It wasn't advertized for long, but the archive managed to catch one of Apple's first pages about Xcode 3.0, which mentions this nifty feature:
Step back
Step. Step. Step. Step. Step. Drat! If stepping through code wears you down, you'll love more forgiving debugger in Xcode 3.0. If you step too far, you can rewind to the previous point. That's right, Xcode 3.0 has gone non-linear. Simply click the run button to update your application and start it up. Hover over a variable in your code to see its value in a tooltip. Then just pause when you need to debug. If you go too far, just rewind. No need to start over. No need to set up a debug session. No need to switch focus. Just code, build, run, and debug in Xcode 3.0. What ever happened to it? Hopefully it will be included in some not-too-distant-future version.
To sum up and clarify: you seem to regard "intellectual property" as referring to rights that can be exclusively possessed and/or controlled (where the possession and control is subject to limits), but not owned, and inasmuch as the phrase is understood to mean exactly that, I don't think object to its use.
But unfortunately the phrase "intellectual property" is too often thought to refer to either copyrights or to copyrightable works and carries with it a connotation that either of these things can or should be owned.
There are plenty of types of property which can have a limited life and/or be subject to restrictions: take, for example, a 50 year lease over real estate, an option that has to be exercised within 20 years, a 1 year T-Bill. Neither the restrictions nor the limited life prevent these assets being "property" as a legal or economic matter. Thank you for citing those examples. I don't think I meant to suggest that those things cannot be regarded as property, but I can see how my comments came off that way.
I think the problem is that when the term "intellectual property" is used by non-lawyers, the speaker often isn't referring to the kind of property you're thinking of. For example, when you hear the term "intellectual property" when copyrights are discussed, you probably think that the "property" is the copyright (which I think is probably correct), whereas most laypeople will think that the "property" is the work that is under copyright (which I think is incorrect).
In other words, most people seem to think of a copyrightable work as something that can be owned exclusively by a single person. And it seems to me that they're misinformed in that regard. I suspect that a suitable way to think of copyrights is more along these lines: (1) each copyrightable work belongs to no one (or everyone); (2) the right to copy and redistribute each copyrightable work is owned (but perhaps not initially possessed) by everyone; however, (3) each said right may be exclusively possessed for a limited time.
I.e., copyright is more like a lease over real estate than outright ownership of real estate.
I think that's the basic understanding that most people should probably have about copyrights, but it becomes harder for that understanding to be the norm when, for example, Apple makes the meaningless statement, "don't steal music" (as if the music itself could be stolen). If they'd simply said, "do not infringe copyrights", I think we'd all be off on a better foot.
All the same thing apply to Patents as well, yet patents are considered Intellectual Property. By some, yes, and quite incorrectly so. The phrase "intellectual property" is like something from a pidgin dialect: It's a blunt term and fails to reflect what actually happens (and what should happen) in law.
Here's the problem: implicit in the term "property" is the notion that "this thing is mine; you cannot ever have it unless I say so, and when I die it will belong exclusively to someone appointed by me".
With copyrights and patents, the notion you should have (and what's codified in law) is, "this thing belongs to everyone, but for the next few years I need (for the most part) to be the only one who has authority over distribution and use so that I can collect some well-earned money for my creative efforts."
When people use the phrase "intellectual property", they're expressing a kind of wish fulfillment: they're trying to spread the meme that ideas can or should be held from Public Domain indefinitely and without reasonable limitations on exclusivity. That stance is antithetical to copyright and patent law, whose ultimate goals are not the mere financial rewarding of holders, but instead the "{promotion of] the progress of science and the useful arts", which is helped immensely by fairly-timed releases of copyrights and patents into the Public Domain.
The use of the term here is not necessarily incorrect Yes, it is necessarily incorrect.
The letter and spirit of copyright law both indicate that copyrights cannot be owned. Rather, they can be held for a limited time, and in that time one may have an exclusive right to copy that is subject to certain restrictions (such as Fair Use).
A copyright is not like a car or a piece of land or the knickknacks you keep in your closet: unlike a copyright, each of those things can be passed down to an unlimited number of generations, each of whom may reasonably keep those tangible objects from the world. In contrast, copyrighted materials are expected to enter the Public Domain after the creator has been given a fair opportunity to profit from his or her act of creation. It's that act that should be (and what was meant to be) rewarded---not the non-act of indefinitely keeping things from the rest of the world.
