we need to be able to plug this into some nations nuclear launch capability.
That's right, nuke the nation with the most spammers... uhhmm... looks at map... that'll be the USA, then, with 5:1 over the whole of the rest of the world put together...
Briefly, yes. The MOT test is a check on the general roadworthiness of a vehicle. It is carried out three years after the vehicle was first registered and every year thereafter. The test is carried out, by commercial companies licensed by the Ministry of Transport, at the owner's expense. You cannot license a motor vehicle without showing a current valid MOT test certificate, and motor insurance is generally not valid unless you have a current MOT test certificate.
The other approach is to first let the world sort out what features are actually desirable, then standardize what's there and try to get implementers to converge towards the standard... Common Lisp is an example of this from programming languages.
Don't, don't, don't follow Common LISP as an example. Common LISP has been a disaster. There are far fewer people earning their living from LISP now than there were before Common LISP standard was introduced, and far fewer programs in regular use written in LISP.
The result is a language that... not even its mother could
love. Like the camel, Common Lisp is a horse designed by
committee. Camels do have their uses.
I was one of the principal designers of the Common Lisp language.
Common LISP essentially destroyed LISP as a usable, productive language. It made an incredible number of simply wrong technical decisions; and too many of those decisions were made by the smaller companies of the eastern United States - Symbolics, LMI, Franz - trying to write a standard which was as different as possible from InterLISP, in order to kill competition from Xerox. I'm not pretending InterLISP was brilliant or the answer to all problems. It wasn't. Like Common LISP, it was a LISP2, making an artificial distinction between data and code; and it was in many ways clumsy and unorthogonal itself. But there was a great deal of creativity coming out of the InterLISP community, which Common LISP effectively killed.
We would have been so much better with a standard based on Portable Standard Lisp, or on EuLisp, or on Scheme. We would have been so much better with no standard at all. Instead, we got a LISP2 with a bizarrely complex lambda-list syntax, with a comment syntax which was incompatible with the LISP reader (so that in-core editing and development were effectively impossible), with so many horrible design errors.
Of course, it succeeded in its primary goal. Xerox was driven out of the LISP marketplace. But the cost for LISP has been horrendous: the language has been effectively destroyed. And for what was and should be the queen of programing languages, that's a disaster.
Oh, yes - I was during the eighties a very junior member of the British Standards Institution's LISP working group. I was there. I still think LISP is the best possible programming language, but these days I use Java.
You have to realize, that if Apple does nothing, Microsoft and Linux are going to be battling it out over the next generation of desktops running on ultracheap commodity hardware. Apple has a unique opportunity here to jump in and really make some inroads into that marketplace, perhaps even to become the major player. They have a mature, solid and easy to use product that would be way ahead of either Microsoft or Linux in their own marketplace, if it could run on that same commodity hardware.
Apple could do this, but in my opinion for commercial reasons they should not and I'm prepared to bet they will not. Apple is a premium brand. Their ability to make a profit depends on it being a premium and an aspirational brand. That brand is built on images of style, quality, ease of use, reliability. It's the quality feel which is Apple's USP, Apple's raison d'etre.
Apple cannot make a profit as a software vendor head to head with increasingly good Linux offerings and the market dominance of Microsoft. Apple have to make a profit on their hardware. But it's their software which, for the average user, actually sets their hardware apart, which gives it its face. If Apple customers can get Apple software on generic hardware, that's going to hurt Apple in two ways: they'll lose the premium hardware revenue stream, which is important to them, and their users will experience unreliability and glitches which are more-or-less inevitable in a commodity hardware environment where many of the device drivers are being written by half trained monkeys over whom Apple have no quality control sanction. And it's Apple's brand image which will be hurt by that.
In my opinion, Apple should look carefully at the fate of Silicon Graphics. SGI, for those who don't remember, used to be a niche maker of UNIX boxes mainly for the design, visualisation, and media markets. They made very very nice hardware, very high quality, running their own UNIX and based on their own MIPS family of RISC processors. They were, as Apple is now, an aspirational brand - a maker of premium and very desirable machines. Then, in the late nineties, they lost confidence in what they were doing and started to ship intel boxes with Windows NT. It was disasterous for them. They couldn't maintain their premium and they diluted their brand value. They've been forced back into their core business - high end visualisation systems on MIPS hardware - but as a much smaller and weaker company.
