If a hiring practice is challenged in court as discriminatory, a company must show the criteria it is using are proven to predict success in the job.
Wait a second, and what? Since when is a valid defense against a discrimination complaint "yeah, we descriminate, but it's okay because it actually provides results."
How far would that kind of argument get you in a Gender, Racial, or Age-based discrimination setting? If anyone said "As a cop i assume every black person is guilty of something, but hey, my arrest rate has gone way up so it's ok." that case would be DONE.
As has been said a few times, the principle reason for a comment is to explain why the code needs to be the way it is, not what it is doing. By this definition, a few things happen. You get fewer comments in the code, because most code doesn't need explanation. Yeah yeah there are those pesky API calls that have to get called in nonsensical order and the fact that you're rounding down and not up because your ad campaign doesn't do partial credit to save money, or whatever other nefarious, legacy, or even sometimes malicious reasons there may be. Even legitimate code can be malicious.
But lets be real. This only works if people write sensible code to begin with. Code can be self-documenting. Those nay-sayers who complain that it cannot be simply don't know how to do it, or haven't yet seen a suitable example.
You don't need to write code that has 6 equations on one line. You don't need to write 200-line methods. You don't need to use variable names that obfuscate meaning, or worse, those that have no meaning at all. (int a,b,c,d = 0). You don't need to, but many of us as professional developers do. Why in the world do we do that?
I can spout all sorts of slander about being lazy and being macho, ignorance and horribly misguided job security, but i won't because it doesn't help. I don't care why we do it, i care why we should seek to write code that we can come back to a year later and just read.
Languages are pretty high level these days. The code they support can very nearly read like sentences. Why not?
I learned how to produce useful self-documenting code by doing TDD. TDD told me to write tests that describe the behaviour i wanted to achieve (not the implementation i was trying to test). I parlayed this into my code as well. Now i might have a class called calculator, with methods such as Divide, Mulitply etc. and tests which say Divide_Prevents_An_Exception_For_A_Denominator_Of_Zero() and Divide_Reports_Divide_By_Zero_Error() and other such things.
Why would i have to comment that? Does the compiler care how long my method names are? Is anyone reading those tests or methods going to need help to understand what is going on? Not likely.
Whether you believe you can truly write self-documenting code or not isn't relevant. I can't evangelize the benefits to non-believers. But how about just trying to achieve it? Even if you don't really succeed, you'll probably find your code a lot easier to understand even if you insist on putting comments in your code.
I'll bet you'll fall in line with everyone else eventually and find that comments aren't necessary, unless something unnatural is afoot. Then and only then, will you ever find a comment in my code.
G.W.Bush was at first glance not a completely ignorant moron too. Maybe Mitt and his uncanneyness will not have to work as hard to rig elections either.
I've been working for a company which does a lot of Test Driven Development (TDD), but quite honestly, we don't develop new products all that often. We have legacy products (10 years old on average) that we work on day in and day out which in some cases are abhorrent. However, we don't try to fix the world by taking a year or two off to add comprehensive tests to the company's products, we just test anything we add or modify. Slowly but surely, you will add value to your products and the stuff you're complaining about will start to happen less often.
I would submit that you don't need to ask for permission to do this. YOU are the developer and it is YOUR mandate and responsibility to produce quality software. YOU know how best to do this, so just do it, and build it into the cost of your estimates. At first, while you get used to it, things may slow a little (not as much as you might worry about). However, once you get rolling in practice we see that things don't take any less time than they did before, and eventually some things will take less time than before. Did i just say that right? In fact I did. The difference is that the same old bugs for the same old reasons simply don't occur anymore. We just have fewer bugs coming in against our products. We KNOW that once we fix something it will stay fixed tomorrow, next release, next year, and for all of time until the spec changes (don't be deluded into thinking it won't...). We have tests that say so and will not let the build pass if at any point that feature no longer behaves as it should. In practice, whenever we add tests to legacy code that we just happen to be modifying, we aren't surprised to find out that it doesn't work the way the specifications say that it should work.
Testing isn't there to speed you up. It's there to not slow you down (among many other wonderful benefits). It's there so that you can say that you *KNOW* that your product works in certain ways. It can be hard to start writing tests, but someone above mentioned a book "Working Effectively With Legacy Code" (Michael C. Feathers), which is an excellent resource to get you started. Here are some others:
- Test Driven Development: By Example (Kent Beck) - Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship (Robert C. Martin) - Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code (Martin Fowler et al)
You don't *have* to adopt TDD as a daily life routine to reap the benefits. Some of these books and other reference it as an excellent tool to enable you to write better tests and better code, which i think is true. However, these books also teach you how to tackle existing code and to get it under control by writing tests for it. You're doing yourself and your products, and your employer a disservice if you don't write tests for the code you write, even if your employer cannot see the benefit. I'm sure surgeons could get stuff done a lot faster and cheaper if they took some shortcuts and didn't bother to sterilize their equipment, but they know better than to do that. You should know better as a developer than to just hack something together and run it by some visual inspection of limited "use cases" and then think that you've done your job properly. Your code may not work at all, and you won't even know it until a customer tells you so.
Just because someone either now or in the future has the capability to 'exceed' the prediction implied by Moore's Law doesn't make it necessarily certain that they will. Bringing that technology to the market has to clear a lot of hurdles, such as money sucking leeches (otherwise known as "business people" and/or "lawyers"). Why give someone a ten-fold increase in capabilities when you can give them a two-fold increase for which they will happily pay the same amount?
"..the number of transistors on an integrated circuit for minimum component cost doubles every 24 months." (Wikipedia)
See the "cost" part? Cost isn't determined by technology. It's determined by leeches. Honestly, i'm surprised it's held up this long. By the time this gets to market (if ever) it ought to be just in time to fit in nicely.
It's part of the job. For example, i work for a company through which millions of pieces of confidential consumer data flow each and every day. It is my job to look at this stuff. Now the only thing preventing me from behaving immorally with respect to this information is my own personal sense of morality, and i suppose also the legal consquences of such action.
There are situations where it is not possible to do one's job without access to data. Now, i will mention that i work in a facility that deals with quite a bit of financial data, and have had to be screened for government "Secret" level classification. That being said, i didn't have to pass that until AFTER i was hired, and i'm not even sure that passing was a condition of keeping my job.
The point is, i read many posts in this thread where it is the opinion of the author that any employee of any company having access to personal data of any kind is a most grievous security breach. How do you think anyone does any work on the systems which maintain and process your data? Things like bank/credit card statements, financial/investment confirmations, bills, and a host of other things you recieve in the mail each month and probably don't give a second thought to all contain an enormous amount of personal information (which of course it has to to be able to mail it to you and print the information on the page), and that is all farmed out from the card provider or financial institution to some third party printing company for mailing. And you're worried about someone who may have legitimate access to the data?
That's a narrow view. I suppose then in ancient times we should have disregarded astronomy, mathematics, and the exploration of science because we had crops to harvest. I suppose now that because we have famine in parts of the world that we should concentrate solely on using existing production methods to feed everyone, and to hell with any future advances that may come as the result of any failure, or chance concept exploration. A number of some of the most useful concepts and inventions have come as mistakes or are borne out of the failure of other experiments. Maybe the solution to world famine, energy problems, some medication or cure for a disease, or even something as everyday useful as post-it notes will come of these billions of dollars of spending you claim to be so useless.
I can't believe i even have to make this argument, as it's appeared more times in slashdot message boards than than i can possibly remember.
