Agreed: unpleasant business though it is, they are well within their rights to sue copyright violators. It is, in fact, what they ought to have been doing all along.
However -- and this is a big however -- they are completely outisde their rights using the powers the DMCA has given them to bring about these suits. Under the bill of rights, which guards against unreasonable search and seizure, and deprivation of property without due process of law, the RIAA would have to get a warrant issued to be able to shut down people's ISP accounts. The burden of proof would rest with the accuser.
However, the DMCA places the burden of proof on the accused. Basically, the DMCA makes it so that an ISP has to take action against anybody accused of copyright violation, regardless of the merit of the claim. The accused has to (at the very least) file a legal counterclaim just to get their account back -- not an easy thing for somebody who's not a lawyer and isn't up on the vagaries of the DMCA. And it's without any oversight from the judicial system.
This unreasonable power lets the RIAA use these lawsuits not as a valid round of legal complaints (which they would be), but as a bullying tactic. They needn't be careful about the accusations they make; they pay no price if they're wrong, and achieve the desired intimidating effect just the same.
Lawsuits were already enough of a big, ugly stick before the DMCA. So yes, they're within their rights to bring the suits -- but not by the methods they've chosen. They'll have my sympathy when they stop trying to dismantle my rights; until then, their business model can crash and burn for all I care.
What happens if we finally manage to get consumers, corporations, and governments of industrialized nations to get their act together, and they all get the greenhouse crisis under control and CO2 levels back to normal...
...and humanity exhales a huge collective sigh of relief?!?
Quotes follow the composite pattern: half of a quote is also a quote! "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" is a quote, even though I have not reprinted the entire text of A Tale of Two Cities.
In this particular case, I've always considered the latter half of the quote unnecessary; it states the obvious in a way that detracts from the dry humor of the whole thing.
I definitely agree with Apple's focus on stability and user experience -- it really shows in the finished product. Still, I sure wouldn't mind a timely beta without the polish. And, as you point out, it should easier for 1.5 than it was for 1.4!
I'm just a little too eager to be using generics on OS X. I feel like I'll have reached some sort of geek nirvana.
Apple (finally!) has a 1.4.2 out, and it's superb. For a brief moment, OS X is up to date on Java.
Does anybody know anything about Apple's timeline on 1.5? Will we see a beta? Will we at least see a concurrent release? Apple has been notoriously out of date in the past, but they swore that they would improve; now's the time for them to prove that they are.
So then p2p sharing of copyrighted material is a crime and should be treated as such?
Of course.
Bringing suits against individual violators is the only thing the RIAA's done in quite a while where I think they're actually standing on solid ethical and legal ground. The ridiculous damages they're claiming, and their scare-and-settle intimidation tactics, are downright reprehensible, and as an independent musician, I'd personally love to see them go down in flames... but aside from that, I have no ethical quibble with them bringing fair suits against actual copyright violators. It's what they ought to have been doing from the beginning, instead of raiding the constitution.
In other words, you'd probably like to see some republicans in jail over this, but if it were Debian you'd settle for a slap on the wrist (not you as in you, you as in a general slashdot you).
Perhaps. But you-as-in-you-you shouldn't put words in your-as-in-Slashdot's-your mouth. Something thing irritates me is that you-as-in-Slashdot-you-including-you-as-in-you-you sometimes lump people into a big group and then draw questionable generalizations about them.
It's almost as irritating as the geeky abuse of English that goes on around here.
And even if the Halloween documents were merely *leaked*, does that make it right? Not hardly. Disgruntled employees work everywhere.
I maintain that leaking and theft are very different things. Leaking is when somebody who does have legal access to the documents makes them public; the ethics there are, to some extent, between that person and their employer.
In both cases, there's a security breach. In the one case, however, it's a matter of somebody disobeying orders. Their employer may choose to respond by firing them, subject to "whistle-blower" laws. In the other case, it's a matter of somebody breaking and entering, and it's a matter of criminal justice.
Putting it as simply as I can: the difference is that in the latter case, we're talking about people committing crimes.
Also, it's been pointed out that whomever did this DID point out to the democrats that the vulnerability was there.
The only people by whom this is claimed, however, are the Republicans; the Democrats deny that they were told. I'm not willing to take either of them at their word, so let's wait and see.