I think Apple are taking a very big risk with their brand image by moving to Intel at all, not because there's anything wrong with Intel processors as such but because it dilutes their brand differentiation. I think it's vital to them to clearly differentiate between an Apple machine and a generic PC. Even if there were no technical reasons for not using generic hardware, I think there are the strongest possible commercial reasons.
I can't see why it [not hiring someone because of their age, gender, race or sexual orientation] *would* be illegal. You're not under any obligation to hire someone.
In Europe, while you're under no obligation to hire someone, you cannot legally use considerations of e.g. race or sexual orientation in deciding not to hire them, and if they can prove you did decide not to hire them on such grounds you're in serious shit. This seems to me, on the whole, fairly reasonable.
don't think "$300 / seat for something proprietary" really matters that much. Even if they re-bought that license every single year, it is less than $1/day to match whatever they are paying the butt that sits in the seat. I have to imagine that even peons are getting more than $100/day.
This is Google we're talking about. There isn't any seat and there isn't any butt, and there isn't any peon to be paid. Or rather, to be specific, there's about one butt on one seat per 10,000 nodes. So if they were paying $300 per node for licences, they would be spending something like $3M in licences for every tech they employed. I don't think their techs are on $3M...
Those of us who live on the net have to accept the fact that we live in public in a far more direct and exposed way than ever before. But actually as the sheer volume of data on the net grows, it becomes more arduous, not easier, to find out about people. For example, ten years ago, if you asked Alta Vista about 'Simon Brooke', the only Simon Brooke it knew about was me (but it knew a hell of a lot about me).
Yes, it probably is possible to work out that some of these Simon Brookes definitely are not me, and it's probably possible to work out some things about 'Simon Brooke' which definitely are me. But with every year that passes it's getting harder. How do you hide in a forest? Make like a leaf.
I believe US law treats companies as legal personae, granting them similiar rights to people.
Should a person break the law, they may well face a jail term.
For a company, a jail sentence make sense. Who should be incarcerated? The executives?
I am thinking this notion of corporation, needs to go away. Make every business a sing propriatary whatever.. the people running the business need to have some sort of responsibility. The way corporations are now no one is responsible for anything anymore. If a corporation ends up doing something evil in the name of profit (which it will if it the reward is worth the risk, b/c a corporation as an entity has no conscience no purpose other than acrue wealth) there is no one to hold accountable (with the rara exception).
I don't think it's as simnple as that.
There is evil inherent in the concept of modern business corporations, but they are nevertheless useful, and should be reformed rather than done away with. The evil, in my opinion, comes down to two things:
Limited liability
Narrowly financial responsibility
Limited liability is what has made the corporation powerful. It allows investors to simply walk away from their debts when things go wrong, ignoring the carnage they've caused to businesses down the food chain. I think limited liability should be done away with, that every shareholder should be personally liable for a share of a company's debt proportional to their shareholding, unless they can prove malfeasance by the directors (in which case the directors would be personally liable for the lot).
Corporations, as presently constituted, have narrowly financial responsibility. They are responsible only to their shareholders, and they are responsible only for their financial performance. Corporations externalise a lot of their costs by, for example, dumping untreated waste into the environment; and global corporations, if prevented by legislation from doing that in one jurisdiction, will simply up sticks and move to another. Corporations also engage in activities of dubious morality - almost half of the chocolate we eat is harvested by slaves; many of the clothes and shoes we wear are made in sweatshops; most of the firearms used by criminals are produced by western corporations. And yet there's no comeback to the investors for any of this. We need a system where any fine imposed on a corporation for illegal activity, and any damages assessed against a corporation, are levied pro-rata on the shareholders. Shareholders need to have a positive interest in the legality and ethics of their corporations business activities. It's also important that corporations can be sued extra-territorially - that simply by moving their operations to a more lax jurisdiction corporations can't evade legal and moral responsibilities.