Disasters as you call them are probably the most beneficial tool we have to further our knowledge. It is only when you refuse to learn from these failures that you have really failed.
We also have the problem that some people are just too stupid to elect which token's they'll cash, and which they wont. Other people just can't be bothered. So even in times when they may not wish to cash relevant tokens, people will wind up doing it anyway. Taken with what i was discussing above, and what other people are saying, chances are some people will start charging significant amounts for their tokens. $0.05 is probably reasonable, as even that would deter a spammer. But if people charge $1, and then stupid people charge $1, $2, $5 and cash in all tokens (never mind greedy people), we've got ourselves a whole new economy coming from spam.
Maybe we should have a standardized rate, rather than letting individuals set their own price. Of course, i fully expect if anyone standardizes this - and you know it would be, cause almost everything gets standardized in one way or another once it becomes popular enough for the government or some big corporate weenie to notice it. You can argue this, but i doubt you'll be able to convince me otherwise - then the fee for acceptance wont go to the individual anymore, it will go to whoever standardizes it. Maybe not fully, but there are always administration fees. *sigh*
So we have the potential to create a system where we are expected to listen to spammers or risk being sued, and also one where our phone and internet bills will explode as a side-effect of ignorance, greed, and laziness. Seemed like such a good idea at first, didn't it?
Ok, so lets assume this scheme gets implemented. Aside from all the other arguments posted already, and those mentioned in the article, if the telemarketers/spammers agree to pay your price, would they then assume that you are reasonably expected to sit there and listen to their whole spiel? I expect someone would turn around and sue you if you accepted their money for the priviledge of your time, and then turned around and deleted the message without reading it, or said "I'm not interested". There doesn't seem to be any provision there for the telemarketer to get their money back.
Now whoa there back the hell up a second. I will be the last one to ever defend a spammer. Listen before you warm up your flame thrower. What i'm worried about is not that most of us would probably do this anyway (hang up or insta-delete whatever spam does come through), which we would - hell, i sure would. What i'm worried about is opening up a legal can of worms, and having spammers actually sue us for ignoring them.
I think that if they agree to pay your fee, then they might get it into their heads that they can reasonably expect you to sit there and listen to them. But how far will that go? Do you have to listen to them for the whole call? What if they talk for an hour? 10 minutes? 5 minutes? 2 minutes before you can tell them where to go and how to get there? I personally wish nothing more than to cast spammers into a pit and put it on cable tv, but really, if you think this is a clear victory for us, if they actually agree to go along with it, we might be stepping into a situation where we're worse off than we are now.
Maybe it will influence people to use what the learned on, maybe not. My university environment was Solaris. I use linux/solaris at work - but that's just because i'm in server development. Many of the developers at my company use windows to develop their software, only because they do particular application development (i can't say what), and the tools in that environment make it easier for them to do their work. But they don't use any ms development tools - they use freely available alternative development tools that quite frankly are more robust than the ms tools.
I'm not sure i buy the argument that what you're taught to use you will use later on. I think most CS people are above that. We learn, we adapt, we use the best tools for the current task at hand. If we don't like the tools we are given, we go get better ones. Why? Cause they are there, we can, we know how, and we've all wasted too much time dealing with crappy dev tools and environments that we know that good development starts with a good working environment. I have enough trouble fighting to integrate other peoples' code. I don't want to fight with my environment or have to say "i wish i could do *this*, it would make my life so much easier"..
When the issue of internet censorship pops up (which of course is unfortunately frequently), i always find myself wondering why it's not ok (or in many cases "legal") to say on the internet what is perfectly ok or legal to say in person.
If i was to say "G.W.Bush sucks cause i don't like his haircut." to a friend of mine on the street while hundreds of people walk by, that would not be a crime, or worthy of censorship. In fact, nobody would give it a second thought. Granted, that sentence is rather ridiculous, but content aside, i'm trying to make a point. Now if i were to post that same comment on the internet, on my own personal web page, am i still allowed to do that? Am i defaming Bush? Am i going to be censored? Maybe, it all depends who sees it and who takes offense. I find that rather incredulous. I can stand on the street, and speak defamation and obscenities to all who pass by yet all that will come of it will be those who agree or get a chuckle out of my ranting, or those who think i'm a social deviant or want to beat me up. Still, i CAN say it. I just can't write it. Is it the perception that the internet is no longer individual voice but rather it is in fact a form of mass media?
Lets say i do the exact same thing, i stand on the street spouting off all my ill-gotten opinions on whatever subject i like, to hell with political correctness. Only this time, a local news crew shows up and broadcasts my rant. Should i be silenced then? What if it were a national news crew? I think the likelihood of someone seeing my rant on national news is far more likely than someone finding my one little page among the endless quagmire of web pages. My point is, it's ok to think freely. It's okay to voice your opinions freely - but on a small scale. Our freedom to express our ideas was curbed long before the net came along. It's all about how many feathers you ruffle, and to whom those feathers belong.
You piss off 1000 average joes in downtown Chicago, so what. You piss of one person that for whatever reason decides to have you silenced, well... it could be the 1st or the 1001st person you come across. So to what lengths do our freedoms really exist with respect to free speech? Is the censorship on the net really a new brand of restriction on our percieved right to free speech, or is it just the line that was always there resolving itself into something more distinct, more perceptible to us all? I'm arguing it's the latter. I'm arguing that our right to free speech is just local at best. We can think whatever we want, we can say whatever we want, just so long as we say it quietly.
There is an exception to that rule, and while this exception has become the agent of many a revolution for good, i'd argue that it's become the agent of tighter censorship on us all. That exception is that it's okay to speak out, IFF you can find enough people that agree with you. You want to end slavery? Fine, so do a whole bunch of other people. Great, speak out, slavery's gone. Phew - dodged a freedom bullet there. But wait, now we've gone and reinforced the idea that you can't speak out against anything unless you can get a bunch of people that agree with you.. You can have free speech, but not as an individual. I think that idea has very ominous ramifications, and this is what we're seeing now on the net. An individual or small group cannot post ideas that will ruffle feathers, else, you face censorship. Welcome to the new age, America.
Maybe you should re-evaluate your decision to blindly dismiss the value of scientific exploration. I'm not a geneticist, or a biologist, or any brand of scientist that can speak intelligently about the merits of space exploration or the study of life on earth or abroad. However, i am a scientist, and i recognize that scientific discoveries - many if not most of them - come from the most unexpected places.
I think space exploration and the quest for extra-terrestrial life is an invaluable quest for all the reasons we *don't* know about. You can't tell me (and even if you did i'd tell you that you're full of crap) that if someone finds even one tiny living single-cell organism on mars, that there is no possibility that the study of that one small organism could not be a catalyst of evolutionary discovery for all life as we know it. I'm not saying it will change the world. I'm saying it has the chance of adding to our understanding of the world and of ourselves. Every little bit of knowledge advances us one step closer to scientific goals we may not even know exist yet.
Space exploration and space research absurd? Humans have only been flying for about a century. How many discoveries in how many different fields have come from flight, and space research? Rocketry, physics, medical disoveries on so many levels, engineering and computing advances, biologic and genetic research in space or even modified gravity environments; I'm not sure anyone knows exactly how space research has impacted humanity in the last 50 years, because its influence is just too wide-spread. If someone somewhere develops a cure for some disease, or a bitchin new technology that will drive our cars, or even replace our cars 10, 50, or 100 years from now, i'm all for it. Space research is far from absurd. It's integrally linked to the standard of living you and I enjoy today, and will enjoy tomorrow.
