides for sequential execution of instructions with branching and looping. A flowchart can graphically clarify a complex process or algorithm that cannot be further reduced into objects (at best it may be functionally decomposed), and would be poorly described by pseudocode.
Web interfaces and embedded systems are examples of other areas where flowcharting can be invaluable.
In the case of user interaction (the more common use of flowcharts Information Systems) a developer will seldom see or directly use the flowchart. Instead the interaction described by the flowchart will be translated by a designed into class, sequence and collaboration diagrams that describe the implementation of the operation the user is trying to achieve.
So, while all the capatalists prepare their ammo, let me explain briefly. The US has extremely labour-unfriendly laws. Depending on your state you have little protection against anything, including retrenchment, being fired without a reason, sexual harassment, poor working conditions, etc. The Free Market philosophy says that sooner or later a job becomes too unacceptable for anyone to do, and the employer has to improve the situation.
Problem is, in the race for the Almighty Buck, this just ain't true. There are too many people out there willing to make a lousy attempt at doing your job for half your salary and in worse conditions. And then there's India.
So the only way you're going to make headway into a solution to this problem, as opposed to an interim company-by-company work-around, is to take a more socialist approach to labour.
But that's just my 2c, and all your Slashdot-reading scholars, students and unemployed serial webophiles are welcome to disagree ;)
OT, but I thought I'd share ;) Unfortunately, people tend to be REALLY stupid.
A few years ago I had a loyalty membership that gave you a free movie for every 5 that you saw. With great fanfare the loyalty scheme announced a superbe upgrade in benefits for its members -- instead of one free movie per five that you saw, now you get one per TEN! Twice the benefit, same price.
You know what? They bought it. And I got a special phone call to explain to me how I was mistaken when I complained.
So when Joe Average reads that MS Word requires 128Mb+ of RAM, its obvious that it must be at least twice as good as OpenOffice which only required 64Mb RAM.
Sad but true.
The second example of purchasing a silent track isn't as ridiculous as it sounds (pun intended). There are people who will intentionally pay for what they consider to be art, or at least to reward the creator(s) of what they consider to be art. A silent track certainly falls into this category.
What you failed to mention is that the track violates Copyright law. Here's a note about a related case concerning silence, plus a thread on SlashNOT that includes links to the CNN article. That is the part that is really sad.
Unless your development team has only one member, you're interfacing to someone else's code.
Designs are able to be changed. That's the whole point of using flexible patterns. But if you don't have a design to begin with then nobody knows where you are planning to end up, or has a framework in which to control the change.
There is nothing special about game development that isn't part of any other software development process.
There is an assumption amongst "focused publishers" of games that leading edge (techniques, graphics, sound, action) counts. It is an assumption that holds true for (probably) most of the gaming market. Nevertheless, the current gaming market is arguably a niche market, and "focused publishers" either aren't aware of this or at a loss to exploit the bulk of the market.
A market means having (a) customers who want your product (b) who have money (c) enough to afford the price which is dictated (at minimum) by your development costs.
The current game publishers are pretty good at (a). There are millions of gamers out there who want the product. The problem is that the vast majority of those gamers do not earn an income. Those that do eventually find that they have less time for gaming in order to do something called "living" or "working" or "getting a wife and kids". Slashdotisms aside, the age profile of gamers is heavily slanted in towards youth and lack of income.
In other words, current publishers aren't a whole lot of good at (b) or (c), or "finding the deep pockets". Games are pirated or obtained occasionally via Mommy or Daddy's money.
So where are the publishers going wrong? To me that's simple. I don't play games anymore because I don't have much time to, and few modern games are entertaining for a person who only plays occasionally. Games are written for gamers, and gamers are highly skilled addicts. This means they get their "hit" from the challenge and, to get value for their money, they require game that is lengthy to complete. Something challenging to a skilled gamer is, even on easy levels, not very entertaining to me when I want to relax for half an hour.
TW is, by comparison, an entertainment company. While many people (especially here) can't stand them, they nevertheless understand how to cater to the mass market ... and I'm guessing they're going to do just that.