And, as I said, leaving a note on the fridge saying "the door was unlocked" does not make theft not theft.
If it was Debian sneaking documents from a Microsoft server, how would you feel about it then?
If by "sneaking" you mean exploiting a security weakness to access documents which they were not authorized to view, then that is a crime and I'd want their asses hauled to court, thank you very much.
it was publicly disclosed that they were leaked -- Slashdot didn't steal the memo and then secretly use it to undermine Microsoft -- and
more importantly, the Microsoft memos weren't leaked due to a security exploit -- they were leaked, not stolen -- and
the programming community hasn't made any secret about exploits in Microsoft's security when they are found.
The Republicans' responsibility was to report the security breach, and to not exploit it regardless of whether it was fixed. (Leaving your door unlocked may be stupid, but it does not make it legal or ethical for others to steal your things.)
This incident is really quite different from the Halloween Memo; it's much more akin to Cliton allegedy breaching the FBI files of political enemies. IMO, that would actually have been a valid foundation for an impeachment case... and so would this.
It's true that a prof has the right to set course requirements as they see fit. I'm simply suggesting that a prof setting tools requirements is a sign that they're not focusing on principles.
And honestly, if I were interviewing candidates, I'd take somebody who knows Eiffel and has a solid understanding of OO over somebody who knows Java and thinks procedurally.
Sure, it's nice to "have it both ways" and get somebody who already knows Java inside and out -- but in my experience, school training in Java gives very little compared to actual experience. I don't think an intelligent, adaptable program with one month of professional Java experience will write code that's any worse than somebody with lots of schooling in Java and no professional experience at all.
So I say, if they want to use Eiffel, why stop them?
Welcome to Real Life, kids.
I sure hope the business world / software industry doesn't count as "real life". I miss my college days -- maybe it's just the veneer of retrospect, or senility setting in, but I remember them being a lot more grounded than the inane world of business.
I prefer to call it "the unreal life you're stuck with half your waking hours if you want to be a software professional".
Many opinionated people would say, perhaps prejudicially, that the job of any teaching institution that is not explicitly a vocational/technical training program is to teach principles and not isolated methods; that a good curriculum implements goals which could be accomplished to equal effect with many different tools; that in the rapidly changing landscape of the computer world, such a teaching approach is the only one that's likely to have any serious long-term benefit to students; and that the presence or absence in the curriculum of restrictions to specific applications, OSes, and programming languages is actually good indicator of the quality of a program.
As it happens, I am such a person. Give these bozos hell.
I got the distinct impression that the text had not been assigned, just the essay. So I was judging the field by the prof. I looked for counter-examples, but it's not worth a decade in the field to me to acquire the taste.
I still think your conclusion is overly broad and unfair. Say that you had a bad experience, say that you're not interested, fair enough -- but don't dismiss the whole field out of hand if you aren't willing to invest the effort in making a fair judgment.
It constantly pains me how many people gave up math -- even hate the idea of math -- because of a bad teacher or two, or a bad experience in the first tedious, dry, repetitious, mechanical two years of the average undergraduate math curriculum. I try to explain to them that manually doing Gaussian elimination or integrations by parts over and over has little to do with the real work of mathematicians; that the cycle of proofs and refutations is a creative, dynamic, exciting process of discovery; and math, real math, is tremendously fun. But they won't buy it or aren't interested, because they had some bad experiences and are permanently turned off.
To this day I have a terrible aversion to the use of "partner" as a verb.
Funny, in my experience, those who complain the loudest about "communication problems" are actually engineers complaining about other engineers who are combative and near-sighted, and blaming others for their own unwillingness to understand their users while they run off and implement crazy and completely inappropriate things.
The problem with paying too much attention to what is actually said is that people don't always know how best to express what they actually want. Implementing very literally to stated intentions is a recipe for disaster.
One of the reasons engineers feel like users keep changing requirements is that they're very bad at separating what people mean from what they say. Customers are not as liter-minded as programmers, and programmers who want truly happy customers had better learn to bloody well deal with it.
A really good engineer in a requirements gathering role can read between the lines to find areas where a customer either may not have really meant quite what they said, may not understand the words they're using in the same way as a programmer would, or simply doesn't quite understand the implications of what they're asking for.
