So by copying PhotoShop, the makers of PaintShopPro are being damaged? Hmmm. Take the arguement only a little further. He's probably spent that $79 on something else (e.g. some books). If he'd bought PSP, then he'd be depriving the publishers of $79.
If your arguement is that it the producer loses no money by your mythical 12 year old's actions, let's establish that as the standard for judging OK in the digital realm. By that argument, it's ok for Kazza or other companies to put sypware on your machine to serve up ads or use unused cpu cycles - which, for flat rate bandwidth pricing, costs you no money
If it cost me no money, takes up precisely no cpu and bandwidth that I was using for anything else, and I'm certain that it's not doing anything else, I have absolutely no problem with it. Why should I?
- and the cpu only works when you've already decided to turn the PC on. Of course, you may say that their is some infitesimal cost associated with cpu use, the copyright holder alos spends money on copy protection and anti-piracy efforts as well - all because people pirate software. So even the pirate that never would buy still costs the copyright owner.
That's a bit of a fatuous arguement really, isn't it? If it was the 12 y/o boy's piracy that they were trying to prevent, and the copyright holder was aware that this would not cost him anything, then spending money on copy protection would be a stupid waste of money. The reason that they do spend vast amounts of money on copy protection is to stop pirates who would cost them money (in other words people that would have bought the product if they couldn't have stolen it - this is stealing, is bad, immoral, etc - see the difference?). The 12 y/o's actions are irrelevant to this, and therefore are still not costing money.
By that arguement, spam is OK because you may buy something - so stealing time from you is OK if you may eventually find something useful amongst the junk.
This would only be a valid comparison if the pirate was asking the copyright holder to spend time copying the disks himself. The problem with spam is that it's intrusive. It has an opportunity cost to me. It takes my time (admittedly usually a small amount per mail, but it all adds up) to delete this junk. The copyright holder has no knowledge of this 12 y/o's copying taking place. It doesn't affect him at all.
Of course, they could just as easily use Linux and some free alternative instead of pirating a copy. Then, if they really liked it, they could eventually convince their employer to use it instead of the commercial alternative.
And this helps the copyright holder how? Or are you claiming that piracy of commercial software actually damages open source? You have a point with that last one.
Oh dear. Please don't attempt to claim that morality and legality are the same thing. Do you find that your morals change whenever the law changes, or when you enter a different state? Morality is your own personal belief as to what is right and wrong, and should not be driven by the laws of the day. Think for yourself instead of letting the state dictate your beliefs.
I'm asssuming that you are also in the software industry. If we all take the attitude of 'well, that's the way the industry works, tough', then it'll never change. I get sick of people telling me to stop whinging about things that are wrong on the grounds, that 'that's the way we do things around here'.
If it truly is someone else's fault (having not worked on this particular project, I have no idea whether it is or not), then why not whinge about it, until the other people sort themselves out? I've complained loudly to senior management about at least half of those problems on various projects throughout my career, and I've (eventually) managed to convince them to fix most of them. Don't be such a defeatist.
This is what clustering and load balancing are all about. Many of our systems are already clustered across several boxes, and don't care which one they happen to be running on. Load balancing software determines which is the best box to run any particular instance. Sure, this seems to be extending the concept to the OS level rather than requiring software to control it, but the basics of it have been around, and used, for years.
You have deprived Adobe the income they demand for the right to use that program.Are Adobe aware of this loss, by me using it? In what way has this harmed them? They were not going to get my income, and they have no idea that I am using it, so what's the problem?
Why don't you just say "I take what I want and don't give a damn for anyone trying to make a living"?
Because, as I pointed out, I do give a damn about people, like myself, making a living out of computer software. I spend large amounts of money on it. I would never pirate anything that I was going to buy.
My actions deprive no one of their living. If I didn't take it, I wouldn't buy it anyway, so they still wouldn't get any money. So, again, I ask what am I actually stealing from them? What do they not have that they would have had if I hadn't pirated it?
The hypocrisy of these "free" software advocates has never been clearer. There is no hypocrisy here. If I am prepared to pay the price asked for the software, I will (and frequently do) pay for it. If I am not prepared to pay for it, regardless of whether I can get hold of a pirate copy, then I won't pay for it. If I can then subsequently have a copy for free, as I had no intention of giving them any money and I am not depriving them of anything, then I have no problem in taking the free copy. No harm to them, benefit to me.
I'll give you another example - I have had thousands of pirated games in the past (particularly in the Amiga days). However, there is not a single one of those games that I played for more than a few hours that I didn't then go out and buy. Many of these are ones that I had not considered buying until I had a chance to play them. No one lost anything by me having a pirate copy of these games, and plenty of people gained, because I discovered games that I didn't think that I would like.