As for protection, buddy, the only thing we need protection from is ourselves at this point. If we can't get to another developed species capable of space travel (assuming as i do that one exists "somewhere"), then we're probably ill equipped to defend ourselves if they can get to us - again, assuming they have nothing but hostile intentions. I chuckle at your expense, and at the same time sigh that close-minded individuals like yourself are all too common.
(sarcasm) This is what we do. We all just give up. We capitulate to microsoft universal rule. Every product everywhere shall be microsoft produced. Eliminate all competition for microsoft. Maybe then they will reach that ever-elusive goal of actually releasing a product to the market that works. (/sarcasm)... oops.. seems the sarcasm section should have ended one sentence earlier...
I'm a software developer, so suffice it to say, i get around on the net on average about as much as many other people who seem to be getting assailed by spam on a daily basis. I however, am not being assailed. In fact, i get virtually no spam at all. I'm on the (former) @home network, and have been for years, so i have a hard time accepting such innuendo that my isp is selling out my email address. Not because it was @home - i'm a skeptical pessimistic bastard most of the time, so i don't put it past any company to screw me over any way they can - but because i simply haven't gotten any spam, which must lead me to the conclusion that i haven't been sold out. So if i haven't been sold out, and i'm on the same network as thousands of other people who suffer from spam every day, i am forced to wonder, what are these people doing to invite the spam? I think "invite" is the appropriate word here too. I can't logically think of any other explanation. If you follow all those links that your "less technical" friends send you in email - nobody is immune from spam that your friends fwd to you - and sign up for all these newsletters and junk like this, you have to expect that your luck is going to run out and you're going to be sold out sooner or later.
You'll never hear me support spammers in any way, shape or form. I detest them and if i could banish them from our universe, believe me i would, but perhaps the blame doesn't rest solely on the spammers - they have to get your address somehow right? Maybe (if you're one of those people that suffer from spam) you should take a look at yourself and figure out what you're doing to aim that spam cannon at yourself.
And let me say... sad. My expectations were probably too high, but seriously. When the announcer yaks up a spoonfull of caviar on camera, something's wrong. For those of you who will read this before it airs in the U.S., it's at about the 30 minute mark. I loved this quote: "if you can't stand the heat, change the damned channel". heh. In my experience of watching season after season of the real iron chef, this is a poor ripoff. Sensationalized, but weak.
As for the chefs themselves, maybe they're hot stuff in America, but world class? please. I'm waiting for the day when the REAL iron chefs get one of these chuckleheads to challenge one of them. My money's on the japanese crew any day of the week. You've got about 10 mintues till it airs for you. You make your own judgement...
call me a cynic if you will, but hiring more people to do a job doesn't necessarily mean they'll do it well. Sure, they're engineers with experience and we all might assume that they'll have a bit more insight into what should and shouldn't be legitimate claims. However, they're still going to be under someone who's giving out the directions on how things are supposed to be done, and that someone is probably well entrenched in the thinking that's become the object of many a laugh on these message boards. Strange how independent thought tends to wither and dry up after enough time has passed in almost any job. Here's hoping..
I've read several posts now on this thread, and as expected, there are many contrasting viewpoints. Lets examine some of the more extreme ones, cause i think they raise some interesting questions.
One such view was the "information should and must be free" ideal. I would love a society in which free exchange of information was a reality. I think there could be many advantages to such an environment. But lets be realistic here. Anything that has advantages has disadvantages also. Perhaps we just don't concern ourselves with the truth about such disadvantages because we're too busy hoping for something that we know isn't attainable in the near future. That is, we're too busy fighting for the cause to be concerned about possible consequences. A theoretical argument then is what i offer. Lets say for a moment that society progressed to such a utopian vision of free information exchange. What price are we going to have to pay for that? Before we answer that question, lets ask another first. What exactly is the line that we invariably must draw between what information should be free, and what shouldn't be? I'd like to pretend that such a line needn't exist, but again, lets be realistic. If we had a completely free exchange of information, then wouldn't that mean that nobody could lay claim to any concept or idea, and in turn make money off of that? Of course that's what it means, cause otherwise it wouldn't be free or complete, right? Remember i'm arguing the extremes here, and If this seems ludicrous to you, or if you're one of the people who had made an argument like this and feel i'm misrepresenting your argument, then you're probably right, i am, but i'm doing it for a reason.
So here we are, we have a totally free exchange of info,.. but doesn't that mean we wouldn't have a much of an economy either? Yeah, we'd have innovation (assuming the exchange of info is actually productive), but how are people to make money off of that? Perhaps we should abolish money? Perhaps we should just setup a society where we not only setup free exchange of information, but how about free exchange of everything? The idea's not without its merits. Your house falling apart? no problem. Everyone pitches in and builds you another. Who pays for it? everyone, but not in terms of money. The cost of such a society would be to contribute your skills and and talents for the betterment of society. We don't compete anymore, we just live, and through living, we better ourselves and put those resources not required to maintain or raise the current standard of living for everyone into research for further advancement of society (Sounds an awful lot like star trek doesn't it?). Hold that thought... and now come back to reality. Reality right now is that no matter how much you want it, society isn't ready to give up one of the most basic concepts of our way of life: everything (information, ideas, goods, services, etc) must be quantified. We have a concept that a guy schlepping fries at a McDonalds is providing a less valuable service than say a doctor giving you a triple bypass cause you ate those very same fries for 50 years. If you don't go all the way, which is probably not what the majority of people are trying to say here, then i ask the question again. How does the line between what should be free and what shouldn't be drawn? Who decides who draws it?
So here we are, stuck between where we are now, and where we would like to be. What about the other way? What about the people who feel there should be more control over information. They probably feel threatened by freedom of information, cause they realize that it would shatter their current status in society. I guess that's what it's all about isn't it? I mentioned that the utopian view of free exchange had disadvantages. The main one i'm trying to communicate here is that we would have to radically change our current paradigm of society, in favour of another. The more radical a change, the more resistant people are to it. Well, most of the arguments on DRM are nothing nearly as extreme of course, but i don't think that just cause we're not going to extremes here that it doesn't mean that we're not going to have to pay the same price. We would have to alter our way of thinking. This of course is on a much smaller scale, but the fact remains.
So what does that mean about DRM? I guess it means that this is just another segment of the inevitable change in society. The arguments i've read thus far seem to be very concerned with the current situation and what should or shouldn't happen, and rightly so. Certainly they're probably a bit more relevant than talking about abstract extreme views of what might become of how we handle things now, but i think it's a good idea to take anything we do now as the foundation for the future we are going to live. That *is* how it works after all, and maybe we should step back from time to time and give that a moments consideration.
I am also a TA at my university, and i agree, it's not too hard to recognize when someone's cheating.
However, these are a list of reasons why i think people get away with it so easily:
Large classes:
In classes of 100+, one TA usually doesn't do all the marking. There may be 2-4 TA's. Right off the bat then, students automatically reduce their chances of getting caught by about 50% since if you copy someone's paper (or code in my case), there is a good chance the same TA wont be marking both papers.