A lot of working well with customers is uncovering the right presumptions and questioning the right things, explaining problems and questions to customers using a language they can understand, and thus bringing what they actually want and what they actually say into sync.
One class is not sufficient evidence for such a decision, of course, but I just don't see enough evidence to the contrary to revisit my conclusion.
I hope to heaven that English -- or any other field -- is not to be judged primarily by its undergraduate students. I don't know in what universe you went to school, but students not reading the assignment is par for the undergraduate course in most every discipline and university. Walk into a comp sci class and ask for a show of hands on how many people actually read the whole assigned section of the textbook, and you'll probably get a minority as well.
If you actually took a good class, or spent a decade actually working in the field, perhaps you would see evidence of the worth of lit crit.
Note that the discussion here is mostly about deconstructionism and cultural theory. Literarcy criticism in general is vast field, with much good and bad in it.
I'm glad you admit your hostility. I would repeat my earlier comments, and encourage you to overcome it. I don't know what field you're in, but my profession -- business software -- constantly suffers from poor communication bordering on illiteracy, and could use a good dose of the humanities. For example, lit crit's study of how things are communicated without being said has obvious application to the requirements gathering process.
I agree that the experiment does not quite demonstrate my claims, although it strongly indicates them to me.
That reasoningly sounds suspciciously unlike science.:)
The field does certainly have some serious problems. I think the article hits it closer than your analysis: deconstructionism is becoming so rarified and inbred that not only is it already incomprehenisble to the general public, but even individual academics are becoming mutually incomprehensible to each other.
Of course, it probably didn't help that theoretical physics is equally incomprehensible to the world at large, and the editors of the journal (erroneously, in my opinion) gave Sokal the benefit of the doubt when they were unable to understand his article.
I can barely (only just barely) imagine somebody getting published in some physics journal because they skimmed the paper and the peer reviewers did the same, but it would be found out instantly after it was published.
I believe that Sokal annouced that his article was a hoax the day it was published, so unfortunately, we can't draw any conclusions about the credibility of field at large -- just the journal.
I do think that deconstructionism, and cultural studies in general, have problems, but I agree with the article's conclusion: instead of being derisive and dismissive, we should "enter the jungle" and rescue the useful insights -- they are truely useful.
Sokal's experiment demonstrated that peer review standards in deconstructionist journals are low. It did not demonstrate, however, that the whole discipline is meaningless, just that one journal (albeit a respected one) was unable to distinguish the meaningless from the meaningful.
About a year ago, my parents gave me an amusing little animatronic toy which (allegedy) responded to voice commands. "Kuma! Sing me a song!" you'd say, and its little lights would flash and it would play a tinny little melody. Then you'd say "Kuma! Hing freeb gafrob nok!"... and its little lights would flash and it would play a tinny little melody.
Reasonable conclusion: Kuma cannot differentiate English from nonsense.
Not to defend deconstuctionism too much -- because I really do think that it's a field with a lot of bullshit in it -- but it's important to keep in mind that every, every field can sound incredibly stupid if you don't have all the jargon, context, background, and indoctrination that it requires.
Most subtle, nuanced statements are going to sound pretty stupid if you render half the words meaningless and remove their context, which is exactly what happens when an outsider hears the language of some specialized field. It's very difficult for outsiders to judge the legitimacy of a field from the outside.
I see this all the time in the general public's reactions to both software and science, especially theoretical physics and medicine.
The article's author actually says this really well:
We engineers are frequently accused of speaking an alien language, of wrapping what we do in jargon and obscurity in order to preserve the technological priesthood. There is, I think, a grain of truth in this accusation. Defenders frequently counter with arguments about how what we do really is technical and really does require precise language in order to talk about it clearly. There is, I think, a substantial bit of truth in this as well, though it is hard to use these grounds to defend the use of the term "grep" to describe digging through a backpack to find a lost item, as a friend of mine sometimes does. However, I think it's human nature for members of any group to use the ideas they have in common as metaphors for everything else in life, so I'm willing to forgive him.