The whole point of copyright is to encourage people to contribute works to society so that everyone ultimately profits---not to restrict whole generations from accessing and re-distributing works that are (a) by long-dead creators and (b) often derived from materials that are already in the Public Domain.
That's why it's not "property": because one can "own" a copyright indefinitely or without limit.
Are you saying that there really is the "jocks" and "nerds" thing in American schools? I don't live in the U.S. and always thought that it was just something that American TV programmes made up, because it seemed so silly! It varies in intensity across different localities (e.g., you tend to see it more as you move away from urban areas) and between different kinds of schools (e.g., I think it occurs more in schools funded by local governments). And yes, media programmers certainly exaggerate. But that social dynamic does exist (although the actual words "jock" and "nerd" may not be used by the young people trapped therein).
And I think it's propped up in large part by some side effects of "School Spirit"---namely, a kind of mob mentality favoring one's home town and a desire among some to see the local athletes as kinds of heroes. "School Spirit" might be the second most popular religion in the U.S. (after nominal Christianity).
Still matches the same, though, because * also matches the empty string. Well, yes, that's what a command line interpreter must conclude. But the actual text in question was written for people, and unlike command line interpreters we're allowed to infer meaning from style.
That, and '****ball' is funnier if you read the stars as indicating censorship. (:
I'm pretty sure those are wildcards, not censorship bars. But if we're going to take '*' as a command-line-style wildcard, then we would expect only one '*'; i.e. '*ball'.
What we really need is to have high schools that don't go out of their way to reinforce the perception that going to state for ****ball is the pinnacle of achievement. Right. I suspect that a huge step in this direction would be the dissociation of organized sports teams from schools.
A friend of mine from Belgium was telling me that's how they do it over there. In a single high school you'll find about the same proportion of students who are athletes as in a school in the U.S., but they represent lots of different local (competing) teams.
Apparently, it goes a long way towards preventing formations of mob mentalities and everything that goes with it.
So e.g., there's no such thing as a school pep rally in support of one sports team and they don't even have anything like the divide between "jocks" and "nerds" (or at least, not to the extent seen in schools in the U.S.).
I don't see it happening in the U.S. anytime soon, but who knows? It could start small, in a place with semi-rational school administrators trying to free up budgets, for example. With the promise of tax reductions, many things can gain political support. (:
Sorry; minor nit:
The only problem is, that's not your decision to make. That's the content owner's decision. :s/content owner/copyright holder/
One cannot *own* content. Rather, one may *hold*, for a *limited time*, an exclusive right to copy, *subject to some limitations* (such as Fair Use).
Apologies if it seems like a trifling point, but I think it's important to keep this distinction in mind, and worth repeating until the vocabulary of this debate reflects history and reality:
Copyrightable works were never intended to be *property*. They were intended to be given *freely* to society after their creators were each given a chance to be fairly compensated for the act of *creation*.
Well, look at it this way: XNU is the kernel. Leopard (which the Open Group now says is "UNIX") is the entire operating system, of which XNU is one part. So XNU by itself really is not UNIX. Analogously, you are not your circulatory system.
Only a masochist could (1) start out as an SVN user, (2) try merging with bk, hg or git and then (3) *choose* to go back to using SVN.
people don't stay on svn for the merging
That much is obvious. (:
they stay for the tools - EVERYTHING supports svn and git is barely a blip on the ide/gui/docs screen.
Ok.
If some git fan got off their keester and actually wrote the things necessary for mainstream adoption
Ok, so only a masochist *or* someone uncomfortable with command line & scripting environments would choose to go back to SVN *for now*.
I don't mean to start a flame war; I just stated a fact that applies to the kinds of programmers who feel comfortable writing their own scripts to support their development processes.
until then your just waxing on about everyone adopting a nitch tool.
Actually, no. I don't care whether people adopt git en masse. I was merely correcting someone who wrote, "It's trivial to branch and merge in SVN."