Lazy TA's: Some TA's are just lazy, and do a piss-poor job. I can look past the simple changed variable names and other simple things like that. However, by 3rd year (i was TAing the 3rd year Operating systems course), people are usually more inventive than that, but still, you get used to how they do it. But that's only if, as a TA, you give a damn. I do, but i'm well aware that many of my colleagues do not. They just skim the code, and scribble a mark on it. *sigh*
No time, but also...: I'm sure if TA's and Professors had the time for a full investigation, they'd find many of the cheaters on any given assignment. However, TA's have work to do, Profs have work to do, there just isn't the time, and moreover the motivation to scour the assignment submissions to catch every cheater. It's a significant investment, often with little return.
There are other reasons, but instead of geting long winded, i'll tell you what my university is doing about it. A friend of mine just completed an undergraduate thesis on this very subject. He devised a program which checks source for similarities, and flags those papers for further investigation by the TA's/professors. Gee this sounds a lot like what Bloomfield did. Of course, with source you've got to be ignorant to variable names and simple block comparisons, and while i'm not privy to how he actually did it, his system was used this past term to identify cheaters in at least one course. We also use a submission format simliar to sending your assignment to a printer. Ie, if your course code is CS 305, then you just lpr -P305 assingment.tar.gz and you're done. It sends it to a holding directory accessible only by the profs and TAs, which auto timestamps it of course so adherence to deadlines is a simple matter to check. Then you can run the cheating program on the code in that directory, and everyone can get on with their lives. It's not perfect, as i'm sure it never really could be. There's a fuzzy line regarding what is and is not cheating. But it's a start. Cheating became somewhat of an epidemic a couple years back, and it motivated the faculty into supporting initiatives like this, as well as making their own. And they're not done yet. It's always the same thing, one person doing someone wrong may be ignored. Several people, enh, and inconvenience but still "what can we do?". You get a significant amount of people doing it, and something's going to get done about it, just like in physics, just like in CS or anywhere else.
It's funny, i've seen people work harder at making their code look different so they wouldn't be caught as cheaters than just trying to learn how to do the assignments so they wouldn't have to cheat in the first place.
This is a common thing i suspect, until..
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Coder on the Cross
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I work for a multi-national software development company. It is my first job straight out of university, and i really needed the job, since i'd had no previous job experience in IT. I used to be a musician:) I, however took the best job offer i received. It was by far the best actually, it paid substantially more, included way more benefits, and bonus, it was even in the same town as where i was going to university, so i didn't have to move.
Now, i just celebrated my one-year anniversary at this company yesterday in fact, and i'm thinking i'm a wiser person than i was, and this is why. After the first couple months of getting used to working as opposed to school, learning the company and its systems, and really taking ownership of a project, i started doing much the same thing as the victim of the article we all just read here. For 9 months, i worked no less than 12 hours a day, every day, including weekends. I worked up to 20 hours a day, and yes, i still made it in the next day. Usually, i averaged 15 hrs on weekdays, 12 on weekends, and the longer hours were reserved for those times when the boss "just had to have something done". This happened all too often though. I'm not whining or complaining here, i loved my job, and i still do. That having been said, i realized that it didn't matter how much i worked. I got sick 4 times in those 9 months. A week with less than 80 hours of work was essentially a holiday. I didn't see my friends much at all. I went home to see my family exactly 3 times in those 9 months: Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter. The best part is, i work salary, not hourly, so i get paid the same each pay-period no matter how much i work.
So what did i learn? It doesn't matter how much you work. I got no special recognition from management. I got no extra pay, no days off, no bonuses, nothing. This may not be the same in all companies, but don't expect too much more. I learned a very simple lesson: A job is not worth your life. Even if i had received much praise and fabulous wealth, i sacrificed too much - my friends, my health, my family. I work no more than 10 hours a day now. I spend time with my friends and family, and i feel great.
The moral of this story is not one software geeks struggle for self-realization. It is that this kind of this probably happens to the majority of us. I think however that it's a lesson that you have to learn on your own. I wish it weren't so, but ask yourself if you've ever sacrificed your life for your job, even if it's not to these extremes. Did you ever hear someone (probably an experienced worker, IT or otherwise) say something to the effect of "it's not worth it"? Did you listen? If you did, did it make a difference? Probably not. That's why many of us go out there and work ourselves to the bone, thinking we can change the world on our own. Well, to save myself from sounding completely cynical, it isn't totally "not worth it". I gained all kinds of work-related experience, i'm reasonably well respected at work as someone who knows his stuff and can get the job done. But i could have accomplished the same thing by working half as much as i did. I guess it's a personal decision - what is important to you? For me, I learned the hard way that my job, while important, is not more important than my friends, family or my health.
I realize that much of the/. crowd is on the younger end of the demographic scale. Many of you will find yourselves in similar situations. Hopefully you'll realize quicker than we did what's *really* important to you. I still love my job, and i still get my work done, and my company is still happy with me, but i have a life now. A life and a job are not mutually exclusive entities. Just try to remember that when it matters.
It's not that games aren't fun.. They are. It's not that games aren't sexy-lookin. They are. Most games that have a decent development team, and a good QA team to make sure it works properly, are good games and they are great fun.. Did you sense a "but" coming? Indeed, because here it is..
The problem as i see it is that they are fun, but only the first few times you play em. Why is that? Well, replayabilty just isn't there anymore for many new games released. I sure hope some game developers actually get to read this because with almost all of my friends and my gaming community buddies, we complain about the same thing. Lets examine some games that have made it, and others that haven't.
They say that the combat flight sim is dying. Well, i might tend to agree, and for a few reasons. Complexity is one, they have that much right, but if you get people into the genre, that's not enough, if you want to sell more games of the genre later on, you have to keep them there, and that's where replayability comes in. To see the same formation of enemy aircraft or ground vehicles in the same place at the same time every time you play the game really makes it boring. I used to be a fan of this genre, and the last game that really tickled my fancy was Gunship 2000. Simple graphics, nothing terribly complicated, but every map you played, even though there were only perhaps 5-10 maps that the game just kept selecting from seemingly at random, the location and configuration of your targets changed every time you loaded the map. That kept me playing that game for a couple years.
Something more recent? How about Quake(series), Diablo, TFC? Now many might say that its just the multiplayability of these games that made them good. Well, they're right, but probably not for the reasons they suspect. How many people do you know that sit there and play the single player QuakeII game over and over? It's not especially thrilling anymore, and not many people bother. Yet there are still thousands of people playing QuakeII multiplayer every day even after 3 years. Why? New maps come out on occaision but its not that. Its that the people you play against make the game like-new every time you join a server. Same with diablo. Diablo had an interesting concept, but it became one of the most popular games in years because different monsters, items, and indeed even the levels you played changed everytime you loaded the game. Same game, but replayability was high.
The real cause of the death of all games, not just PC games is misdirected focus in development. Most games are being directed toward making better more intense and real graphics thanks to the intense graphics competition out there. New hardware means new capabilities, but really, i don't want sexier graphics if it means after i buy the game and play it once, i don't want to play it again. Maybe the game reviewer's themselves are contributors to the apparent stagnation in innovation. Development companies do pay attention to the reviews and suggestions they make, and when was the last time you saw a category in a review for replayability. Its all about graphics, graphics, graphics. Sure they review playability, configurability, stability, and a few other standard review items -- all important, no doubt. Yet they consistently overlook what is going to keep you coming back for more. I think it's time the developers took an objective look at what made those games of yesteryear great, and take a step back from replying on the technological developments of tomorrow for sales.
Slashdot Mirror
If a hiring practice is challenged in court as discriminatory, a company must show the criteria it is using are proven to predict success in the job.