He goes on to draw what I think is a really useful conclusion (much more insightful than most of the posts on this thread, I'm afraid):
Every day I have to explain what I do to people who are different from me -- marketing people, technical writers, my boss, my investors, my customers -- none of whom belong to my profession or share my technical background or knowledge. As a consequence, I'm constantly forced to describe what I know in terms that other people can at least begin to understand.... Contrast this situation with that of academia. Professors of Literature or History or Cultural Studies in their professional life find themselves communicating principally with other professors of Literature or History or Cultural Studies. They also, of course, communicate with students, but students don't really count.... What you have is rather like birds on the Galapagos islands -- an isolated population with unique selective pressures resulting in evolutionary divergence from the mainland population. There's no reason you should be able to understand what these academics are saying because, for several generations, comprehensibility to outsiders has not been one of the selective criteria to which they've been subjected.
I wonder what we might learn if comprehensibility returned to the equation. There are a lot of very interesting ideas buring in academia.
That was a funny PA -- quite clever, if you've read Reinventing Comics. However, I think Gabe & Tycho made real asses out of themselves in the accompanying commentary. They responded to McCloud's optimistic (if starry-eyed) willingness to imagine a bright future for cartooning and put out creative new ideas by basically, as he put it, kicking him in the teeth.
G&T are hilarious, but heavens, they do shoot their arrogant little mouths off sometimes. Micropayments may not work, and Scott McCloud may not be right about everything (or even anything), but (1) as a hard-working veteran artist who was drawing comics when the PA crew was in diapers, he deserved more respect than they gave him, (2) as a veteran embracing change, a creative mind trying to test out new, risky ideas, he deserved more respect than they gave him, and (3) as somebody who is -- hello! -- trying to figure how they can make a living from their craft, he deserved one heck of a lot more respect than they gave him.
They ended up eating a bit of crow over that comic -- mostly because McCloud himself responded by being persistently civil to them until they realized what a couple of assholes they were. But they did realize, and came back with the kind of civility their satire ought to have carrier from the beginning. Tycho: "Reader response to Friday's thingy was profoundly, powerfully negative (Which Scott even apologized for - can you believe that?)... Your responses were deft and had the weight of punishment, and I feel as though I have been taught a valuable lesson by a bloom of aluminum baseball bats. At the root of it, I misjudged the man. For his part, he says that he has not made himself as aware as he should of the way online comics are progressing - and the ways they are endeavoring to support themselves.... My conversation with Scott was fascinating, and clarified many, many issues."
But if somebody is Offering the same or equivalent conent at same or acceptably same quality then people will not go to pay for service.
The key phrase there is "the same or equivalent content" -- in other words, commoditized content.
It is loosely true that a market tends to push the price of a commodity towards its marginal cost, which is nearly zero in the case of digital information. The trick is that not all art is a commodity. Some is, to be sure -- does the public really care which boy / boob band is cranking out the latest schlock?
Not so with all art. The sorts of work I've seen (and paid for!) on BitPass so far have all been unique, idiosyncratic little works of art. Sure, I can also get online comics for free -- but they're different, and even if I've read one, I haven't read them all. Some are mediocre; some are good; a few are very good. All leave me looking for more. While there is some limit to the number I want to read, having read one doesn't stop me from wanting to read others.
For art like this, which is not a commodity, it's entirely possible that people will be willing to pay for some even though they can get others free.
In my view, the underlying problem with XP is just how extreme its proponents have let it become.
The original inventors of XP were very careful to say how they thought it was and wasn't useful. Kent Beck's "white book" gives a good list of "don't use XP if..." criteria which should have ruled out the near-disasterous project at where my company used it. As you point out, Martin Fowler and others offer different perspective, and nearly all the inventors insist on remaining flexible in the process and open to change.
The problem is all the zealots who picked it up and ran with it, taking it to hysterical, almost religious extremes: "I hated developement and was considering a career switch until I started using XP. Now I'm happier than ever, and so is my boss!" User testimonials sounded more and more like ads for penis enlargement, or rehab.
And what did XP's founders do to deserve this reaction? I mean, it's not like they oversold XP and tried to turn it into a cult...er....
Well, yeah, actually, that's exactly what they did: they set it up like a cult, and got a cult-like following.
