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Offset Bad Code, With Bad Code Offsets
An anonymous reader writes "Two weeks ago, The Daily WTF's Alex Papadimoulis announced Bad Code Offsets, a join venture between many big names in the software development community (including StackOverflow's Jeff Atwood and Jon Skeet and SourceGear's Eric Sink). The premise is that you can offset bad code by purchasing Bad Code Offsets (much in the same way a carbon-footprint is offset). The profits are donated to Free Software projects which work to eliminate bad code, such as the Apache Foundation and FreeBSD. The first cheques were sent out earlier today." Hopefully, they work better than carbon offsets, actually.
Why??
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The idea is ammusing and having the money donated to a open source project is cool but the prices are a tad high for my blood...
which work to eliminate bad code, such as the Apache Foundation and FreeBSD.
Wow, that's a quite direct attack.
* (carbon, code, whatever) offsets are really the Papal indulgences of the 21st century.
Test your net with Netalyzr
"Hopefully, they work better than carbon offsets, actually."
Way to ensure this whole thread goes off track, by trolling on an unrelated and politically charged topic. And with an example poorly chosen as proof of anything, at that.
This is the voice of World Control. I bring you Peace.
I can't really see how Microsoft can afford this...
... if the bad-code offset is a penalty after-the-fact for putting out bad code.
And no, I'm not going to RTFA. This is a horrible idea.
You stereotypers are all the same...
Are these payments received related to the programs used for global warming calculations?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
...to yet another place it will not work.
A single incorrect critical line of code has the potential to bring down a system just like a single loose coupling on a remote control aircraft will bring turn it into a pile of broken wood. In some things any less than 100% just won't do the job. You can't offset that.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I firmly expect the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to purchase billions of US dollars worth of code offsets, to donate to Microsoft Corporation.
Reply with your email address and I will send you my PayPal info! Thanks for saving Christmas^H^H^H^H^Hthe environment.
Computer Science is all about trying to find the right wrench to bang in the right screw. -T.Cumbo?
From the "Bad Code FAQ":
Offsetting bad code also provides a salve to your conscience.
I wonder how that line would go over in a project plan? Nowhere in the FAQ does it ever mention actually removing or fixing the Bad Code for which they are willing to sell an Offset. Ironically, if they advocated, promoted, and actually assisted in that effort, their market for Bad Code Offsets would diminish. This smells like something that would have been pitched to the VC's back in the mid-90s as a means of generating revenue until a real product was ready.
As a Catholic, let me tell all you greens and bad coders that letting people buy their way out of their sins just gets stuff nailed to your door. But good luck with it anyway.
on Technical Debt. Why make it higher? Carbon offsets are necessary because it's cheaper to pollute and there are no interest expenses. Not true for technical debt.
the world would be better off if you just kept it to yourself. No need for the bad code offsets.
With that said, I have yet to run nto a developer who confessed to writing bad code. I know my code is all peaches and cream!
-- Many men would appreciate a woman's mind more if they could fondle it
Or slashdot would go broke in a hurry.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
No, it really is. It advocates that 3rd world countries can only advance to 1st world status by polluting... a lot. Instead of trying to develop these countries without all the pollution we had to do in the past, they are basically saying that 1st world countries have to subsidize that pollution advancement by lowering their own pollution in response.
It's a totally assanine proposition and basically is advocating that it's fine for 3rd world countries to pollute if they advance themselves up.
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
Am I the only one who read the summary as saying Apache and BSD are bad code?
The day Alex announced this was the day I finally stopped reading the DailyWTF. It's gotten worse and worse over the past few years, with stories that were so embellished that you stop caring. The fun part about the site was laughing at real IT blunders. But Alex and his creative writing team overdid the writing to the point where the stories were often incredibly far from the real fact (the original submitters would often explain the "real" story in the comments". This might be bearable if their writing wasn't so awful. But often they interchange important character names, have horribly confusing grammatical constructs, and generally just make a mess out of the stories.
Then to top it off, Alex shows up occasionally and comes up with nonsense like this instead of posting another story.
I'm done. Yes, it was amusing for awhile, but I'm moving on.
There is no amount of offsets you can buy for Windows ME.
It seems like a lot of people don't get this.
It's like a swear box. You know, in an attempt to get out of the habit of swearing, you put a dollar in box every time you swear. The contents of the box goes to charity.
This is exactly the same, except that in this case the habit you're trying to get out of is releasing bad code.
We all sneak out bad code from time to time - "it's ugly but it works; I can clean it up, or I can ship it and have an extra hour doing [insert recreation of choice]". The 'swear box' makes cleaning it up seem more attractive. And if you don't, a worthy cause benefits.
The analogy to carbon offsets is pretty weak, but I guess it's wry humour of a sort.
The author of the tagline should buy a grammar offset for misusing that unfortunate comma.