Wait a second, and what? Since when is a valid defense against a discrimination complaint "yeah, we descriminate, but it's okay because it actually provides results."
How far would that kind of argument get you in a Gender, Racial, or Age-based discrimination setting? If anyone said "As a cop i assume every black person is guilty of something, but hey, my arrest rate has gone way up so it's ok." that case would be DONE.
As has been said a few times, the principle reason for a comment is to explain why the code needs to be the way it is, not what it is doing. By this definition, a few things happen.
You get fewer comments in the code, because most code doesn't need explanation. Yeah yeah there are those pesky API calls that have to get called in nonsensical order and the fact that you're rounding down and not up because your ad campaign doesn't do partial credit to save money, or whatever other nefarious, legacy, or even sometimes malicious reasons there may be. Even legitimate code can be malicious.
But lets be real. This only works if people write sensible code to begin with. Code can be self-documenting. Those nay-sayers who complain that it cannot be simply don't know how to do it, or haven't yet seen a suitable example.
You don't need to write code that has 6 equations on one line. You don't need to write 200-line methods. You don't need to use variable names that obfuscate meaning, or worse, those that have no meaning at all. (int a,b,c,d = 0). You don't need to, but many of us as professional developers do. Why in the world do we do that?
I can spout all sorts of slander about being lazy and being macho, ignorance and horribly misguided job security, but i won't because it doesn't help. I don't care why we do it, i care why we should seek to write code that we can come back to a year later and just read.
Languages are pretty high level these days. The code they support can very nearly read like sentences. Why not?
I learned how to produce useful self-documenting code by doing TDD. TDD told me to write tests that describe the behaviour i wanted to achieve (not the implementation i was trying to test). I parlayed this into my code as well. Now i might have a class called calculator, with methods such as Divide, Mulitply etc. and tests which say Divide_Prevents_An_Exception_For_A_Denominator_Of_Zero() and Divide_Reports_Divide_By_Zero_Error() and other such things.
Why would i have to comment that? Does the compiler care how long my method names are? Is anyone reading those tests or methods going to need help to understand what is going on? Not likely.
Whether you believe you can truly write self-documenting code or not isn't relevant. I can't evangelize the benefits to non-believers. But how about just trying to achieve it? Even if you don't really succeed, you'll probably find your code a lot easier to understand even if you insist on putting comments in your code.
I'll bet you'll fall in line with everyone else eventually and find that comments aren't necessary, unless something unnatural is afoot. Then and only then, will you ever find a comment in my code.
G.W.Bush was at first glance not a completely ignorant moron too. Maybe Mitt and his uncanneyness will not have to work as hard to rig elections either.
See, now i don't know what to put on the census form. Is my religion Apple now, or am i still a Jedi? Am i a Jedapple?
I've been working for a company which does a lot of Test Driven Development (TDD), but quite honestly, we don't develop new products all that often. We have legacy products (10 years old on average) that we work on day in and day out which in some cases are abhorrent. However, we don't try to fix the world by taking a year or two off to add comprehensive tests to the company's products, we just test anything we add or modify. Slowly but surely, you will add value to your products and the stuff you're complaining about will start to happen less often.
I would submit that you don't need to ask for permission to do this. YOU are the developer and it is YOUR mandate and responsibility to produce quality software. YOU know how best to do this, so just do it, and build it into the cost of your estimates. At first, while you get used to it, things may slow a little (not as much as you might worry about). However, once you get rolling in practice we see that things don't take any less time than they did before, and eventually some things will take less time than before. Did i just say that right? In fact I did. The difference is that the same old bugs for the same old reasons simply don't occur anymore. We just have fewer bugs coming in against our products. We KNOW that once we fix something it will stay fixed tomorrow, next release, next year, and for all of time until the spec changes (don't be deluded into thinking it won't...). We have tests that say so and will not let the build pass if at any point that feature no longer behaves as it should. In practice, whenever we add tests to legacy code that we just happen to be modifying, we aren't surprised to find out that it doesn't work the way the specifications say that it should work.
Testing isn't there to speed you up. It's there to not slow you down (among many other wonderful benefits). It's there so that you can say that you *KNOW* that your product works in certain ways. It can be hard to start writing tests, but someone above mentioned a book "Working Effectively With Legacy Code" (Michael C. Feathers), which is an excellent resource to get you started. Here are some others:
- Test Driven Development: By Example (Kent Beck)
- Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship (Robert C. Martin)
- Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code (Martin Fowler et al)
You don't *have* to adopt TDD as a daily life routine to reap the benefits. Some of these books and other reference it as an excellent tool to enable you to write better tests and better code, which i think is true. However, these books also teach you how to tackle existing code and to get it under control by writing tests for it. You're doing yourself and your products, and your employer a disservice if you don't write tests for the code you write, even if your employer cannot see the benefit. I'm sure surgeons could get stuff done a lot faster and cheaper if they took some shortcuts and didn't bother to sterilize their equipment, but they know better than to do that. You should know better as a developer than to just hack something together and run it by some visual inspection of limited "use cases" and then think that you've done your job properly. Your code may not work at all, and you won't even know it until a customer tells you so.
Just because someone either now or in the future has the capability to 'exceed' the prediction implied by Moore's Law doesn't make it necessarily certain that they will. Bringing that technology to the market has to clear a lot of hurdles, such as money sucking leeches (otherwise known as "business people" and/or "lawyers"). Why give someone a ten-fold increase in capabilities when you can give them a two-fold increase for which they will happily pay the same amount?
"..the number of transistors on an integrated circuit for minimum component cost doubles every 24 months." (Wikipedia)
See the "cost" part? Cost isn't determined by technology. It's determined by leeches. Honestly, i'm surprised it's held up this long. By the time this gets to market (if ever) it ought to be just in time to fit in nicely.
It's part of the job. For example, i work for a company through which millions of pieces of confidential consumer data flow each and every day. It is my job to look at this stuff. Now the only thing preventing me from behaving immorally with respect to this information is my own personal sense of morality, and i suppose also the legal consquences of such action.
There are situations where it is not possible to do one's job without access to data. Now, i will mention that i work in a facility that deals with quite a bit of financial data, and have had to be screened for government "Secret" level classification. That being said, i didn't have to pass that until AFTER i was hired, and i'm not even sure that passing was a condition of keeping my job.
The point is, i read many posts in this thread where it is the opinion of the author that any employee of any company having access to personal data of any kind is a most grievous security breach. How do you think anyone does any work on the systems which maintain and process your data? Things like bank/credit card statements, financial/investment confirmations, bills, and a host of other things you recieve in the mail each month and probably don't give a second thought to all contain an enormous amount of personal information (which of course it has to to be able to mail it to you and print the information on the page), and that is all farmed out from the card provider or financial institution to some third party printing company for mailing. And you're worried about someone who may have legitimate access to the data?
That's a narrow view. I suppose then in ancient times we should have disregarded astronomy, mathematics, and the exploration of science because we had crops to harvest. I suppose now that because we have famine in parts of the world that we should concentrate solely on using existing production methods to feed everyone, and to hell with any future advances that may come as the result of any failure, or chance concept exploration. A number of some of the most useful concepts and inventions have come as mistakes or are borne out of the failure of other experiments. Maybe the solution to world famine, energy problems, some medication or cure for a disease, or even something as everyday useful as post-it notes will come of these billions of dollars of spending you claim to be so useless.