The attitude of the XP literature is all too often overwhelmingly arrogant, self-important, marketing-focused, and insufferably holy-holy -- starting with the XP "Bill of Rights", and Kent Beck's inconceivably cocky advice on using XP. (Use it on your hardest project. Repeat.) Or Martin Fowler's laughable quote about JUnit: "Never in the field of software development was so much owed by so many to so few lines of code." JUnit is OK, but give me a break, Martin!
It's not hard to trace the cultural history of XP from these kinds of statements to the stories I've heard from colleagues of being the victims of angry attacks at conferences for asking about where the process had failed for them, or suggesting changes.
I think there are a lot of good ideas in XP, and I'd like to see the XP community fix its attitude problem so that those good ideas can prosper and evolve. Perhaps this book is the dose of circumspection that XP needs.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, we can agree to disagree. My opinion: brevity is the soul of wit.
Agreed: unpleasant business though it is, they are well within their rights to sue copyright violators. It is, in fact, what they ought to have been doing all along.
However -- and this is a big however -- they are completely outisde their rights using the powers the DMCA has given them to bring about these suits. Under the bill of rights, which guards against unreasonable search and seizure, and deprivation of property without due process of law, the RIAA would have to get a warrant issued to be able to shut down people's ISP accounts. The burden of proof would rest with the accuser.
However, the DMCA places the burden of proof on the accused. Basically, the DMCA makes it so that an ISP has to take action against anybody accused of copyright violation, regardless of the merit of the claim. The accused has to (at the very least) file a legal counterclaim just to get their account back -- not an easy thing for somebody who's not a lawyer and isn't up on the vagaries of the DMCA. And it's without any oversight from the judicial system.
This unreasonable power lets the RIAA use these lawsuits not as a valid round of legal complaints (which they would be), but as a bullying tactic. They needn't be careful about the accusations they make; they pay no price if they're wrong, and achieve the desired intimidating effect just the same.
Lawsuits were already enough of a big, ugly stick before the DMCA. So yes, they're within their rights to bring the suits -- but not by the methods they've chosen. They'll have my sympathy when they stop trying to dismantle my rights; until then, their business model can crash and burn for all I care.
Quotes follow the composite pattern: half of a quote is also a quote! "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" is a quote, even though I have not reprinted the entire text of A Tale of Two Cities.
In this particular case, I've always considered the latter half of the quote unnecessary; it states the obvious in a way that detracts from the dry humor of the whole thing.
"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice."
(A favorite quote of mine -- someone had to say it!)
Every time I try to comprehend the parent post, I get:
ungood is not an lvalue
Some people are just so hard to understand!
And I'm sure it would work exactly well for the Justice Department as it does now for the music industry.
I definitely agree with Apple's focus on stability and user experience -- it really shows in the finished product. Still, I sure wouldn't mind a timely beta without the polish. And, as you point out, it should easier for 1.5 than it was for 1.4!
I'm just a little too eager to be using generics on OS X. I feel like I'll have reached some sort of geek nirvana.
Apple (finally!) has a 1.4.2 out, and it's superb. For a brief moment, OS X is up to date on Java.
Does anybody know anything about Apple's timeline on 1.5? Will we see a beta? Will we at least see a concurrent release? Apple has been notoriously out of date in the past, but they swore that they would improve; now's the time for them to prove that they are.
So then p2p sharing of copyrighted material is a crime and should be treated as such?
... but aside from that, I have no ethical quibble with them bringing fair suits against actual copyright violators. It's what they ought to have been doing from the beginning, instead of raiding the constitution.
u sometimes lump people into a big group and then draw questionable generalizations about them.
Of course.
Bringing suits against individual violators is the only thing the RIAA's done in quite a while where I think they're actually standing on solid ethical and legal ground. The ridiculous damages they're claiming, and their scare-and-settle intimidation tactics, are downright reprehensible, and as an independent musician, I'd personally love to see them go down in flames
In other words, you'd probably like to see some republicans in jail over this, but if it were Debian you'd settle for a slap on the wrist (not you as in you, you as in a general slashdot you).
Perhaps. But you-as-in-you-you shouldn't put words in your-as-in-Slashdot's-your mouth. Something thing irritates me is that you-as-in-Slashdot-you-including-you-as-in-you-yo
It's almost as irritating as the geeky abuse of English that goes on around here.
And even if the Halloween documents were merely *leaked*, does that make it right? Not hardly. Disgruntled employees work everywhere.