Why play in the highly competitive leading edge games market when you can combine non-interactive media with yesterday's techniques (that have been made into a Microsoft SDK), at a fraction of the cost, and target a far larger market that also happens to have money?
Its all about understanding your market. People who earn money (more particularly those who have "responsibilities") tend to be more price sensitive when it comes to products they aren't sure they will get their money's worth from. You may not be able to sell a $50 game to such people except at Christmas, but a $10 game a month will slip right under their radar.
There are also other markets that aren't currently served by game publishers. Do you remember interactive fiction books? They give you a paragraph or two, you decide what to do, and get a "goto" for another paragraph. There's thousands of them out there, and children and young teens love them. It would take one such book, a week of VB, and one day in your average TV series studio to turn the book into multimedia interactive fiction (30 second clips rather than paragraphs). TW could flog off stuff like that at a quarter the price of a game and still make a killing.
Heck, that reminds of back in them good ol' earl-ee nine tees when I could get a soldering iron into the ol' PC if she needed a fixin' !
Any you would not, in any circumstance, buy or let anyone you can influence buy a car sold with a computerised engine management system without the full interface specification for said management system being published and readily available (preferably completely open sourced), right?
You can't service your average BMW, Opel, Mercedes or any other modern computer-managed car without the appropriate equipment to interact with and (more importantly) reset the engine management computer.
And those that are silly enough to try it end up finding that they could have done the service a lot cheaper by going to an approved agent, where the management computer simply says "Flush the oil properly this time and reset me", rather than attempting to replace the oil, oil filter, air filter, carb, belts, etc. Yes, I do know someone who has done this.
The fact is that, for anything but low-range models, it doesn't matter if you have access under the hood unless you can interact with the engine management computer.
That's what happen last time, right?
As a taxpayer who doesn't fund the space program (different country) I think that the public/private argument is a hard one to make from any perspective.
There is potential for huge amounts of money to be wasted and, let's face it, we have huge problems on earth that need solving a whole lot sooner than GUT. But at the same time the space program has provided a huge number of benefits to humanity.
Historically we have seen that markets tend to be poor innovators but good at creating markets for new technology. More importantly it would be impossible to convince many small companies to collaborate on a risky venture (with little opportunity for return), and those companies with enough capital tend not to be interested.
One solution may be for the government to fund a large project, but to "outsource" a lot of the development of component parts to private corporations.
That's very disturbing, coming from a music business lawyer! Maybe he's looking for more people to sue ;)
Seriously, the music industry goes after hundreds of people every year for resampling and remixing (which are copying implementation) as well as recreating identifiable bits of music (not sure quite the right words to use, but e.g. a rapper using an immediately identifiable intro of another song in a remix, wihtout permission, even if it has been recreated without using the original).
The important thing about music is that the actual recording is protected separately to the musical score (if I can put it that way) is protected separately to the words. So using any significant and identifiable part of any of those aspects could infringe copyright.
That is not to say that I support this is any way ;) And I certainly do not support software patents (in general) because most don't meet the criteria for inventiveness (they are not new in their field to an expert -- give any expert the same problem and they will most likely arrive at a similar, if not identical, solution).
Why not be a non-traditional Slashdot poster and find out what you're talking about before commenting?
IP laws protect ideas, not implementation. Patents do this directly -- any implementation can infringe a patent. Copyright also protects ideas. It is a complete misconception that only a specific implementation is protected ; the copyright on a book (for example) effectively prohibits a screenplay or movie based on the book, or a derivative work (including other works using the same core scenario, characters and/or storylines). Trademarks protect a word or phrase, irrespective or how or where you express it.
I suppose that depends on how good the doctor is and how good Joe Average is, doesn't it?
Doctors tend to diagnose based on a tiny amount of information. They don't ask the right questions to determine if other symptoms are (or are not) present. So you regularly see pneumonia misdiagnosed as influenza or bronchitis; lactose intolerance becomes a visit for stomach cramps, another for acne, another for sinus headaches. A good doctor should insist that you come back if your "cold" hasn't cleared from your chest in three days, and should always check your medical history and consider relationships between complaints. But few do.