Wow, kill me. Is he the guy that thinks that you can only discuss programming in English because other human languages would lack terms for stuff such as "linked lists" and so on? The guy that thinks that Stackoverflow, essentially a simplified web forum that could be designed by a semi-literate PHP monkey in 48 hours of work, is a major feat of software engineering?
There was a time when you had to do more than become a famous blogger's pet to become a well-known name in the industry.
Oh that's right, instead we should have 3rd world countries use all the affordable clean energy sources that secretly exist somewhere.
There is no bad code, only bad developers. Can you offset one of these jokers?
Anyone else notice that this site supports the Apache Software Foundation and yet the server itself runs Microsoft IIS 6? I find that just a bit strange.
Zorix
will determine that the big name software developers will have to pay for their Bad Code Offsets to the the non-big name developers. But then it will turn out that the non-big name developers don't give a shit, so then coding for anything beyond 'hello world' will become economically infeasible.
Maybe we can sell Stupidity Offsets to dump rich people, I can think of a couple dozen people in Hollywood who would qualify to buy these, they would go towards educating people in universities on the subject of physics, chemistry, and biology.
Oh and I get to keep 10% of the money for my own "Operating Expenses".
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Where are these third world countries getting the money to buy carbon offsets? And why would they since they don't have any laws mandating them? You have this completely backwards.
Carbon offsets are purchased by companies in first world countries which have laws setting CO2 quotas, or by rich yuppies who want to feel good about their energy-exorbitant house/car/jet. They do so because it is cheaper to buy bogus carbon offsets from third world countries than it is to actually lower their own CO2 generation.
I think you have this term confused with something else.
Richard G blasted into space last year, and to offset the tons of jet fuel his spaceship burned, he purchased some carbon offsets. At a talk in Austin earlier this year, he made what I thought was an interesting point: carbon offsets might not work as effectively as planned, but they help get you in the habit of doing something about the problem. When/if we discover a better way, then you've already got the habit formed -- you just switch it to whatever this new method might be.
I'm sure there are some flaws in that but it was an interesting take I hadn't heard before.
-ryry
Now if we could have a tax on bad code on the other hand...
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Code offsets are actually the 2009 version of buying code indulgences, which had to be done at a special room in Carnegie Mellon in the 50's. Prior to that there were animal sacrifices, sometimes human - but only if there was smoking equipment.
OK, I'm in the process of debugging somebody else's 43,000 lines of FORTRAN code. (I hate FORTRAN...). What I see in here would require a number of offsets which would cost approximately the entire US GDP to buy. This is not the first time I have seen code like this, either.
With all the hot air over-inflated Atwood and pals inject into the intertubes...
you had me at #!
All lines of code are not created equal. In some languages one line could be the entire program.
[X] Real prOGRammeRS USe STudLYCApS // bad code to be offset with the purchase of a Bad Code Offset (on topic)
[X] In Soviet Russia, bad code offsets YOU!
[X] Ask Tiger Woods wife to fix it instead - if she can beat Tiger Woods driver with any old club on her first try, she can probably fix bad code just by looking at it. Think female Chuck Norris.
[X] camelCaseStyle (humps in middle)
[X] ProperCaseStyle
[X] Title_Case_Style
[X] classic_style
[X] InJavaAllClassNamesMustBeAsLongAsPossible.AndRandomMixOfProperCaseAndALL_CAPS_YOU_IGNORANT_CLOD
[X] case CowboyNeal:
[X] HITLERcase - raises thread.terminate();
What a wonderful way to piss some programmers off! Buy a bunch of these and hand them out as Christmas gifts!!
I can certainly think of some that could use them.
If I purchase some credits in their name, do you think they'll get the hint?
...or else I release my bad code.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
I stopped reading thedailywtf when Alex renamed "wtf" to "worse than failure", because "double-yoo-tee-eff" was too offensive for his deaf grandmother's ears.
The point of carbon credits is to redistribute wealth*. Here, the FOSS projects that don't get the same funding as the closed/private industry projects are given an alternate source of funding.
*Or so I've been told by people I've talked to from DOE. Sounds logical enough, given it's cheaper to give a developing country run-of-the-mill equipment to upgrade their obsolete equipment than develop state-of-the-art equipment.
My webcomic
I work in the climate science department of a well known university in E Anglia, UK, and am proud to be the owner of a 4 x 4 and also an excruciatingly bad programmer. No, sorry, I got that wrong, I have no car, walk to work, and only write in equisitely structured C++.
You can all assuage your guilt from driving those 4 x 4s and writing all that crap code in Python. Ruby or whatever by sending me large sums of money, and I will continue my low guilt lifestyle as long as the cheques keep coming.
You can carry on shopping at malls in your 4 x 4s, and writing your terrible code.
We will all be happy. I will get rich. Everyone wins. We save the planet. What's the problem?