For example what did this HP group do while SUN was inventing Java and Microsoft C#.
Guys, guys, be aware of your history. The 'virtual machine' has been around since at least 1966. The concept of a virtual machine which was the common host to multiple languages has been around since at least 1977.
Automatic memory management and garbage collection has been around since I was a small child.
Don't get me wrong. I like Java. I make my living out of Java. But Sun didn't 'invent' Java.
Nothing in the conception of the Oak (later Java) platform was either new or innovative. Java was a nice, clean implementation of some well known programming techniques which got a good marketing push behind it.
As for C# - indeed the whole.net platform - it is a very straight copy of Java. Virtually nothing - from the syntax of the C# language to many of the opcodes of the virtual machine - has changed. These things are not 'innovations' or 'inventions'. They're technology as usual; building on and refining what went before in quite small increments.
By contrast, Smalltalk genuinely was innovative. It was the first fully object oriented language. It used a virtual machine, but was the first virtual machine language which had a JIT. Don't devalue inventions. Inventions (especially in software) are rare; there have been only about half a dozen genuine software inventions since 1960, and Smalltalk definitely counts as one of those.
Yes, the government represents you as a citizen. It also represents me as a citizen. What I am suggesting is that if we disagree fundamentally about what we want government to do, there is not at all some a priori moral foundation of government beyond popular sovereignty and this very debate within the populace by which the actions of government should proceed.
Well, fair enough. if that's your position, feel free to argue it. But if you're going to argue it you cannot at the same time make ex cathedra declarations of what it is that a government is put in its place to do.
In any case it is not your place to comment on what we the British electorate want our Broadcasting Corporation to do. You're right, of course, that there's no complete concensus. But note that no political party hoping to get elected in Britain would even dream of suggesting selling off the BBC. It would be political suicide - like suggesting privatising health care. There is no constituency in the UK for either suggestion. What suits you in the United States may not suit other people who live in more mature nations.
Governments are put in place to do the things that private citizens and corporations can't do on their own: enforce order, build roads, provide for the common defense, etc.
Says who? You deftly slide this by as though it's a statement of fact. How about:
Governments are put in place to do things that private citizens or corporations won't do, but that most private citizens wish somebody would do.
How about Governments are put in place to do whatever it is their electors mandate them to do? It should be pointed out, however, that this is the BBC and not the government, and although the degree of the BBCs independence is a slightly grey area, it is at least to some degree an independent corporation and one which is held in much higher esteem both in Britain and (I believe) in the world in general than the UK Government.
Furthermore, this is not simply the UK being more liberal with publicly funded 'intellectual property' than the US. For example, the digital forms of nautical charts are free from the US NOAA, but jealously protected by the UK Hydrographic Office. Both countries have inconsistent attitudes to the use of intellectual property produced at the public expense. As far as I'm concerned, if I've paid (through my taxes) to produce it, then I should have access to it for free, whether it's a recording of a Beethoven symphony or a chart of the North Atlantic.
How's this for the ultimate conundrum: the combination of "Nobody RTFA here" and "the Slashdot Effect" taking down sites?
Simple. The world of Slashdot is divided into two unequal subsets: those who RTFA, and those who post. The intersection between these two subsets is null.
Those extra U.S. Dollars are currently being held by various organizations around the world who use it for things like buying oil investing in U.S. stocks or real estate. If foreign confidence in the dollar drops due to a large trade deficits (i.e. too many dollars available outside the U.S.) then the dollar value will drop... [my emphasis]
Sorry to have to tell you this, chaps, but that's present tense. The dollar is dropping, and what's more it has been dropping for some time.
For applications it's doubtlessly far superior to Mac Minis, but for a desktop I would take a Mac or an XP box over RISC OS (Or even 99% of Linux distros for that matter).
Have you tried RISC OS? For usability and consistency of user interface it used to be streets ahead of Mac, and probably still is. For efficiency it was streets ahead of everything. Mind you, relying on a co-operative rather than a pre-emptive scheduler was a major fault, as was the fact that you couldn't use the filer to explore for the directory you wanted to save into while you had a save-file dialog open.