This arguement is total fallacy. If I take a Ferrari from someone, that someone has no longer got their Ferrari. You've deprived someone of something.
If I copy Photoshop, and I had no intention of buying it, who have I deprived of what exactly? For me, Photoshop isn't that much better than freeware photo editing software. It's better, and I prefer to use it, but if I hadn't got a copy of it, I'd use the free ones. I would not buy a copy.
(Before the piracy police attack me, I do spend vast amounts of money on software (development tools, games etc), I just have no problem pirating any software that I wouldn't be prepared to pay for.)
The United Kingdom of Great Britain, Northern Ireland and Dependent Territories
And which website was that from, then? Try something like the United Nations, or the CIA World factbook.. The name comes from the Act Of Union in 1801, when it was titled the "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland". After partition, the name was changed to reflect the change to "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland".
Being part of the British Isles is irrelevant, as Eire is also part of the British Isles and no longer forms any part of Great Britain or the UK. The other dependancies that you mention are part of Great Britain (the names - British Indian Ocean Territory, etc) often give a suble clue to this. You seem to be mixing geographical (British Isles) with political (Great Britain). The latter includes all of the dependent territories that you mentioned.
For instance Bermuda. "Bermuda is one of the fourteen (14) Overseas Territories of Britain." It's part of Britain, not just the UK.
Actually, as the full title is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands are part of Great Britain, not just the UK. You're also missing a few, such as Gibraltar and Bermuda. </pedandry>
There's nothing blurred about it. These people (and they were actually people controlling these characters) were mourning the death of their friend (the actual person, not the bunch of electronic connections) in a way that was entirely appropriate to the way in which they knew him.
In a very similar way, my local football team, Nottingham Forest, held a minute's silence at the start of their last home game to commemorate the death of one of their old players. No one thought that the line between sport and the rest of life was being blurred in an inappropriate way, or that everyone in the ground should have gone and attended his funeral instead. It was a tribute to the man by the club and it's fans, in the same way that this was a tribute to the man from the online community through which he knew them.
Two things. Firstly, the article actually mentions that Bluetooth range is 10m (and it certainly works fine between my PDA and phone, when the PDA is downstairs, and my phone is upstairs). Secondly, if the pictures can be sent to your phone (or PDA) by bluetooth, then you can email them to people.
I've flown both EasyJet and Go in the past 6 months and neither mentioned anything about this on any of those flights (except for during takeoff/landing).
No one thinks that they do until the day that the error handling code that the programmer couldn't be bothered to put in wipes out the company's entire database.
Only yesterday, I was talking to someone who'd spotted a problem during a code review in some code written by a "cheap" outsourcing company. If he hadn't added an error handler to cope with there being multiple files in a location that expected only one, the program would have overwritten a paymemt file and cost his company $2M when it ran yesterday morning.
On a less dramatic level, most of the cost of typical software comes in support and maintenance. Our department was basically unable to deliver any new functionality to the business last year as we spent it fixing bugs and rewriting software that didn't do the job that it was intended to do.
Yeah but you use their code when you run Microsoft windows.Which is why no-one in their right mind uses Microsoft software for business-critical systems.
Basically, your boss is saying that his business plan doesn't work unless he can get everyone to work twice as long as they are paid to work. Well, that's his problem. If he can't get the stuff done on time with the people there, working sensible hours, then get more people, or delay the release. If he can't make a profitable business while doing either then that's his tough shit, not yours.
And in answer to your question, of course continuous long hours are going to affect code quality. After your nth continuous 15hr day, are you going to be thinking "I'd better add a buffer overrun test in case the file is corrupted" or are you thinking "fuck it, it compiles. I'm going home"? A tired programmer is not a conscientious programmer. You may ship this release quickly, but all you are doing is building up bugs for the next version, which will then also require stupidly long hours to remove the crap that you put in at 2am one morning on this version.
Apart fromt the fact that the BBC isn't (officially) controlled by the government. It is as independent of goverment interference as any other broadcaster.
Perhaps you can explain the benefits of XML for config files. Not why they're no worse than other formats, but what advantages they give you that are sufficiently compelling to use XML? Because I genuinely don't get it...
What is your preferred alternative? Windows INI files? Java properties files? Something else? Or a proprietary format for each app?
One of the advantages of XML is that it uses a standard layout, meaning that once you've understood the basics of XML, you should be able to read any XML file. If the XML includes a DTD or schema, that describes (again in a standard format) exactly what the acceptable content of the file should be. This means that you don't normally have the same need to ship a config tool with each app as you would with most other tools, as a single XML tool can read the DTD and determine what the person editing the file should do.