I maintain that leaking and theft are very different things. Leaking is when somebody who does have legal access to the documents makes them public; the ethics there are, to some extent, between that person and their employer.
In both cases, there's a security breach. In the one case, however, it's a matter of somebody disobeying orders. Their employer may choose to respond by firing them, subject to "whistle-blower" laws. In the other case, it's a matter of somebody breaking and entering, and it's a matter of criminal justice.
Putting it as simply as I can: the difference is that in the latter case, we're talking about people committing crimes.
Also, it's been pointed out that whomever did this DID point out to the democrats that the vulnerability was there.
The only people by whom this is claimed, however, are the Republicans; the Democrats deny that they were told. I'm not willing to take either of them at their word, so let's wait and see.
And, as I said, leaving a note on the fridge saying "the door was unlocked" does not make theft not theft.
If it was Debian sneaking documents from a Microsoft server, how would you feel about it then?
If by "sneaking" you mean exploiting a security weakness to access documents which they were not authorized to view, then that is a crime and I'd want their asses hauled to court, thank you very much.
- it was publicly disclosed that they were leaked -- Slashdot didn't steal the memo and then secretly use it to undermine Microsoft -- and
- more importantly, the Microsoft memos weren't leaked due to a security exploit -- they were leaked, not stolen -- and
- the programming community hasn't made any secret about exploits in Microsoft's security when they are found.
The Republicans' responsibility was to report the security breach, and to not exploit it regardless of whether it was fixed. (Leaving your door unlocked may be stupid, but it does not make it legal or ethical for others to steal your things.)This incident is really quite different from the Halloween Memo; it's much more akin to Cliton allegedy breaching the FBI files of political enemies. IMO, that would actually have been a valid foundation for an impeachment case
It's true that a prof has the right to set course requirements as they see fit. I'm simply suggesting that a prof setting tools requirements is a sign that they're not focusing on principles.
And honestly, if I were interviewing candidates, I'd take somebody who knows Eiffel and has a solid understanding of OO over somebody who knows Java and thinks procedurally.
Sure, it's nice to "have it both ways" and get somebody who already knows Java inside and out -- but in my experience, school training in Java gives very little compared to actual experience. I don't think an intelligent, adaptable program with one month of professional Java experience will write code that's any worse than somebody with lots of schooling in Java and no professional experience at all.
So I say, if they want to use Eiffel, why stop them?
Welcome to Real Life, kids.
I sure hope the business world / software industry doesn't count as "real life". I miss my college days -- maybe it's just the veneer of retrospect, or senility setting in, but I remember them being a lot more grounded than the inane world of business.
I prefer to call it "the unreal life you're stuck with half your waking hours if you want to be a software professional".
Has anybody seen any useful benchmarks of compiler output comparing XL and GCC on PowerPC?
That would be interesting to see.
Many opinionated people would say, perhaps prejudicially, that the job of any teaching institution that is not explicitly a vocational/technical training program is to teach principles and not isolated methods; that a good curriculum implements goals which could be accomplished to equal effect with many different tools; that in the rapidly changing landscape of the computer world, such a teaching approach is the only one that's likely to have any serious long-term benefit to students; and that the presence or absence in the curriculum of restrictions to specific applications, OSes, and programming languages is actually good indicator of the quality of a program.
As it happens, I am such a person. Give these bozos hell.
I got the distinct impression that the text had not been assigned, just the essay. So I was judging the field by the prof. I looked for counter-examples, but it's not worth a decade in the field to me to acquire the taste.
I still think your conclusion is overly broad and unfair. Say that you had a bad experience, say that you're not interested, fair enough -- but don't dismiss the whole field out of hand if you aren't willing to invest the effort in making a fair judgment.
It constantly pains me how many people gave up math -- even hate the idea of math -- because of a bad teacher or two, or a bad experience in the first tedious, dry, repetitious, mechanical two years of the average undergraduate math curriculum. I try to explain to them that manually doing Gaussian elimination or integrations by parts over and over has little to do with the real work of mathematicians; that the cycle of proofs and refutations is a creative, dynamic, exciting process of discovery; and math, real math, is tremendously fun. But they won't buy it or aren't interested, because they had some bad experiences and are permanently turned off.
