rant

Mailing lists as community channels - ugh

I’m not blogging as often these days; as you know I don’t traditionally ‘do’ short blog posts - in my book if something is worth blogging about, it’s worth making sure it holds together as an argument, and as a piece of writing generally - and a combined lack of time of anything I’m motivated (or permitted) to talk about has left the site a little bereft of content. Luckily my OGRE Twitteris stocked with more frequent and less lovingly crafted status updates on what I’m doing there.

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Those who can, do. Those who can't, patent business methods.

legal patents rant

There was a time when patents represented innovation. Thanks to the relaxing of patent rules as championed by the US patent office in a blatant attempt to curry favour with dubious business interests, and make a bit of money at the same time, those days are gone. These days, patents are a tool for those who have no business model other than litigation, either because their primary business model failed, or by design because filing patents and hoping a lawsuit or three will stick (or rather, be settled out of court) is easier than actually building something good.

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How hard is this question?

COPPA forum ogre rant

Every day I get at least one email from people asking me to manually activate their OGRE forumaccount because they answered the COPPAquestion wrong: Honestly, how hard is this to answer correctly? *sigh*

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