I can't believe i even have to make this argument, as it's appeared more times in slashdot message boards than than i can possibly remember.
Disasters as you call them are probably the most beneficial tool we have to further our knowledge. It is only when you refuse to learn from these failures that you have really failed.
We also have the problem that some people are just too stupid to elect which token's they'll cash, and which they wont. Other people just can't be bothered. So even in times when they may not wish to cash relevant tokens, people will wind up doing it anyway. Taken with what i was discussing above, and what other people are saying, chances are some people will start charging significant amounts for their tokens. $0.05 is probably reasonable, as even that would deter a spammer. But if people charge $1, and then stupid people charge $1, $2, $5 and cash in all tokens (never mind greedy people), we've got ourselves a whole new economy coming from spam.
Maybe we should have a standardized rate, rather than letting individuals set their own price. Of course, i fully expect if anyone standardizes this - and you know it would be, cause almost everything gets standardized in one way or another once it becomes popular enough for the government or some big corporate weenie to notice it. You can argue this, but i doubt you'll be able to convince me otherwise - then the fee for acceptance wont go to the individual anymore, it will go to whoever standardizes it. Maybe not fully, but there are always administration fees. *sigh*
So we have the potential to create a system where we are expected to listen to spammers or risk being sued, and also one where our phone and internet bills will explode as a side-effect of ignorance, greed, and laziness. Seemed like such a good idea at first, didn't it?
Ok, so lets assume this scheme gets implemented. Aside from all the other arguments posted already, and those mentioned in the article, if the telemarketers/spammers agree to pay your price, would they then assume that you are reasonably expected to sit there and listen to their whole spiel? I expect someone would turn around and sue you if you accepted their money for the priviledge of your time, and then turned around and deleted the message without reading it, or said "I'm not interested". There doesn't seem to be any provision there for the telemarketer to get their money back.
Now whoa there back the hell up a second. I will be the last one to ever defend a spammer. Listen before you warm up your flame thrower. What i'm worried about is not that most of us would probably do this anyway (hang up or insta-delete whatever spam does come through), which we would - hell, i sure would. What i'm worried about is opening up a legal can of worms, and having spammers actually sue us for ignoring them.
I think that if they agree to pay your fee, then they might get it into their heads that they can reasonably expect you to sit there and listen to them. But how far will that go? Do you have to listen to them for the whole call? What if they talk for an hour? 10 minutes? 5 minutes? 2 minutes before you can tell them where to go and how to get there? I personally wish nothing more than to cast spammers into a pit and put it on cable tv, but really, if you think this is a clear victory for us, if they actually agree to go along with it, we might be stepping into a situation where we're worse off than we are now.
Maybe it will influence people to use what the learned on, maybe not. My university environment was Solaris. I use linux/solaris at work - but that's just because i'm in server development. Many of the developers at my company use windows to develop their software, only because they do particular application development (i can't say what), and the tools in that environment make it easier for them to do their work. But they don't use any ms development tools - they use freely available alternative development tools that quite frankly are more robust than the ms tools.
I'm not sure i buy the argument that what you're taught to use you will use later on. I think most CS people are above that. We learn, we adapt, we use the best tools for the current task at hand. If we don't like the tools we are given, we go get better ones. Why? Cause they are there, we can, we know how, and we've all wasted too much time dealing with crappy dev tools and environments that we know that good development starts with a good working environment. I have enough trouble fighting to integrate other peoples' code. I don't want to fight with my environment or have to say "i wish i could do *this*, it would make my life so much easier"..
When the issue of internet censorship pops up (which of course is unfortunately frequently), i always find myself wondering why it's not ok (or in many cases "legal") to say on the internet what is perfectly ok or legal to say in person.
If i was to say "G.W.Bush sucks cause i don't like his haircut." to a friend of mine on the street while hundreds of people walk by, that would not be a crime, or worthy of censorship. In fact, nobody would give it a second thought. Granted, that sentence is rather ridiculous, but content aside, i'm trying to make a point. Now if i were to post that same comment on the internet, on my own personal web page, am i still allowed to do that? Am i defaming Bush? Am i going to be censored? Maybe, it all depends who sees it and who takes offense. I find that rather incredulous. I can stand on the street, and speak defamation and obscenities to all who pass by yet all that will come of it will be those who agree or get a chuckle out of my ranting, or those who think i'm a social deviant or want to beat me up. Still, i CAN say it. I just can't write it. Is it the perception that the internet is no longer individual voice but rather it is in fact a form of mass media?
Lets say i do the exact same thing, i stand on the street spouting off all my ill-gotten opinions on whatever subject i like, to hell with political correctness. Only this time, a local news crew shows up and broadcasts my rant. Should i be silenced then? What if it were a national news crew? I think the likelihood of someone seeing my rant on national news is far more likely than someone finding my one little page among the endless quagmire of web pages.
My point is, it's ok to think freely. It's okay to voice your opinions freely - but on a small scale. Our freedom to express our ideas was curbed long before the net came along. It's all about how many feathers you ruffle, and to whom those feathers belong.
You piss off 1000 average joes in downtown Chicago, so what. You piss of one person that for whatever reason decides to have you silenced, well... it could be the 1st or the 1001st person you come across. So to what lengths do our freedoms really exist with respect to free speech? Is the censorship on the net really a new brand of restriction on our percieved right to free speech, or is it just the line that was always there resolving itself into something more distinct, more perceptible to us all? I'm arguing it's the latter. I'm arguing that our right to free speech is just local at best. We can think whatever we want, we can say whatever we want, just so long as we say it quietly.
There is an exception to that rule, and while this exception has become the agent of many a revolution for good, i'd argue that it's become the agent of tighter censorship on us all. That exception is that it's okay to speak out, IFF you can find enough people that agree with you. You want to end slavery? Fine, so do a whole bunch of other people. Great, speak out, slavery's gone. Phew - dodged a freedom bullet there. But wait, now we've gone and reinforced the idea that you can't speak out against anything unless you can get a bunch of people that agree with you.. You can have free speech, but not as an individual. I think that idea has very ominous ramifications, and this is what we're seeing now on the net. An individual or small group cannot post ideas that will ruffle feathers, else, you face censorship. Welcome to the new age, America.
Maybe you should re-evaluate your decision to blindly dismiss the value of scientific exploration. I'm not a geneticist, or a biologist, or any brand of scientist that can speak intelligently about the merits of space exploration or the study of life on earth or abroad. However, i am a scientist, and i recognize that scientific discoveries - many if not most of them - come from the most unexpected places.
I think space exploration and the quest for extra-terrestrial life is an invaluable quest for all the reasons we *don't* know about. You can't tell me (and even if you did i'd tell you that you're full of crap) that if someone finds even one tiny living single-cell organism on mars, that there is no possibility that the study of that one small organism could not be a catalyst of evolutionary discovery for all life as we know it. I'm not saying it will change the world. I'm saying it has the chance of adding to our understanding of the world and of ourselves. Every little bit of knowledge advances us one step closer to scientific goals we may not even know exist yet.
Space exploration and space research absurd? Humans have only been flying for about a century. How many discoveries in how many different fields have come from flight, and space research? Rocketry, physics, medical disoveries on so many levels, engineering and computing advances, biologic and genetic research in space or even modified gravity environments; I'm not sure anyone knows exactly how space research has impacted humanity in the last 50 years, because its influence is just too wide-spread. If someone somewhere develops a cure for some disease, or a bitchin new technology that will drive our cars, or even replace our cars 10, 50, or 100 years from now, i'm all for it. Space research is far from absurd. It's integrally linked to the standard of living you and I enjoy today, and will enjoy tomorrow.