Not only is that utterly false, but, if we restrict our discussion to uses from command line environments, we can plainly see that git, Mercurial and Bitkeeper are all demonstrably faster (by a few orders of magnitude!) and far, far easier to use than SVN. If you first try them and later think I'm wrong on this point, I would love to hear why you think so.
As for integration in everyone's favorite IDE (and potential subsequent mainstream adoption), I personally don't care. But it'll probably happen in the next few years in response to user demand. And for people who really need IDE integration, I certainly recommend *against* using git or Mercurial for now.
WTF are you talking about? It's trivial to branch and merge in SVN.
It's true that branching is trivial with SVN. And merging can be done. But if you think *merging* is "trivial" with SVN, then you really are using a special definition of the word "trivial".
If you want to know what really trivial merging is, then try it with Mercurial, Bitkeeper (download the trial version), and/or git. The command-line interface is pretty much the same in each case.
Only a masochist could (1) start out as an SVN user, (2) try merging with bk, hg or git and then (3) *choose* to go back to using SVN.
Please note the term "C pre-processor" can be very misleading in this context; it is not the best term to use when referring to Cfront.
Cfront parsed, analyzed & type-checked C++ code and generated the equivalent C code. It fits the formal description of a compiler and should be referred to as such.
I understand that "C pre-processor" can mean "a compiler whose target language is C", but usually it means "the program (or a component of a C or C++ front end) that processes directives beginning with '#' and resolves macro expansions."
And calling Cfront "just" a C pre-processor is even worse. It was as complicated as any native-code-generating C++ compiler of its later years (when such compilers started to appear on the market), with the exception that it generated C code instead of native assembler code.
Re:Static Analyzer Run != Code Review
on
PMD Applied
·
· Score: 1
Static analyzers are very good at catching *certain* *limited* *kinds* of obvious and likely or conceivable bugs...
To be fair, good static analysis tools can catch a LOT of non-obvious bugs.
Very true; and I've seen SAs catch some very non-obvious bugs so I shouldn't have said "obvious". (:
MS Research's SLAM project found a bug in the parallel port driver, a race condition that was triggered if a program was closing the port at the same time the port was being physically removed from the computer. (Hey, it could happen if you have a laptop docking station.) This bug went undetected for like a decade to be found automatically.
You might debate the value of finding that particular bug, but static analysis can do more than find obvious bugs. (In fact, in some cases, they can prove a program free of a particular class of bugs. Let's see you do that with code reviews.)
It can be easier to prove correctness if contract programming is employed. But in general I agree.
Re:Static Analyzer Run != Code Review
on
PMD Applied
·
· Score: 1
I agree with your point that PMD is not a substitute for a REAL code review, undertaken by a small group of talented programmers.
Ok, we agree so far...
Unfortunately, these rarely happen, so PMD starts to be a very useful second line of defense. For the pragmatic among us, using PMD makes much sense. I wish it wasn't so, but I find that it is.
Why do you wish that using PMD wouldn't make sense?
I think perhaps you missed my other point: Code review is not a substitute for running a static analyzer.
Static analysis is a Good Thing.
Peer review is Good Thing.
To use *both* is best: both reveal bugs that the other might not catch.
One of the great virtues of static analyzers is that they help you to weed out lots of simpler issues *before* you go into peer review of code, and that can save you and your peers a good deal of time.
For the pragmatic among us, using a layered approach to catching bugs makes the most sense. If a pointy-haired boss takes away any of those layers, that's a separate issue.
Static Analyzer Run != Code Review
on
PMD Applied
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Enter PMD, an open-source Java static analyzer. Think of it as a code review in a box.
No, no, no!
Neither of these development tools is a substitute for the other. Static analyzers are very good at catching *certain* *limited* *kinds* of obvious and likely or conceivable bugs in a short span of time, but in general they cannot deduce the intentions of the developer -- let alone the desires of the user. That's where your peers come in: they review your designs before you write the code and review patches prior to merging them into a revision control system. Static analyzers are *debugging tools*: use them while coding and/or when you run regresssion tests.
Olly: Folks, we here at the Precious Roy Home Shopping Network know how hard it can be to maintain a blog in the EU.
Sifl: Oh, you know the problem I've been having with my blog!
