Most people calling themselves 'Software Engineers' are not Engineers in the sense of the word as a profession. A true profession (lawyers, doctors, accountants, etc) have a certifying body, an exam that must be passed, a code of ethics that must be followed, and the ability to disbar people from performing the work. For more information, check out the book "After the Gold Rush"
As a software engineer, I would *love* to have such a body behind me. A real software engineering shop would then become more like an architectural firm - perhaps a few architects, but most people would be draftsmen, apprentices, etc. With jobs appropriate to their training and ability. I can't tell you how many projects I have seen where a mess was created by someone in over their head. And can you imagine the ability to say to management, "No, I cannot sign up for that ridiculous deadline you pulled out of the air - I could be disbarred for being that irresponsible".
To nitpick this guy on this point though is a cheap shot - the way this industry is today, that has no bearing on his real technical competency. He should have been prepared to defend it though - not sound so incompetent.
I wonder how many of the RIAA's 'musicians' actually have a Bachelor of Arts in Music Performance?
So the customers don't want it, the music execs don't want it, the vendors don't want it, and I don't think he musicians are clamoring for it either... Why do we have DRM again?
Viacom, a company with VERY deep pockets, has just violated your copyright. You can bet that if you took a video of theirs and claimed it as your own, some nasty lawyers would come knocking. They just did the same to you. Go find yourself a lawyer who is used to filing nuisance cases, and make some money off their mistake!
The only way this mistake will be unlikely to happen in the future is if the mistake costs them a lot *now*.
For most people, this 'computer stuff' is just plain hard. They don't understand all the moving pieces of the puzzle and get easily frustrated. That is why they call on people like us to help them. People feel ignorant and stupid when dealing with computer hassles... If my Father-in-law ran into issues upgading Vista, he would lump it in the same category as having trouble putting in his color printer cartridge and give me a call. He has _no idea_ that these hassles are caused because Microsoft is not truly focusing on the user experience (as much as they would have you believe they are).
If his neighbor left a bag of trash or a pile of leaves in his driveway, he would understand and have something to say about that... but there are things in software literally and figuratively in his way as much as his neighbor's trash, but he just thinks "I just don't understand how to use the computer".
Does this mean they are also going to delist auctions for domain names, downloadable software, and other, not-so-game-oriented property that also happens to be virtual?
Get involved in your local user groups. Java, Ruby, Linux, and others have huge communities out there. There are opportunities to learn, to present, and to volunteer. The work you do there can be high profile, good for references, and good for finding job leads.
Comarting something like Jave EE to Ajax isn't even like comparing apples to oranges, it's like comparing apples to blue. They are totally, totally different things, and live at different conceptual points in the hierarchy.
Of course, that is actually the point of the article... That Java EE shouldn't be a bunch of specs for implementation, that it should be a bunch of loosely coupled ideas that end up getting something done. I mean, AJAX originally stood for Asynchronous Javascript and XML, but today, you see things that don't use XML and aren't asynchronous using the buzzword. Ajax is 'just a bunch of ideas'.
Of course, those ideas are based on Javascript, html, cascading stylesheets, the XMLHTTPRequest function in browsers, etc. If these things weren't all spec'd out, Ajax wouldn't have come into existence. The article makes it seem like the author is somewhat against specs, so I find this rather ironic.
Bad students are bad students... A podcast isn't going to make up for it, and it is not your job to police them like you are their parents.
Put the information up for the students; wallpaper the planet with it like AOL did with CD roms. The students are paying for it and should get it whether they were in class or not.
Something tells me that a student who doesn't care enough to show up to class is still going to get a lousy grade. Drinking a big cup of coffee and watching a bunch of videos the day before an exam is not going to earn you a good grade.
I didn't see anyone else say wuite this argument, so I figured I'd add my 2 cents to this already crowded conversation.
The question over whether we need DRM is fundamentally different than the question of whether authors have rights that need protection in general.
If you don't agree author's have rights, then this whole thing is a mute point - it means that you believe that a creative work, once created, is the property of all to do whatever they want to with.
If you believe that authors have rights, the you believe that the author has some sort of interest in protecting how his/her work is used, and the right to profit from it.
DRM is about whether you think the authors have a further right to inconvenience/not trust/violate the fsir use righte/etc of your customers.
Authors CAN have rights to their work, AND use the law to protect them, WITHOUT using DRM.
You know the 'show within the show' that creates plausible deniability for the existence of the Stargate program? For some time I have been thinking that this might be very real... just like when Seinfeld did his 'show within the show' idea. Now we find out within weeks of each other that Cheyenne Mountain is shutting down, and Stargate is cancelled.
If Oracle, Microsoft, and others can craft end user licenses that ban people from comparing their product against others and publishing those metrics, how about crafting a license that prevents people from reviewing and publishing information in context of copycat crimes?
The general population is so confused by technology they can easily take one concept they grasp and mis-apply it.
For instance, my sister-in-law is convinved her cell phone battery dies quicker when she is calling long distance numbers. To the average slashdotter, that is laughable... but think about it from her point of view - batteries die more quickly when they are used for more intensive stuff... her cell phone is calling a number further away. Throw in the 'power of suggestion', and the rest is an obviousl false conclusion. She has no idea how cell phones actually are talking to a local tower, so it is a reasonable but ignorant (in a non-insulting sense) conclusion.
I still had fun telling her my theory that global warning is caused by the extra hour of sunlight from daylight savings time, and that the ocean levels are rising because the chemicals we are dumping into the oceans are killing all the sponges.
This isn't an open source issue, this isn't a coding issue, this isn't even a technology issue. This is a contract issue, plain and simple.