The problem with RISC OS now is that there are very few modern applications developed for it. I stopped developing for RISC OS twelve years ago, and that's a long time. But both as an operating system and as a GUI it had a lot going for it. I'd love to see it revived, but I'm not holding my breath.
Really, the best way to revive the RISC OS GUI would be to port it to X11, and I believe such a project exists (although a quick google didn't find it).
While I basically agree with Bruce completely on this particular issue, there's something a bit ironic about Bruce, who has quite a reputation as a hothead himself, telling the usually unperturbable Mr. Torvalds to "cool it".
You said it! That's exactly what I was thinking. That said, like you, I do agree that on this occasion Perens is right.
If you can't figure out the format of an XML file (with appropriate Schema or DTD) in 15 years, god help you.
Wow! It's easy to see you've not been in this game for fifteen years.
Let's see, it's easy to figure out the format of a file so long as it's in XML. Provided, of course, that you know the character encoding, of course. And that you've got a device that can actually read the media. And provided you can license the patent on the compression algorithm. And provided the XML doesn't include any binary sections. So, no problems, then.
This is the regular Charter renewal for the BBC. Happens every 10years or so.
That's true of course, but it doesn't alter the fact that it gives Tony Bliar the opportunity to muzzle the institution which successfully pointed out his use of blatant dishonesty in pulling this country into an illegal war.
Can any informed Europeans tell us why the Comission can just ignore what they've been told to do?
Not really...
In theory the Commission are 'civil servants', although in fact they are normally nominated from among the ranks of former senior politicians. They are nominated by individual member governments and it often seems that the people nominated are people it is considered convenient to get out of the way of national politics. Not all are of the highest calibre, and those who were are often past their best. So the first way you can look at the commission is as a retirement home for failed senior politicians.
Next, the commission effectively serves two masters. The real power in the EU is in the hands of the 'Council of Ministers'. The Council of Ministers is just that - a meeting of all the ministers of all the member governments. This is as if the USA was ruled by a council of all the state governors. But there is, additionally, the Parliament, which has very little actual power but is directly elected so has stronger claims to legitimacy.
All these are relatively young institutions and the power relationships between them have not yet really been played out, and anything happening in EU politics has to be seen partly as the individual states, the Council of Ministers, the Parliament and the Commission all vying for power. The long term trend is that the influence nd reputation of the Parliament seems to be increasing slowly, while the Commission has been badly tarnished by a series of scandals.
What is happening here is the Commission is playing the Council of Ministers off against the Parliament. The Commission wants patents. The Council of Ministers started off pro-patent but is now badly split and may become anti-patent. The Parliament is at present anti-patent.
This may sound good for us but in practice I don't think any of these institutions fundamentally cares very much about the patent issue. What they care about is establishing the pecking order between the institutions, and software patents is just the ball currently in play.
The ONLY ban I would support would be of the government competing against a service provided by a business. If theres no businesses willing or able to provide the service, then theres no problem.
I don't get this. If a politician says to the electors 'if you elect me, I will provide service X as a municipal service', and the electors do elect him and he does provide the service, what's the problem? Isn't that what democracy is all about?
For the benefit of those of us who live outside the US of A, can someone explain why on earth someone would want to ban municipalities from offering services their citizens want? Surely it's up to the citizens of the municipality to democratically elect the representatives who offer to provide the tax/services package they want? If not, why not?
Slashdot Mirror
That's right, nuke the nation with the most spammers... uhhmm... looks at map... that'll be the USA, then, with 5:1 over the whole of the rest of the world put together...
Briefly, yes. The MOT test is a check on the general roadworthiness of a vehicle. It is carried out three years after the vehicle was first registered and every year thereafter. The test is carried out, by commercial companies licensed by the Ministry of Transport, at the owner's expense. You cannot license a motor vehicle without showing a current valid MOT test certificate, and motor insurance is generally not valid unless you have a current MOT test certificate.
more details here.
Don't, don't, don't follow Common LISP as an example. Common LISP has been a disaster. There are far fewer people earning their living from LISP now than there were before Common LISP standard was introduced, and far fewer programs in regular use written in LISP.