To this day I have a terrible aversion to the use of "partner" as a verb.
"Verbing weirds language." --Bill Watterson
Funny, in my experience, those who complain the loudest about "communication problems" are actually engineers complaining about other engineers who are combative and near-sighted, and blaming others for their own unwillingness to understand their users while they run off and implement crazy and completely inappropriate things.
The problem with paying too much attention to what is actually said is that people don't always know how best to express what they actually want. Implementing very literally to stated intentions is a recipe for disaster.
One of the reasons engineers feel like users keep changing requirements is that they're very bad at separating what people mean from what they say. Customers are not as liter-minded as programmers, and programmers who want truly happy customers had better learn to bloody well deal with it.
A really good engineer in a requirements gathering role can read between the lines to find areas where a customer either may not have really meant quite what they said, may not understand the words they're using in the same way as a programmer would, or simply doesn't quite understand the implications of what they're asking for.
A lot of working well with customers is uncovering the right presumptions and questioning the right things, explaining problems and questions to customers using a language they can understand, and thus bringing what they actually want and what they actually say into sync.
One class is not sufficient evidence for such a decision, of course, but I just don't see enough evidence to the contrary to revisit my conclusion.
I hope to heaven that English -- or any other field -- is not to be judged primarily by its undergraduate students. I don't know in what universe you went to school, but students not reading the assignment is par for the undergraduate course in most every discipline and university. Walk into a comp sci class and ask for a show of hands on how many people actually read the whole assigned section of the textbook, and you'll probably get a minority as well.
If you actually took a good class, or spent a decade actually working in the field, perhaps you would see evidence of the worth of lit crit.
Note that the discussion here is mostly about deconstructionism and cultural theory. Literarcy criticism in general is vast field, with much good and bad in it.
I'm glad you admit your hostility. I would repeat my earlier comments, and encourage you to overcome it. I don't know what field you're in, but my profession -- business software -- constantly suffers from poor communication bordering on illiteracy, and could use a good dose of the humanities. For example, lit crit's study of how things are communicated without being said has obvious application to the requirements gathering process.
I agree that the experiment does not quite demonstrate my claims, although it strongly indicates them to me.
:)
That reasoningly sounds suspciciously unlike science.
The field does certainly have some serious problems. I think the article hits it closer than your analysis: deconstructionism is becoming so rarified and inbred that not only is it already incomprehenisble to the general public, but even individual academics are becoming mutually incomprehensible to each other.
Of course, it probably didn't help that theoretical physics is equally incomprehensible to the world at large, and the editors of the journal (erroneously, in my opinion) gave Sokal the benefit of the doubt when they were unable to understand his article.
I can barely (only just barely) imagine somebody getting published in some physics journal because they skimmed the paper and the peer reviewers did the same, but it would be found out instantly after it was published.
I believe that Sokal annouced that his article was a hoax the day it was published, so unfortunately, we can't draw any conclusions about the credibility of field at large -- just the journal.
I do think that deconstructionism, and cultural studies in general, have problems, but I agree with the article's conclusion: instead of being derisive and dismissive, we should "enter the jungle" and rescue the useful insights -- they are truely useful.
Sokal's experiment demonstrated that peer review standards in deconstructionist journals are low. It did not demonstrate, however, that the whole discipline is meaningless, just that one journal (albeit a respected one) was unable to distinguish the meaningless from the meaningful.
... and its little lights would flash and it would play a tinny little melody.
About a year ago, my parents gave me an amusing little animatronic toy which (allegedy) responded to voice commands. "Kuma! Sing me a song!" you'd say, and its little lights would flash and it would play a tinny little melody. Then you'd say "Kuma! Hing freeb gafrob nok!"
Reasonable conclusion: Kuma cannot differentiate English from nonsense.
Unreasonable conclusion: All English is nonsense.
Your whole post is well said. Thank you.
Most subtle, nuanced statements are going to sound pretty stupid if you render half the words meaningless and remove their context, which is exactly what happens when an outsider hears the language of some specialized field. It's very difficult for outsiders to judge the legitimacy of a field from the outside.
I see this all the time in the general public's reactions to both software and science, especially theoretical physics and medicine.