As for Ant, again what is your preferred alternative? The last real build tool I used (as opposed to batch files) was nmake, and the config file for that was certainly no easier to read than Ant's XML, and you had to learn all of the nuances of its file layout as well as the specific syntax for the app. The only editor there was for it (except for autogeneration from the IDE) was a text editor.
Multiple inheritance has major problems (if both superclasses have the same function, which one do you use?). A much better answer is often to use "Composition", where the class you are writing contains both of the superclasses that you want to extend, and have your class manually delegate to which ever one of the classes you want to perform the operation. See the "Inheritance versus Composition" section of "Design Pattern" for more details.
Operator overloading
I agree that it is a shame that this was not included. The usual arguement against them, that it's very easy to change the semantic meaning of an operator and this can confuse developers, is just as applicable to an "add" method, but I don't think it's a devastating loss to the language.
Pointers and direct memory access:
Ye gods. No. The moment you start doing this is the moment Java stops being cross platform, and this is a far more important feature than the extra performance that you could squeeze out of it with direct access. Since they sorted most of the performance issues out, I've rarely seen an app where there was any noticable issue in the speed of the actual java code at all (speed of DB link/RMI from overuse of EJBs are much more likely to be problems and unlikely to be sorted out with direct memory access. If you really need to do it, then write that bit in C or assembler on your native platform and call it using JNI. It's messy, but it makes sure that you really think about whether you need it or not.
You seem to have missed the biggest C++ related ommission from Java - templates. The ability to create typed arrays using a single line is something that Java would really benefit from.
From what is described, it's quite different to the SSN (certainly as used in the UK). It sounds much closer to the PACI (Public Authority for Civil Information) database that is used in Kuwait. This is much more than an ID number. The database contains detailed records about you (such as address/marital status/number of children), and you are expected to keep it up to date.
One example of how it used differently is in credit bureaux (which is where I came across it when we were developing one for a Kuwaiti bank). In the UK, when you apply for a loan, you give them your name and address, and this information is sent to the credit bureau to attempt to find your details. In Kuwait, you give them your PACI number, and the credit bureau will connect into the PACI database to retrieve any information that is wanted.
Any system that wants to uniquely identify someone can just store this number, and rely on the PACI system to get the person's current address.
In normal use, this is very sensible thing. You need to tell one place that you've moved. Everyone else's system will automatically be updated. However, when Kuwait was invaded, it became an extremely useful tool to track down anyone that the Iraqis were after.
The fact that there is a standard way of preventing search engines trawling through the site is a start, but that doesn't help newbies who aren't aware of this. Do you remember a time when you were first learning about web pages? Was your first though "I wonder how I'll stop search engines archiving my attempt"? I know mine wasn't. There are loads of people out there that play around with their own personal sites and quite possibly don't realise this archiving happens. It's not "the fault" of Google, and Google may well offer a method of removing these caches, but unless the users aren't aware of the issue (and many of these are *shock horror* not computer nerds and don't spend much of their waking lives reading techie site - they just want to put a lovely picture of their kids up for all the world to see), they don't know to go check to make sure they haven't accidentally left something stupid or embarassing floating in Google's cache.
It's not fair to attack Google for this, but it is reasonable for a non-techie paper to report on the potential risks.
Slashdot Mirror
So by copying PhotoShop, the makers of PaintShopPro are being damaged? Hmmm. Take the arguement only a little further. He's probably spent that $79 on something else (e.g. some books). If he'd bought PSP, then he'd be depriving the publishers of $79.
If it cost me no money, takes up precisely no cpu and bandwidth that I was using for anything else, and I'm certain that it's not doing anything else, I have absolutely no problem with it. Why should I?
- and the cpu only works when you've already decided to turn the PC on. Of course, you may say that their is some infitesimal cost associated with cpu use, the copyright holder alos spends money on copy protection and anti-piracy efforts as well - all because people pirate software. So even the pirate that never would buy still costs the copyright owner.
That's a bit of a fatuous arguement really, isn't it? If it was the 12 y/o boy's piracy that they were trying to prevent, and the copyright holder was aware that this would not cost him anything, then spending money on copy protection would be a stupid waste of money. The reason that they do spend vast amounts of money on copy protection is to stop pirates who would cost them money (in other words people that would have bought the product if they couldn't have stolen it - this is stealing, is bad, immoral, etc - see the difference?). The 12 y/o's actions are irrelevant to this, and therefore are still not costing money.