Common LISP is a very bad standard. As Scott Fahlman wrote:
He should know. As he says on his home page:
Common LISP essentially destroyed LISP as a usable, productive language. It made an incredible number of simply wrong technical decisions; and too many of those decisions were made by the smaller companies of the eastern United States - Symbolics, LMI, Franz - trying to write a standard which was as different as possible from InterLISP, in order to kill competition from Xerox. I'm not pretending InterLISP was brilliant or the answer to all problems. It wasn't. Like Common LISP, it was a LISP2, making an artificial distinction between data and code; and it was in many ways clumsy and unorthogonal itself. But there was a great deal of creativity coming out of the InterLISP community, which Common LISP effectively killed.
We would have been so much better with a standard based on Portable Standard Lisp, or on EuLisp, or on Scheme. We would have been so much better with no standard at all. Instead, we got a LISP2 with a bizarrely complex lambda-list syntax, with a comment syntax which was incompatible with the LISP reader (so that in-core editing and development were effectively impossible), with so many horrible design errors.
Of course, it succeeded in its primary goal. Xerox was driven out of the LISP marketplace. But the cost for LISP has been horrendous: the language has been effectively destroyed. And for what was and should be the queen of programing languages, that's a disaster.
Oh, yes - I was during the eighties a very junior member of the British Standards Institution's LISP working group. I was there. I still think LISP is the best possible programming language, but these days I use Java.
Apple could do this, but in my opinion for commercial reasons they should not and I'm prepared to bet they will not. Apple is a premium brand. Their ability to make a profit depends on it being a premium and an aspirational brand. That brand is built on images of style, quality, ease of use, reliability. It's the quality feel which is Apple's USP, Apple's raison d'etre.
Apple cannot make a profit as a software vendor head to head with increasingly good Linux offerings and the market dominance of Microsoft. Apple have to make a profit on their hardware. But it's their software which, for the average user, actually sets their hardware apart, which gives it its face. If Apple customers can get Apple software on generic hardware, that's going to hurt Apple in two ways: they'll lose the premium hardware revenue stream, which is important to them, and their users will experience unreliability and glitches which are more-or-less inevitable in a commodity hardware environment where many of the device drivers are being written by half trained monkeys over whom Apple have no quality control sanction. And it's Apple's brand image which will be hurt by that.
In my opinion, Apple should look carefully at the fate of Silicon Graphics. SGI, for those who don't remember, used to be a niche maker of UNIX boxes mainly for the design, visualisation, and media markets. They made very very nice hardware, very high quality, running their own UNIX and based on their own MIPS family of RISC processors. They were, as Apple is now, an aspirational brand - a maker of premium and very desirable machines. Then, in the late nineties, they lost confidence in what they were doing and started to ship intel boxes with Windows NT. It was disasterous for them. They couldn't maintain their premium and they diluted their brand value. They've been forced back into their core business - high end visualisation systems on MIPS hardware - but as a much smaller and weaker company.
I think Apple are taking a very big risk with their brand image by moving to Intel at all, not because there's anything wrong with Intel processors as such but because it dilutes their brand differentiation. I think it's vital to them to clearly differentiate between an Apple machine and a generic PC. Even if there were no technical reasons for not using generic hardware, I think there are the strongest possible commercial reasons.
In Europe, while you're under no obligation to hire someone, you cannot legally use considerations of e.g. race or sexual orientation in deciding not to hire them, and if they can prove you did decide not to hire them on such grounds you're in serious shit. This seems to me, on the whole, fairly reasonable.
This is Google we're talking about. There isn't any seat and there isn't any butt, and there isn't any peon to be paid. Or rather, to be specific, there's about one butt on one seat per 10,000 nodes. So if they were paying $300 per node for licences, they would be spending something like $3M in licences for every tech they employed. I don't think their techs are on $3M...
Those of us who live on the net have to accept the fact that we live in public in a far more direct and exposed way than ever before. But actually as the sheer volume of data on the net grows, it becomes more arduous, not easier, to find out about people. For example, ten years ago, if you asked Alta Vista about 'Simon Brooke', the only Simon Brooke it knew about was me (but it knew a hell of a lot about me).