I'm gonna need a bigger calculator to find out how much I owe these guys.
This one doesn't handle factorials.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
I first thought it would be like this:
-Open Source/Company/person submits short blocks of crap code
-People sign up to fix crap code blocks (fixing their code karma in the process)
-People gain karma points that allow them to post more code that needs fixin'
-Fixed code gets merged... no more crap!
Sounded interesting that way. (instead of a money grab)
That claim of failure says:
But that "argument" is a strawman. Those carbon offsets are not primarily designed to change behavior by making them more expensive. They're designed to charge money for polluting behavior that is then spent reducing pollution:
Economics says that the extra charge will also tend to curb the more expensive behavior. But if that's not happening, it's capitalism that's wrong. The carbon offsets are still funding the carbon reduction projects. Until there's proof that those projects don't reduce carbon, that argument against carbon offsets is a fallacy.
Now, it's possible that the carbon reduction projects funded by carbon offsets don't reduce as much carbon as the offsets pay to keep producing. Which just means that the carbon offsets should be more expensive (or offset less carbon for the same price, and make it up in volume). It's also certain that carbon pollution is subsidized in many ways that mask the true cost (which generally comes when cleaning up the mess that carbon pollution eventually makes, which is vastly more expensive than the polluting system cost to operate, but which others pay for). The carbon offset prices might just be too small and get lost in the much larger economics of the subsidies, and indeed in artificial costs making carbon reduction project prices higher (droughts in Africa interfering with solar projects, for example).
But just because some travel outfit tried and failed to make money on a carbon offset program doesn't mean that its fallacious arguments for dropping the program are worth repeating.
--
make install -not war
Must be April fools day again.
This seems to be more of a fun way to give to charity than the guilt-driven indulgence scam that is carbon offsets.
/. editors buy Bad Journalism Offsets for every poorly written summary they write. Spelling errors cost a little, grammatical errors cost a bit more, and flamebait comments cost a day's salary.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Sure there are. I'd say curing cancer would just about offset Windows ME. If you save as many lives as you ruin then it's even, right?
I hate printers.
Clearly the correct system would be cap and trade. We'll say that only 100,000 lines of bad code can be produced a year and then auction them off. By 2050, we'll be down to only 500 lines of bad code a year.
The entire point of a carbon trading system is to raise energy costs, which changes the cost/benefit analysis of investments in efficiency.
It's preferable to a carbon tax because private companies and brokers make the money instead of the government. They have to put their riches somewhere, thus it becomes private capital for business investment. And it's more flexible than a carbon tax because carbon brokers can change their rates without an act of Congress or federal rulemaking.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
What's the going rate on that whooshing sound over your head?
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Even if it cured cancer and AIDS next week, Windows ME would still be on the naughty list for decades to come.
carbon offsets: making up for your pollution by supporting green projects. /. comment by posting something really insightful on someones blog.
bad code offsets: making up for your bad code by supporting open source projects.
blonde joke offsets: making up for your blonde jokes by donating to Gloria Steinem.
idiocy offsets: making up for voting W by supporting inner city youth projects.
netnerd offsets: making up for that
What a waste of time.
10x $5k offset = ideal gift for linus torvalds
Do we know that he was banned? Might he not have just gotten fed up and walked away himself? As I remember, TopCod3r was a sincere and gifted troll. He wrote comments that were funny and insightful to anybody with two functioning brain cells. Yet half the comments that followed were TDWTFers arguing about how misguided he was.
You're either not a programmer or an incredibly good programmer. I've been guilty many times of knowing there's a better way to do something, realizing there was a quick solution that was horrible in some way (difficult to maintain or extend) and saying, "screw it" to get something done quickly. I might even write a comment that says something to the effect of "don't ever do this, it's really bad" to those who look at the code and might decide to learn from it.
Of course, all they learn from it is that it's ok to write bad code as long as you acknowledge it in the comments. So I do feel guilty about it, and if I have free time I might go back and fix some of those things. They don't get fixed often enough though.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
If it was cost effective to install greener technology and produce less carbon today, companies would do it and save money.
If it becomes cost effective TOMORROW, they'll do it TOMORROW to save money.
In the meantime, the cost of carbon offsets has done nothing but cost them, and thus every one of their customers, money.
I know faulty slashdot moderation has long since become rampant, but parent getting "Insightful" threw my head spinning. The premise of carbon credits is that it's not cost-effective, now or tomorrow, to lower emissions, because there is no cost to companies to produce carbon. If we impose a cost on emitters, then it becomes cost-effective, now and tomorrow, to lower emissions, because emitting has become a cost. Where's the "Insight" in simply failing to understand that concept?
Of course, carbon trading is not just a theory. It has been empirically shown to work.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
Attitudes follow behavior, somebody that does lots of car driving must have mod points in this story...
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.