By that arguement, spam is OK because you may buy something - so stealing time from you is OK if you may eventually find something useful amongst the junk.
This would only be a valid comparison if the pirate was asking the copyright holder to spend time copying the disks himself. The problem with spam is that it's intrusive. It has an opportunity cost to me. It takes my time (admittedly usually a small amount per mail, but it all adds up) to delete this junk. The copyright holder has no knowledge of this 12 y/o's copying taking place. It doesn't affect him at all.
Of course, they could just as easily use Linux and some free alternative instead of pirating a copy. Then, if they really liked it, they could eventually convince their employer to use it instead of the commercial alternative.
And this helps the copyright holder how? Or are you claiming that piracy of commercial software actually damages open source? You have a point with that last one.
Oh dear. Please don't attempt to claim that morality and legality are the same thing. Do you find that your morals change whenever the law changes, or when you enter a different state? Morality is your own personal belief as to what is right and wrong, and should not be driven by the laws of the day. Think for yourself instead of letting the state dictate your beliefs.
But converting to pl/sql may well do.
If it truly is someone else's fault (having not worked on this particular project, I have no idea whether it is or not), then why not whinge about it, until the other people sort themselves out? I've complained loudly to senior management about at least half of those problems on various projects throughout my career, and I've (eventually) managed to convince them to fix most of them. Don't be such a defeatist.
This is what clustering and load balancing are all about. Many of our systems are already clustered across several boxes, and don't care which one they happen to be running on. Load balancing software determines which is the best box to run any particular instance. Sure, this seems to be extending the concept to the OS level rather than requiring software to control it, but the basics of it have been around, and used, for years.
This seems to be nothing more than glorified load balancing.
Why don't you just say "I take what I want and don't give a damn for anyone trying to make a living"?
Because, as I pointed out, I do give a damn about people, like myself, making a living out of computer software. I spend large amounts of money on it. I would never pirate anything that I was going to buy.
My actions deprive no one of their living. If I didn't take it, I wouldn't buy it anyway, so they still wouldn't get any money. So, again, I ask what am I actually stealing from them? What do they not have that they would have had if I hadn't pirated it?
The hypocrisy of these "free" software advocates has never been clearer. There is no hypocrisy here. If I am prepared to pay the price asked for the software, I will (and frequently do) pay for it. If I am not prepared to pay for it, regardless of whether I can get hold of a pirate copy, then I won't pay for it. If I can then subsequently have a copy for free, as I had no intention of giving them any money and I am not depriving them of anything, then I have no problem in taking the free copy. No harm to them, benefit to me.
I'll give you another example - I have had thousands of pirated games in the past (particularly in the Amiga days). However, there is not a single one of those games that I played for more than a few hours that I didn't then go out and buy. Many of these are ones that I had not considered buying until I had a chance to play them. No one lost anything by me having a pirate copy of these games, and plenty of people gained, because I discovered games that I didn't think that I would like.
As is you're just another lying piece of shit
What bit did I lie about?
If I copy Photoshop, and I had no intention of buying it, who have I deprived of what exactly? For me, Photoshop isn't that much better than freeware photo editing software. It's better, and I prefer to use it, but if I hadn't got a copy of it, I'd use the free ones. I would not buy a copy.
(Before the piracy police attack me, I do spend vast amounts of money on software (development tools, games etc), I just have no problem pirating any software that I wouldn't be prepared to pay for.)
This from the country with the "World Series". Sorry, couldn't resist it.
And which website was that from, then? Try something like the United Nations, or the CIA World factbook.. The name comes from the Act Of Union in 1801, when it was titled the "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland". After partition, the name was changed to reflect the change to "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland".
Being part of the British Isles is irrelevant, as Eire is also part of the British Isles and no longer forms any part of Great Britain or the UK. The other dependancies that you mention are part of Great Britain (the names - British Indian Ocean Territory, etc) often give a suble clue to this. You seem to be mixing geographical (British Isles) with political (Great Britain). The latter includes all of the dependent territories that you mentioned.
For instance Bermuda.
"Bermuda is one of the fourteen (14) Overseas Territories of Britain." It's part of Britain, not just the UK.
Actually, as the full title is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands are part of Great Britain, not just the UK. You're also missing a few, such as Gibraltar and Bermuda.
</pedandry>
In a very similar way, my local football team, Nottingham Forest, held a minute's silence at the start of their last home game to commemorate the death of one of their old players. No one thought that the line between sport and the rest of life was being blurred in an inappropriate way, or that everyone in the ground should have gone and attended his funeral instead. It was a tribute to the man by the club and it's fans, in the same way that this was a tribute to the man from the online community through which he knew them.