Nowadays, if you ask Google about 'Simon Brooke', you'll learn (as I've just done) that I played a wife beater in a 2001 film, and that I run a specialist insurance brokerage, that I'm obsessive about elderly aircraft, that I've written a novel called '2Cool2BTrue', that I used to be an academic at the University of Dublin, and that my nickname is Derick. Fortunately, none of these things happens to be true.
Yes, it probably is possible to work out that some of these Simon Brookes definitely are not me, and it's probably possible to work out some things about 'Simon Brooke' which definitely are me. But with every year that passes it's getting harder. How do you hide in a forest? Make like a leaf.
Yes.
I don't think it's as simnple as that.
There is evil inherent in the concept of modern business corporations, but they are nevertheless useful, and should be reformed rather than done away with. The evil, in my opinion, comes down to two things:
Limited liability is what has made the corporation powerful. It allows investors to simply walk away from their debts when things go wrong, ignoring the carnage they've caused to businesses down the food chain. I think limited liability should be done away with, that every shareholder should be personally liable for a share of a company's debt proportional to their shareholding, unless they can prove malfeasance by the directors (in which case the directors would be personally liable for the lot).
Corporations, as presently constituted, have narrowly financial responsibility. They are responsible only to their shareholders, and they are responsible only for their financial performance. Corporations externalise a lot of their costs by, for example, dumping untreated waste into the environment; and global corporations, if prevented by legislation from doing that in one jurisdiction, will simply up sticks and move to another. Corporations also engage in activities of dubious morality - almost half of the chocolate we eat is harvested by slaves; many of the clothes and shoes we wear are made in sweatshops; most of the firearms used by criminals are produced by western corporations. And yet there's no comeback to the investors for any of this. We need a system where any fine imposed on a corporation for illegal activity, and any damages assessed against a corporation, are levied pro-rata on the shareholders. Shareholders need to have a positive interest in the legality and ethics of their corporations business activities. It's also important that corporations can be sued extra-territorially - that simply by moving their operations to a more lax jurisdiction corporations can't evade legal and moral responsibilities.
Guys, guys, be aware of your history. The 'virtual machine' has been around since at least 1966. The concept of a virtual machine which was the common host to multiple languages has been around since at least 1977. Automatic memory management and garbage collection has been around since I was a small child.
Don't get me wrong. I like Java. I make my living out of Java. But Sun didn't 'invent' Java. Nothing in the conception of the Oak (later Java) platform was either new or innovative. Java was a nice, clean implementation of some well known programming techniques which got a good marketing push behind it.
As for C# - indeed the whole .net platform - it is a very straight copy of Java. Virtually nothing - from the syntax of the C# language to many of the opcodes of the virtual machine - has changed. These things are not 'innovations' or 'inventions'. They're technology as usual; building on and refining what went before in quite small increments.
By contrast, Smalltalk genuinely was innovative. It was the first fully object oriented language. It used a virtual machine, but was the first virtual machine language which had a JIT. Don't devalue inventions. Inventions (especially in software) are rare; there have been only about half a dozen genuine software inventions since 1960, and Smalltalk definitely counts as one of those.
Most problems have already been solved, but the first solution is not always the most elegant solution. This is very elegant.
Well, fair enough. if that's your position, feel free to argue it. But if you're going to argue it you cannot at the same time make ex cathedra declarations of what it is that a government is put in its place to do.
In any case it is not your place to comment on what we the British electorate want our Broadcasting Corporation to do. You're right, of course, that there's no complete concensus. But note that no political party hoping to get elected in Britain would even dream of suggesting selling off the BBC. It would be political suicide - like suggesting privatising health care. There is no constituency in the UK for either suggestion. What suits you in the United States may not suit other people who live in more mature nations.
How about Governments are put in place to do whatever it is their electors mandate them to do? It should be pointed out, however, that this is the BBC and not the government, and although the degree of the BBCs independence is a slightly grey area, it is at least to some degree an independent corporation and one which is held in much higher esteem both in Britain and (I believe) in the world in general than the UK Government.