Olly: Sifl, you've got some serious-ass blogging-in-the-European-Union problems. But folks, with the new Precious Roy (R) Stealth Blogging Kit, you can self-aggrandize like there's no tomorrow!
[Olly continues with lots of outrageously false claims and eventually has yet another psychotic episode.]
Pray tell, how exactly does FairPlay infringe upon a user's Fair Use rights?
It does so to the degree that it prevents users from exercising rights granted to them under the Fair Use section of copyright law. Example: DRM'd audio files downloaded from the iTunes music store cannot be played with software other than what Apple distributes. But such a use would be fair.
Be it the little known loop hole of secretly burning off your music and re-ripping it into your favorite codec or the more nefarious path known as fair play.
Indeed, Apple's FairPlay is quite nefarious as it infringes upon the copyrights of consumers (namely, the Fair Use rights granted in copyright law).
Oh, but that isn't really a path for *users*. Maybe you meant PlayFair (now known as Hymn)? But it's not at all nefarious to *use* Hymn. Copyright law explicitly allows that. (You might have some issues with distributing Hymn though, but then most users don't need to do that.)
Is it really that risky? Does the success of a console necessarily depend that much on the number of operations per second that can be performed by the CPU? If so, how do you explain the fact that the DS is (if you go by console sales estimates) more popular than the PSP (which has a more powerful CPU)?
Also, +1 to chrismcdirty; cost really is an important factor -- both for developers and consumers. I'll probably buy a PS3, but not before the price drops to something near US$200. (And I was planning on getting Wii Sports anyway, so this is pretty much what I'll be paying for the Wii.)
Finally, note that the low cost of hardware production for the wii makes it possible for them to make a profit on the *consoles* and not just the games.
So really, their strategy seems as low-risk as can be: they probably would have been taking a *higher* financial risk if they had tried to max out ops/sec in their CPUs. And they've already proven that high performance doesn't necessarily translate into a more popular system in this generation, so really, why should they feel pressure to compete on raw CPU power?
Slashdot Mirror
Step. Step. Step. Step. Step. Drat! If stepping through code wears you down, you'll love more forgiving debugger in Xcode 3.0. If you step too far, you can rewind to the previous point. That's right, Xcode 3.0 has gone non-linear. Simply click the run button to update your application and start it up. Hover over a variable in your code to see its value in a tooltip. Then just pause when you need to debug. If you go too far, just rewind. No need to start over. No need to set up a debug session. No need to switch focus. Just code, build, run, and debug in Xcode 3.0. What ever happened to it? Hopefully it will be included in some not-too-distant-future version.
To sum up and clarify: you seem to regard "intellectual property" as referring to rights that can be exclusively possessed and/or controlled (where the possession and control is subject to limits), but not owned, and inasmuch as the phrase is understood to mean exactly that, I don't think object to its use.
But unfortunately the phrase "intellectual property" is too often thought to refer to either copyrights or to copyrightable works and carries with it a connotation that either of these things can or should be owned.
I think the problem is that when the term "intellectual property" is used by non-lawyers, the speaker often isn't referring to the kind of property you're thinking of. For example, when you hear the term "intellectual property" when copyrights are discussed, you probably think that the "property" is the copyright (which I think is probably correct), whereas most laypeople will think that the "property" is the work that is under copyright (which I think is incorrect).
In other words, most people seem to think of a copyrightable work as something that can be owned exclusively by a single person. And it seems to me that they're misinformed in that regard. I suspect that a suitable way to think of copyrights is more along these lines: (1) each copyrightable work belongs to no one (or everyone); (2) the right to copy and redistribute each copyrightable work is owned (but perhaps not initially possessed) by everyone; however, (3) each said right may be exclusively possessed for a limited time.
I.e., copyright is more like a lease over real estate than outright ownership of real estate.
I think that's the basic understanding that most people should probably have about copyrights, but it becomes harder for that understanding to be the norm when, for example, Apple makes the meaningless statement, "don't steal music" (as if the music itself could be stolen). If they'd simply said, "do not infringe copyrights", I think we'd all be off on a better foot.
Here's the problem: implicit in the term "property" is the notion that "this thing is mine; you cannot ever have it unless I say so, and when I die it will belong exclusively to someone appointed by me".