The list above isn't sucked from my thumb. It is misdiagnoses that have caused serious later-life problems for close friends of mine; and I have plenty more examples. In only one cause did visiting a second doctor result in a different diagnosis.
Doctors are just like lawyers. They practice. They tend to get simple things right, but when it really counts they have to go before a judge. So tell me ... how often do lawyers lose?
The sad part is that this should not be a joke. If a patient is insisting something is wrong with him then either:
D&D is what you make it. The very fact that it doesn't have rules to control every situation and almost any dice-based resolution comes down attributes and the DM's decision makes the game incredibly flexible and easy. This makes role playing in the D&D environment a whole lot easier than in some systems which micro-manage characters with their rules. Besides which D&D has a very poor combat system for anything even vaguely strategic (like wargaming).
Linux has to make it onto the office desktop before it will make it onto the home desktop.
Most people still learn to use computers in an work context (but computing in schools is making this less prevalent) and at work or in school the desktop is (by and large) Windows. This gives the advantage of familiarity to the Windows OS, and people will typically choose something familiar.
Related to this is the lack of Linux software in stores. When you walk into a computer store you see plenty of software and games for Windows. Nothing for Linux. Not everyone can download hundreds of megs of free stuff from the 'net; not everyone wants to; not everyone knows. But more importantly its the perception: "hey, there's nothing here for that Linux thing, its obviously not well supported, I probably won't be able to get the software I need".
Its all about perception. You don't see Linux, you don't know Linux, and you don't have a warm fuzzy feeling that Linux will do what you want.
Finally, don't underestimate the value of a vast amount of crappy software -- there are a lot of Windows utilities out there that offer a lot of nifty features that end users like, and they have a lot of choice. Linux also offers a lot of choice but often more aimed at geeks than non-techie end users.
In particular a lot of the available Linux software is not "polished". Please don't misread this: most of the base applications in distributions qualifies as "polished", but a lot of the alternatives (that offer choice and nifty features) are not.
A lot of this comes down to the market maturity of Linux. Windows has a massive software market with a strong base: there are many tool and component providers. Application developers can easily develop powerful applications, concentrating on functionality and usability and leaving the details of components (especially GUI widgets) to third party developers. In addition the Windows model is economic: there are literally tens of thousands of shareware developers out there who have incentive to provide what end users want, as opposed to what they personally would like to make (which is typical of Open Source).
There are relatively few development tools and third party components for Linux (in fact Linux doens't have a strong and consistent component model). The choice present at the basic levels of the OS (e.g. KDE vs GNOME vs vanilla X) is a huge obstacle that fractures the commercial development community. All of this increases the difficulty of development, the liklihood of bugs, and thus the cost. Most Linux users appear to be against paying for software, so there is not a strong shareware model.
In short, there are few Linux developments that are focused squarely on the end-user and "too hell with the geeks". And this is a problem for end users. Aside: something most OSS developers don't seem to understand is that your average end user wants choice of applications, not choice of functionality of an application. A mail client that has twenty configuration screens is just not something they want to play with, not matter how powerful or useful it may be in the long run. The more settings that can be assumed (or at least hidden for advanced users only) the better.
I don't think they are patenting XML, but they've patented every possibly way of combining multiple scripts into a single file and allowing one or more to be extracted and executed. One of the file formats specifically described is XML.
In other words they've patented using any form of electronic data storage and retrieval mechanism (file, database, etc) for storing scripts. This is complete bullshit. You would be violating this patent by using a loopback mount for /etc/rc.d .
Already happened. They're called Star Wars 1, 2 and 3. Includes purile humour, plenty of out-of-place CGI and some unused scenes from Titanic.
Let me translate your own letter for you:
Hi. Nice project, but I think you could be violating the GPL. I'm too rabidly Stallmanist to bother reading other licenses, and my statement is based entirely on hearsay anyway, but I'm making it your responsibility to address my problems.
By not even bothering to find out about the other licenses, or if the source code is really unavailable, you are showing complete disrespect for the time, effort and finance that has gone into this project.