As for protection, buddy, the only thing we need protection from is ourselves at this point. If we can't get to another developed species capable of space travel (assuming as i do that one exists "somewhere"), then we're probably ill equipped to defend ourselves if they can get to us - again, assuming they have nothing but hostile intentions. I chuckle at your expense, and at the same time sigh that close-minded individuals like yourself are all too common.
i love your proposal idea. all the best to you.
(sarcasm) This is what we do. We all just give up. We capitulate to microsoft universal rule. Every product everywhere shall be microsoft produced. Eliminate all competition for microsoft. Maybe then they will reach that ever-elusive goal of actually releasing a product to the market that works. (/sarcasm) ... oops.. seems the sarcasm section should have ended one sentence earlier...
you should read his post. he said "even in comments..". I must have read the same post he did, since i saw someone claiming to have 50 spams/day.
I'm a software developer, so suffice it to say, i get around on the net on average about as much as many other people who seem to be getting assailed by spam on a daily basis. I however, am not being assailed. In fact, i get virtually no spam at all. I'm on the (former) @home network, and have been for years, so i have a hard time accepting such innuendo that my isp is selling out my email address. Not because it was @home - i'm a skeptical pessimistic bastard most of the time, so i don't put it past any company to screw me over any way they can - but because i simply haven't gotten any spam, which must lead me to the conclusion that i haven't been sold out. So if i haven't been sold out, and i'm on the same network as thousands of other people who suffer from spam every day, i am forced to wonder, what are these people doing to invite the spam? I think "invite" is the appropriate word here too. I can't logically think of any other explanation. If you follow all those links that your "less technical" friends send you in email - nobody is immune from spam that your friends fwd to you - and sign up for all these newsletters and junk like this, you have to expect that your luck is going to run out and you're going to be sold out sooner or later.
You'll never hear me support spammers in any way, shape or form. I detest them and if i could banish them from our universe, believe me i would, but perhaps the blame doesn't rest solely on the spammers - they have to get your address somehow right? Maybe (if you're one of those people that suffer from spam) you should take a look at yourself and figure out what you're doing to aim that spam cannon at yourself.
And let me say... sad. My expectations were probably too high, but seriously. When the announcer yaks up a spoonfull of caviar on camera, something's wrong. For those of you who will read this before it airs in the U.S., it's at about the 30 minute mark. I loved this quote: "if you can't stand the heat, change the damned channel". heh. In my experience of watching season after season of the real iron chef, this is a poor ripoff. Sensationalized, but weak.
As for the chefs themselves, maybe they're hot stuff in America, but world class? please. I'm waiting for the day when the REAL iron chefs get one of these chuckleheads to challenge one of them. My money's on the japanese crew any day of the week. You've got about 10 mintues till it airs for you. You make your own judgement...
call me a cynic if you will, but hiring more people to do a job doesn't necessarily mean they'll do it well. Sure, they're engineers with experience and we all might assume that they'll have a bit more insight into what should and shouldn't be legitimate claims. However, they're still going to be under someone who's giving out the directions on how things are supposed to be done, and that someone is probably well entrenched in the thinking that's become the object of many a laugh on these message boards. Strange how independent thought tends to wither and dry up after enough time has passed in almost any job. Here's hoping..
I've read several posts now on this thread, and as expected, there are many contrasting viewpoints. Lets examine some of the more extreme ones, cause i think they raise some interesting questions.
.. but doesn't that mean we wouldn't have a much of an economy either? Yeah, we'd have innovation (assuming the exchange of info is actually productive), but how are people to make money off of that? Perhaps we should abolish money? Perhaps we should just setup a society where we not only setup free exchange of information, but how about free exchange of everything? The idea's not without its merits. Your house falling apart? no problem. Everyone pitches in and builds you another. Who pays for it? everyone, but not in terms of money. The cost of such a society would be to contribute your skills and and talents for the betterment of society. We don't compete anymore, we just live, and through living, we better ourselves and put those resources not required to maintain or raise the current standard of living for everyone into research for further advancement of society (Sounds an awful lot like star trek doesn't it?). Hold that thought... and now come back to reality. Reality right now is that no matter how much you want it, society isn't ready to give up one of the most basic concepts of our way of life: everything (information, ideas, goods, services, etc) must be quantified. We have a concept that a guy schlepping fries at a McDonalds is providing a less valuable service than say a doctor giving you a triple bypass cause you ate those very same fries for 50 years. If you don't go all the way, which is probably not what the majority of people are trying to say here, then i ask the question again. How does the line between what should be free and what shouldn't be drawn? Who decides who draws it?
One such view was the "information should and must be free" ideal. I would love a society in which free exchange of information was a reality. I think there could be many advantages to such an environment. But lets be realistic here. Anything that has advantages has disadvantages also. Perhaps we just don't concern ourselves with the truth about such disadvantages because we're too busy hoping for something that we know isn't attainable in the near future. That is, we're too busy fighting for the cause to be concerned about possible consequences. A theoretical argument then is what i offer. Lets say for a moment that society progressed to such a utopian vision of free information exchange. What price are we going to have to pay for that? Before we answer that question, lets ask another first. What exactly is the line that we invariably must draw between what information should be free, and what shouldn't be? I'd like to pretend that such a line needn't exist, but again, lets be realistic. If we had a completely free exchange of information, then wouldn't that mean that nobody could lay claim to any concept or idea, and in turn make money off of that? Of course that's what it means, cause otherwise it wouldn't be free or complete, right? Remember i'm arguing the extremes here, and If this seems ludicrous to you, or if you're one of the people who had made an argument like this and feel i'm misrepresenting your argument, then you're probably right, i am, but i'm doing it for a reason.
So here we are, we have a totally free exchange of info,
So here we are, stuck between where we are now, and where we would like to be. What about the other way? What about the people who feel there should be more control over information. They probably feel threatened by freedom of information, cause they realize that it would shatter their current status in society. I guess that's what it's all about isn't it? I mentioned that the utopian view of free exchange had disadvantages. The main one i'm trying to communicate here is that we would have to radically change our current paradigm of society, in favour of another. The more radical a change, the more resistant people are to it. Well, most of the arguments on DRM are nothing nearly as extreme of course, but i don't think that just cause we're not going to extremes here that it doesn't mean that we're not going to have to pay the same price. We would have to alter our way of thinking. This of course is on a much smaller scale, but the fact remains.
So what does that mean about DRM? I guess it means that this is just another segment of the inevitable change in society. The arguments i've read thus far seem to be very concerned with the current situation and what should or shouldn't happen, and rightly so. Certainly they're probably a bit more relevant than talking about abstract extreme views of what might become of how we handle things now, but i think it's a good idea to take anything we do now as the foundation for the future we are going to live. That *is* how it works after all, and maybe we should step back from time to time and give that a moments consideration.
I am also a TA at my university, and i agree, it's not too hard to recognize when someone's cheating.
However, these are a list of reasons why i think people get away with it so easily:
Large classes:
In classes of 100+, one TA usually doesn't do all the marking. There may be 2-4 TA's. Right off the bat then, students automatically reduce their chances of getting caught by about 50% since if you copy someone's paper (or code in my case), there is a good chance the same TA wont be marking both papers.