With copyrights and patents, the notion you should have (and what's codified in law) is, "this thing belongs to everyone, but for the next few years I need (for the most part) to be the only one who has authority over distribution and use so that I can collect some well-earned money for my creative efforts."
When people use the phrase "intellectual property", they're expressing a kind of wish fulfillment: they're trying to spread the meme that ideas can or should be held from Public Domain indefinitely and without reasonable limitations on exclusivity. That stance is antithetical to copyright and patent law, whose ultimate goals are not the mere financial rewarding of holders, but instead the "{promotion of] the progress of science and the useful arts", which is helped immensely by fairly-timed releases of copyrights and patents into the Public Domain.
Spread the word. oops;
The letter and spirit of copyright law both indicate that copyrights cannot be owned. Rather, they can be held for a limited time, and in that time one may have an exclusive right to copy that is subject to certain restrictions (such as Fair Use).
A copyright is not like a car or a piece of land or the knickknacks you keep in your closet: unlike a copyright, each of those things can be passed down to an unlimited number of generations, each of whom may reasonably keep those tangible objects from the world. In contrast, copyrighted materials are expected to enter the Public Domain after the creator has been given a fair opportunity to profit from his or her act of creation. It's that act that should be (and what was meant to be) rewarded---not the non-act of indefinitely keeping things from the rest of the world.
The whole point of copyright is to encourage people to contribute works to society so that everyone ultimately profits---not to restrict whole generations from accessing and re-distributing works that are (a) by long-dead creators and (b) often derived from materials that are already in the Public Domain.
That's why it's not "property": because one can "own" a copyright indefinitely or without limit.
Spread the word.
And I think it's propped up in large part by some side effects of "School Spirit"---namely, a kind of mob mentality favoring one's home town and a desire among some to see the local athletes as kinds of heroes. "School Spirit" might be the second most popular religion in the U.S. (after nominal Christianity).
That, and '****ball' is funnier if you read the stars as indicating censorship. (:
A friend of mine from Belgium was telling me that's how they do it over there. In a single high school you'll find about the same proportion of students who are athletes as in a school in the U.S., but they represent lots of different local (competing) teams.
Apparently, it goes a long way towards preventing formations of mob mentalities and everything that goes with it.
So e.g., there's no such thing as a school pep rally in support of one sports team and they don't even have anything like the divide between "jocks" and "nerds" (or at least, not to the extent seen in schools in the U.S.).
I don't see it happening in the U.S. anytime soon, but who knows? It could start small, in a place with semi-rational school administrators trying to free up budgets, for example. With the promise of tax reductions, many things can gain political support. (:
One cannot *own* content. Rather, one may *hold*, for a *limited time*, an exclusive right to copy, *subject to some limitations* (such as Fair Use).
Apologies if it seems like a trifling point, but I think it's important to keep this distinction in mind, and worth repeating until the vocabulary of this debate reflects history and reality:
Copyrightable works were never intended to be *property*. They were intended to be given *freely* to society after their creators were each given a chance to be fairly compensated for the act of *creation*.
Well, look at it this way: XNU is the kernel. Leopard (which the Open Group now says is "UNIX") is the entire operating system, of which XNU is one part. So XNU by itself really is not UNIX. Analogously, you are not your circulatory system.
I don't mean to start a flame war; I just stated a fact that applies to the kinds of programmers who feel comfortable writing their own scripts to support their development processes.Actually, no. I don't care whether people adopt git en masse. I was merely correcting someone who wrote, "It's trivial to branch and merge in SVN."
Not only is that utterly false, but, if we restrict our discussion to uses from command line environments, we can plainly see that git, Mercurial and Bitkeeper are all demonstrably faster (by a few orders of magnitude!) and far, far easier to use than SVN. If you first try them and later think I'm wrong on this point, I would love to hear why you think so.
As for integration in everyone's favorite IDE (and potential subsequent mainstream adoption), I personally don't care. But it'll probably happen in the next few years in response to user demand. And for people who really need IDE integration, I certainly recommend *against* using git or Mercurial for now.
It's true that branching is trivial with SVN. And merging can be done. But if you think *merging* is "trivial" with SVN, then you really are using a special definition of the word "trivial".