The article's author actually says this really well:
He goes on to draw what I think is a really useful conclusion (much more insightful than most of the posts on this thread, I'm afraid):
I wonder what we might learn if comprehensibility returned to the equation. There are a lot of very interesting ideas buring in academia.
That was a funny PA -- quite clever, if you've read Reinventing Comics. However, I think Gabe & Tycho made real asses out of themselves in the accompanying commentary. They responded to McCloud's optimistic (if starry-eyed) willingness to imagine a bright future for cartooning and put out creative new ideas by basically, as he put it, kicking him in the teeth.
... Your responses were deft and had the weight of punishment, and I feel as though I have been taught a valuable lesson by a bloom of aluminum baseball bats. At the root of it, I misjudged the man. For his part, he says that he has not made himself as aware as he should of the way online comics are progressing - and the ways they are endeavoring to support themselves. ... My conversation with Scott was fascinating, and clarified many, many issues."
G&T are hilarious, but heavens, they do shoot their arrogant little mouths off sometimes. Micropayments may not work, and Scott McCloud may not be right about everything (or even anything), but (1) as a hard-working veteran artist who was drawing comics when the PA crew was in diapers, he deserved more respect than they gave him, (2) as a veteran embracing change, a creative mind trying to test out new, risky ideas, he deserved more respect than they gave him, and (3) as somebody who is -- hello! -- trying to figure how they can make a living from their craft, he deserved one heck of a lot more respect than they gave him.
They ended up eating a bit of crow over that comic -- mostly because McCloud himself responded by being persistently civil to them until they realized what a couple of assholes they were. But they did realize, and came back with the kind of civility their satire ought to have carrier from the beginning. Tycho: "Reader response to Friday's thingy was profoundly, powerfully negative (Which Scott even apologized for - can you believe that?)
But if somebody is Offering the same or equivalent conent at same or acceptably same quality then people will not go to pay for service.
The key phrase there is "the same or equivalent content" -- in other words, commoditized content.
It is loosely true that a market tends to push the price of a commodity towards its marginal cost, which is nearly zero in the case of digital information. The trick is that not all art is a commodity. Some is, to be sure -- does the public really care which boy / boob band is cranking out the latest schlock?
Not so with all art. The sorts of work I've seen (and paid for!) on BitPass so far have all been unique, idiosyncratic little works of art. Sure, I can also get online comics for free -- but they're different, and even if I've read one, I haven't read them all. Some are mediocre; some are good; a few are very good. All leave me looking for more. While there is some limit to the number I want to read, having read one doesn't stop me from wanting to read others.
For art like this, which is not a commodity, it's entirely possible that people will be willing to pay for some even though they can get others free.
In my view, the underlying problem with XP is just how extreme its proponents have let it become.
The original inventors of XP were very careful to say how they thought it was and wasn't useful. Kent Beck's "white book" gives a good list of "don't use XP if..." criteria which should have ruled out the near-disasterous project at where my company used it. As you point out, Martin Fowler and others offer different perspective, and nearly all the inventors insist on remaining flexible in the process and open to change.
The problem is all the zealots who picked it up and ran with it, taking it to hysterical, almost religious extremes: "I hated developement and was considering a career switch until I started using XP. Now I'm happier than ever, and so is my boss!" User testimonials sounded more and more like ads for penis enlargement, or rehab.
And what did XP's founders do to deserve this reaction? I mean, it's not like they oversold XP and tried to turn it into a cult...er....
Well, yeah, actually, that's exactly what they did: they set it up like a cult, and got a cult-like following.
The attitude of the XP literature is all too often overwhelmingly arrogant, self-important, marketing-focused, and insufferably holy-holy -- starting with the XP "Bill of Rights", and Kent Beck's inconceivably cocky advice on using XP. (Use it on your hardest project. Repeat.) Or Martin Fowler's laughable quote about JUnit: "Never in the field of software development was so much owed by so many to so few lines of code." JUnit is OK, but give me a break, Martin!
It's not hard to trace the cultural history of XP from these kinds of statements to the stories I've heard from colleagues of being the victims of angry attacks at conferences for asking about where the process had failed for them, or suggesting changes.
I think there are a lot of good ideas in XP, and I'd like to see the XP community fix its attitude problem so that those good ideas can prosper and evolve. Perhaps this book is the dose of circumspection that XP needs.