Lazy TA's: Some TA's are just lazy, and do a piss-poor job. I can look past the simple changed variable names and other simple things like that. However, by 3rd year (i was TAing the 3rd year Operating systems course), people are usually more inventive than that, but still, you get used to how they do it. But that's only if, as a TA, you give a damn. I do, but i'm well aware that many of my colleagues do not. They just skim the code, and scribble a mark on it. *sigh*
No time, but also...: I'm sure if TA's and Professors had the time for a full investigation, they'd find many of the cheaters on any given assignment. However, TA's have work to do, Profs have work to do, there just isn't the time, and moreover the motivation to scour the assignment submissions to catch every cheater. It's a significant investment, often with little return.
There are other reasons, but instead of geting long winded, i'll tell you what my university is doing about it. A friend of mine just completed an undergraduate thesis on this very subject. He devised a program which checks source for similarities, and flags those papers for further investigation by the TA's/professors. Gee this sounds a lot like what Bloomfield did. Of course, with source you've got to be ignorant to variable names and simple block comparisons, and while i'm not privy to how he actually did it, his system was used this past term to identify cheaters in at least one course. We also use a submission format simliar to sending your assignment to a printer. Ie, if your course code is CS 305, then you just lpr -P305 assingment.tar.gz and you're done. It sends it to a holding directory accessible only by the profs and TAs, which auto timestamps it of course so adherence to deadlines is a simple matter to check. Then you can run the cheating program on the code in that directory, and everyone can get on with their lives. It's not perfect, as i'm sure it never really could be. There's a fuzzy line regarding what is and is not cheating. But it's a start. Cheating became somewhat of an epidemic a couple years back, and it motivated the faculty into supporting initiatives like this, as well as making their own. And they're not done yet. It's always the same thing, one person doing someone wrong may be ignored. Several people, enh, and inconvenience but still "what can we do?". You get a significant amount of people doing it, and something's going to get done about it, just like in physics, just like in CS or anywhere else.
It's funny, i've seen people work harder at making their code look different so they wouldn't be caught as cheaters than just trying to learn how to do the assignments so they wouldn't have to cheat in the first place.
I work for a multi-national software development company. It is my first job straight out of university, and i really needed the job, since i'd had no previous job experience in IT. I used to be a musician :) I, however took the best job offer i received. It was by far the best actually, it paid substantially more, included way more benefits, and bonus, it was even in the same town as where i was going to university, so i didn't have to move.
Now, i just celebrated my one-year anniversary at this company yesterday in fact, and i'm thinking i'm a wiser person than i was, and this is why. After the first couple months of getting used to working as opposed to school, learning the company and its systems, and really taking ownership of a project, i started doing much the same thing as the victim of the article we all just read here. For 9 months, i worked no less than 12 hours a day, every day, including weekends. I worked up to 20 hours a day, and yes, i still made it in the next day. Usually, i averaged 15 hrs on weekdays, 12 on weekends, and the longer hours were reserved for those times when the boss "just had to have something done". This happened all too often though. I'm not whining or complaining here, i loved my job, and i still do. That having been said, i realized that it didn't matter how much i worked. I got sick 4 times in those 9 months. A week with less than 80 hours of work was essentially a holiday. I didn't see my friends much at all. I went home to see my family exactly 3 times in those 9 months: Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter. The best part is, i work salary, not hourly, so i get paid the same each pay-period no matter how much i work.
So what did i learn? It doesn't matter how much you work. I got no special recognition from management. I got no extra pay, no days off, no bonuses, nothing. This may not be the same in all companies, but don't expect too much more. I learned a very simple lesson: A job is not worth your life. Even if i had received much praise and fabulous wealth, i sacrificed too much - my friends, my health, my family. I work no more than 10 hours a day now. I spend time with my friends and family, and i feel great.
The moral of this story is not one software geeks struggle for self-realization. It is that this kind of this probably happens to the majority of us. I think however that it's a lesson that you have to learn on your own. I wish it weren't so, but ask yourself if you've ever sacrificed your life for your job, even if it's not to these extremes. Did you ever hear someone (probably an experienced worker, IT or otherwise) say something to the effect of "it's not worth it"? Did you listen? If you did, did it make a difference? Probably not. That's why many of us go out there and work ourselves to the bone, thinking we can change the world on our own. Well, to save myself from sounding completely cynical, it isn't totally "not worth it". I gained all kinds of work-related experience, i'm reasonably well respected at work as someone who knows his stuff and can get the job done. But i could have accomplished the same thing by working half as much as i did. I guess it's a personal decision - what is important to you? For me, I learned the hard way that my job, while important, is not more important than my friends, family or my health.
I realize that much of the /. crowd is on the younger end of the demographic scale. Many of you will find yourselves in similar situations. Hopefully you'll realize quicker than we did what's *really* important to you. I still love my job, and i still get my work done, and my company is still happy with me, but i have a life now. A life and a job are not mutually exclusive entities. Just try to remember that when it matters.
It's not that games aren't fun.. They are. It's not that games aren't sexy-lookin. They are. Most games that have a decent development team, and a good QA team to make sure it works properly, are good games and they are great fun.. Did you sense a "but" coming? Indeed, because here it is..
The problem as i see it is that they are fun, but only the first few times you play em. Why is that? Well, replayabilty just isn't there anymore for many new games released. I sure hope some game developers actually get to read this because with almost all of my friends and my gaming community buddies, we complain about the same thing. Lets examine some games that have made it, and others that haven't.
They say that the combat flight sim is dying. Well, i might tend to agree, and for a few reasons. Complexity is one, they have that much right, but if you get people into the genre, that's not enough, if you want to sell more games of the genre later on, you have to keep them there, and that's where replayability comes in. To see the same formation of enemy aircraft or ground vehicles in the same place at the same time every time you play the game really makes it boring. I used to be a fan of this genre, and the last game that really tickled my fancy was Gunship 2000. Simple graphics, nothing terribly complicated, but every map you played, even though there were only perhaps 5-10 maps that the game just kept selecting from seemingly at random, the location and configuration of your targets changed every time you loaded the map. That kept me playing that game for a couple years.
Something more recent? How about Quake(series), Diablo, TFC? Now many might say that its just the multiplayability of these games that made them good. Well, they're right, but probably not for the reasons they suspect. How many people do you know that sit there and play the single player QuakeII game over and over? It's not especially thrilling anymore, and not many people bother. Yet there are still thousands of people playing QuakeII multiplayer every day even after 3 years. Why? New maps come out on occaision but its not that. Its that the people you play against make the game like-new every time you join a server. Same with diablo. Diablo had an interesting concept, but it became one of the most popular games in years because different monsters, items, and indeed even the levels you played changed everytime you loaded the game. Same game, but replayability was high.
The real cause of the death of all games, not just PC games is misdirected focus in development. Most games are being directed toward making better more intense and real graphics thanks to the intense graphics competition out there. New hardware means new capabilities, but really, i don't want sexier graphics if it means after i buy the game and play it once, i don't want to play it again. Maybe the game reviewer's themselves are contributors to the apparent stagnation in innovation. Development companies do pay attention to the reviews and suggestions they make, and when was the last time you saw a category in a review for replayability. Its all about graphics, graphics, graphics. Sure they review playability, configurability, stability, and a few other standard review items -- all important, no doubt. Yet they consistently overlook what is going to keep you coming back for more. I think it's time the developers took an objective look at what made those games of yesteryear great, and take a step back from replying on the technological developments of tomorrow for sales.