If you want to know what really trivial merging is, then try it with Mercurial, Bitkeeper (download the trial version), and/or git. The command-line interface is pretty much the same in each case.
Only a masochist could (1) start out as an SVN user, (2) try merging with bk, hg or git and then (3) *choose* to go back to using SVN.
"Heck, C++ was just a C pre-processor."
Please note the term "C pre-processor" can be very misleading in this context; it is not the best term to use when referring to Cfront.
Cfront parsed, analyzed & type-checked C++ code and generated the equivalent C code. It fits the formal description of a compiler and should be referred to as such.
I understand that "C pre-processor" can mean "a compiler whose target language is C", but usually it means "the program (or a component of a C or C++ front end) that processes directives beginning with '#' and resolves macro expansions."
And calling Cfront "just" a C pre-processor is even worse. It was as complicated as any native-code-generating C++ compiler of its later years (when such compilers started to appear on the market), with the exception that it generated C code instead of native assembler code.
Ok, we agree so far...
Why do you wish that using PMD wouldn't make sense?
I think perhaps you missed my other point: Code review is not a substitute for running a static analyzer.
Static analysis is a Good Thing.
Peer review is Good Thing.
To use *both* is best: both reveal bugs that the other might not catch.
One of the great virtues of static analyzers is that they help you to weed out lots of simpler issues *before* you go into peer review of code, and that can save you and your peers a good deal of time.
For the pragmatic among us, using a layered approach to catching bugs makes the most sense. If a pointy-haired boss takes away any of those layers, that's a separate issue.
No, no, no!
Neither of these development tools is a substitute for the other. Static analyzers are very good at catching *certain* *limited* *kinds* of obvious and likely or conceivable bugs in a short span of time, but in general they cannot deduce the intentions of the developer -- let alone the desires of the user. That's where your peers come in: they review your designs before you write the code and review patches prior to merging them into a revision control system. Static analyzers are *debugging tools*: use them while coding and/or when you run regresssion tests.
Why wasn't that obvious to the submitter?
Olly: Folks, we here at the Precious Roy Home Shopping Network know how hard it can be to maintain a blog in the EU.
Sifl: Oh, you know the problem I've been having with my blog!
Olly: Sifl, you've got some serious-ass blogging-in-the-European-Union problems. But folks, with the new Precious Roy (R) Stealth Blogging Kit, you can self-aggrandize like there's no tomorrow!
[Olly continues with lots of outrageously false claims and eventually has yet another psychotic episode.]
Oh come on; you know what Olly would say:
"So the European Union comes up and they're like, stop blogging and I'm like, yeah whatever!"
It does so to the degree that it prevents users from exercising rights granted to them under the Fair Use section of copyright law. Example: DRM'd audio files downloaded from the iTunes music store cannot be played with software other than what Apple distributes. But such a use would be fair.
Indeed, Apple's FairPlay is quite nefarious as it infringes upon the copyrights of consumers (namely, the Fair Use rights granted in copyright law).
Oh, but that isn't really a path for *users*. Maybe you meant PlayFair (now known as Hymn)? But it's not at all nefarious to *use* Hymn. Copyright law explicitly allows that. (You might have some issues with distributing Hymn though, but then most users don't need to do that.)
Is it really that risky? Does the success of a console necessarily depend that much on the number of operations per second that can be performed by the CPU? If so, how do you explain the fact that the DS is (if you go by console sales estimates) more popular than the PSP (which has a more powerful CPU)?
Also, +1 to chrismcdirty; cost really is an important factor -- both for developers and consumers. I'll probably buy a PS3, but not before the price drops to something near US$200. (And I was planning on getting Wii Sports anyway, so this is pretty much what I'll be paying for the Wii.)
Finally, note that the low cost of hardware production for the wii makes it possible for them to make a profit on the *consoles* and not just the games.
So really, their strategy seems as low-risk as can be: they probably would have been taking a *higher* financial risk if they had tried to max out ops/sec in their CPUs. And they've already proven that high performance doesn't necessarily translate into a more popular system in this generation, so really, why should they feel pressure to compete on raw CPU power?
For those of you who can't get your interview translations fast enough: it seems that Nintendo Europe has been updating theirs faster than NOA.