Two things. Firstly, the article actually mentions that Bluetooth range is 10m (and it certainly works fine between my PDA and phone, when the PDA is downstairs, and my phone is upstairs). Secondly, if the pictures can be sent to your phone (or PDA) by bluetooth, then you can email them to people.
I've flown both EasyJet and Go in the past 6 months and neither mentioned anything about this on any of those flights (except for during takeoff/landing).
Loads of places have auto flushing toilets already. They usually use some form of movement sensor.
Only yesterday, I was talking to someone who'd spotted a problem during a code review in some code written by a "cheap" outsourcing company. If he hadn't added an error handler to cope with there being multiple files in a location that expected only one, the program would have overwritten a paymemt file and cost his company $2M when it ran yesterday morning.
On a less dramatic level, most of the cost of typical software comes in support and maintenance. Our department was basically unable to deliver any new functionality to the business last year as we spent it fixing bugs and rewriting software that didn't do the job that it was intended to do.
Yeah but you use their code when you run Microsoft windows.Which is why no-one in their right mind uses Microsoft software for business-critical systems.
And in answer to your question, of course continuous long hours are going to affect code quality. After your nth continuous 15hr day, are you going to be thinking "I'd better add a buffer overrun test in case the file is corrupted" or are you thinking "fuck it, it compiles. I'm going home"? A tired programmer is not a conscientious programmer. You may ship this release quickly, but all you are doing is building up bugs for the next version, which will then also require stupidly long hours to remove the crap that you put in at 2am one morning on this version.
Have you never seen Jesus's chat show "Jesus and Friends"?
Apart fromt the fact that the BBC isn't (officially) controlled by the government. It is as independent of goverment interference as any other broadcaster.
What is your preferred alternative? Windows INI files? Java properties files? Something else? Or a proprietary format for each app?
One of the advantages of XML is that it uses a standard layout, meaning that once you've understood the basics of XML, you should be able to read any XML file. If the XML includes a DTD or schema, that describes (again in a standard format) exactly what the acceptable content of the file should be. This means that you don't normally have the same need to ship a config tool with each app as you would with most other tools, as a single XML tool can read the DTD and determine what the person editing the file should do.
As for Ant, again what is your preferred alternative? The last real build tool I used (as opposed to batch files) was nmake, and the config file for that was certainly no easier to read than Ant's XML, and you had to learn all of the nuances of its file layout as well as the specific syntax for the app. The only editor there was for it (except for autogeneration from the IDE) was a text editor.
You could use your hands for something else at the same time - like typing on a different computer :-)
Multiple inheritance has major problems (if both superclasses have the same function, which one do you use?). A much better answer is often to use "Composition", where the class you are writing contains both of the superclasses that you want to extend, and have your class manually delegate to which ever one of the classes you want to perform the operation. See the "Inheritance versus Composition" section of "Design Pattern" for more details.
Operator overloading
I agree that it is a shame that this was not included. The usual arguement against them, that it's very easy to change the semantic meaning of an operator and this can confuse developers, is just as applicable to an "add" method, but I don't think it's a devastating loss to the language.
Pointers and direct memory access:
Ye gods. No. The moment you start doing this is the moment Java stops being cross platform, and this is a far more important feature than the extra performance that you could squeeze out of it with direct access. Since they sorted most of the performance issues out, I've rarely seen an app where there was any noticable issue in the speed of the actual java code at all (speed of DB link/RMI from overuse of EJBs are much more likely to be problems and unlikely to be sorted out with direct memory access. If you really need to do it, then write that bit in C or assembler on your native platform and call it using JNI. It's messy, but it makes sure that you really think about whether you need it or not.
You seem to have missed the biggest C++ related ommission from Java - templates. The ability to create typed arrays using a single line is something that Java would really benefit from.
One example of how it used differently is in credit bureaux (which is where I came across it when we were developing one for a Kuwaiti bank). In the UK, when you apply for a loan, you give them your name and address, and this information is sent to the credit bureau to attempt to find your details. In Kuwait, you give them your PACI number, and the credit bureau will connect into the PACI database to retrieve any information that is wanted.
Any system that wants to uniquely identify someone can just store this number, and rely on the PACI system to get the person's current address.
In normal use, this is very sensible thing. You need to tell one place that you've moved. Everyone else's system will automatically be updated. However, when Kuwait was invaded, it became an extremely useful tool to track down anyone that the Iraqis were after.
It's not fair to attack Google for this, but it is reasonable for a non-techie paper to report on the potential risks.