Furthermore, this is not simply the UK being more liberal with publicly funded 'intellectual property' than the US. For example, the digital forms of nautical charts are free from the US NOAA, but jealously protected by the UK Hydrographic Office. Both countries have inconsistent attitudes to the use of intellectual property produced at the public expense. As far as I'm concerned, if I've paid (through my taxes) to produce it, then I should have access to it for free, whether it's a recording of a Beethoven symphony or a chart of the North Atlantic.
Simple. The world of Slashdot is divided into two unequal subsets: those who RTFA, and those who post. The intersection between these two subsets is null.
Sorry to have to tell you this, chaps, but that's present tense. The dollar is dropping, and what's more it has been dropping for some time.
You're right about why, though.
Have you tried RISC OS? For usability and consistency of user interface it used to be streets ahead of Mac, and probably still is. For efficiency it was streets ahead of everything. Mind you, relying on a co-operative rather than a pre-emptive scheduler was a major fault, as was the fact that you couldn't use the filer to explore for the directory you wanted to save into while you had a save-file dialog open.
The problem with RISC OS now is that there are very few modern applications developed for it. I stopped developing for RISC OS twelve years ago, and that's a long time. But both as an operating system and as a GUI it had a lot going for it. I'd love to see it revived, but I'm not holding my breath.
Really, the best way to revive the RISC OS GUI would be to port it to X11, and I believe such a project exists (although a quick google didn't find it).
You said it! That's exactly what I was thinking. That said, like you, I do agree that on this occasion Perens is right.
Oh yes they were - in the alternate series 1/series 2 link episode around Christmas 1979, along with the black spaceship.
That's 1.88 in real money. Do keep up at the back,
Wow! It's easy to see you've not been in this game for fifteen years.
Let's see, it's easy to figure out the format of a file so long as it's in XML. Provided, of course, that you know the character encoding, of course. And that you've got a device that can actually read the media. And provided you can license the patent on the compression algorithm. And provided the XML doesn't include any binary sections. So, no problems, then.
That's true of course, but it doesn't alter the fact that it gives Tony Bliar the opportunity to muzzle the institution which successfully pointed out his use of blatant dishonesty in pulling this country into an illegal war.
Nor that he's taking it.
Not really...
In theory the Commission are 'civil servants', although in fact they are normally nominated from among the ranks of former senior politicians. They are nominated by individual member governments and it often seems that the people nominated are people it is considered convenient to get out of the way of national politics. Not all are of the highest calibre, and those who were are often past their best. So the first way you can look at the commission is as a retirement home for failed senior politicians.
Next, the commission effectively serves two masters. The real power in the EU is in the hands of the 'Council of Ministers'. The Council of Ministers is just that - a meeting of all the ministers of all the member governments. This is as if the USA was ruled by a council of all the state governors. But there is, additionally, the Parliament, which has very little actual power but is directly elected so has stronger claims to legitimacy.
All these are relatively young institutions and the power relationships between them have not yet really been played out, and anything happening in EU politics has to be seen partly as the individual states, the Council of Ministers, the Parliament and the Commission all vying for power. The long term trend is that the influence nd reputation of the Parliament seems to be increasing slowly, while the Commission has been badly tarnished by a series of scandals.
What is happening here is the Commission is playing the Council of Ministers off against the Parliament. The Commission wants patents. The Council of Ministers started off pro-patent but is now badly split and may become anti-patent. The Parliament is at present anti-patent.
This may sound good for us but in practice I don't think any of these institutions fundamentally cares very much about the patent issue. What they care about is establishing the pecking order between the institutions, and software patents is just the ball currently in play.
I don't get this. If a politician says to the electors 'if you elect me, I will provide service X as a municipal service', and the electors do elect him and he does provide the service, what's the problem? Isn't that what democracy is all about?
For the benefit of those of us who live outside the US of A, can someone explain why on earth someone would want to ban municipalities from offering services their citizens want? Surely it's up to the citizens of the municipality to democratically elect the representatives who offer to provide the tax/services package they want? If not, why not?