The Government should have written their proposal to build the garage and the accompanying contract so that they own code that runs the system. This would also allow them to have it peer reviewed by others without a vested interest in anything other than a successful peer review.
This isn't an open source issue either... While that would give the government agencies access to the code in question, it isn't like armies of engineers are going to be contributing code back to the project (although I guess it is possible). In fact, (at least in my experience with Federal Government contracting), such source code would be considered in the 'public domain', and accessible via a Freedom of Information Act request.
Slashdot's title of 'replacing humans' aside, this article is right on. We do peer reviews of our code, but before we do, we make sure it meets our checkstyle conventions, and fix at least some of the egregious things that PMD, Findbugs, and a couple of the other reports we can get out of our Maven build system without any real effort.
This makes our reviews more productive, because people don't get caught up in discussions over curly brances, finding copied code, issues with contructor and exception idioms, etc.
The slashdot crowd is going to envison pointy-haired bosses basing performance reviews on this kind of stuff, which is a legitimae fear and shouldn't happen. Used in the hands of real software engineers though, this is similar in spirit to the woodworker's adage "measure twice, cut once". Loosely applied, "You know what you are doing, but be your own safety net".
This iPod adapter that Honda makes does this; it reads to you the names of your albums, and you select the one you want when it says it.
Too bad it sucks. First of all, it would take, like, 2 hours to read me all of my albums on my iPod, so I can't jump to anything quickly... also, you have to click a button with a second or so of it reading the one you want. This is a bad idea when driving; the only thing I should have to respond to in a timely manner while driving is, well, driving.
One review I read of it likened the experience to handing your iPod to a friend on the other side of a door and having them read the contents to you, then poking them with a coathanger when they read the song you want.
So, does this mean their local CBS affiliate cannot broadcast CSI anymore? It takes place in Las Vegas, and occasionally have plots that involve the transmission of 'gambling information'.
How about Star Trek, the Next Generation? They showed the Senior officers playing poker occasionally - Data even explains the game in one episode. There was even an episode entitled "Casino Royale" which involved data altering a pair of dice in a craps game. This is *clearly* the transmission of gambling information, including the knowledge of the games, methods of cheating, etc.
Can I order books on gambling from Amazon and have them shipped to WA? This involves the transmission of the horrid 'gambling information'.
I'm all for having a 'desktop that folds' over a miscule little laptop for the way I work, but this screen is just pathetic. The resolution is only 1680 x 1050... my Inspiron 9300 is 17 inches, and gives me 1900 x 1200. I need screen real estate more than I need just sheer size; at that resolution this screen make this the "Readers Digest Large Print Edition" of the laptop world.
1) If Steve Ballmer can't even go to a friend's wedding without getting the "Hey - you know a lot about computers, can you help me?" tired old line, then I don't feel so bad when it happens to me (and it happens to me a LOT).
2) So, the whole jist of this article is how neither Steve nor some of the best minds at Microsoft could fix a malware infected computer... So they create Microsoft Live OneCare? And this is suppost to be some kind of great thing? What a horrible endorsement of the service, "Use Microsoft Line OneCare... our best engineers can't really fix it either..." I guess when they sign up customers, Steve Ballmer will be running down the hallway saying, "Hey! We've got a Live one!"
Forget the prior art angle, this should lose on the merit of 'non-obvious to a practitioner in the field' part of patent law.
If you met the friend of a friend, hit it off, and said, "Hey, can you give me your phone number?", you are violating the spirit of this patent. That is the "exchange of in order to establish a direct communications link".
The ODF format is limited to the features and performance of OpenOffice and StarOffice and would not satisfy most of our Microsoft Office customers today.
This is just plain wrong, and is an example of the marketing machine creating a myth that most people will believe without challenging it. From my personal experience with dozens of people, you can put OpenOffice in front of them and they won't even be able to even tell the difference between OpenOffice and Word for most things they use it for.
Most people want to type a letter, do a little formatting, choose a few text styles, spellcheck it, and print it out. Most people get confused when they step outside this use case with the most trivial things, like headers and footers. Most people are not writing 150 page documents with 2 columns on a page, alternating between landscape and portrait pages, etc. Even if they are, they are struggling with Word to make it happen; I'd rather struggle with it, keep $495 per license in my IT budget, and know that the data is in a format I can DO something with outside of the tool that created it
This is like saying the right to Health Care is only useful to those people who are doctors.
The 'freedom' of free software can be asserted by non-technical people/organizations. If my dentist uses some open source piece of software to run his client and medical record database, he can always hire a comptetent consultant to fix or modify something for him - in this sense it is no different than his plumbing, x-ray machine, and other tools in his office. If he uses a closed-source product to do this, there is every chance that his data will be locked in a format he won't be able to use if the company that owns that software goes out of business.
This is neat and all, but who is going to want to buy a license for something like Microsoft Word when someone has already used up some of the words you can type? I mean, is there an easy way to figure out how many of a particular word is left?
Slashdot Mirror
Most people calling themselves 'Software Engineers' are not Engineers in the sense of the word as a profession. A true profession (lawyers, doctors, accountants, etc) have a certifying body, an exam that must be passed, a code of ethics that must be followed, and the ability to disbar people from performing the work. For more information, check out the book "After the Gold Rush"
http://preview.tinyurl.com/39amo4
As a software engineer, I would *love* to have such a body behind me. A real software engineering shop would then become more like an architectural firm - perhaps a few architects, but most people would be draftsmen, apprentices, etc. With jobs appropriate to their training and ability. I can't tell you how many projects I have seen where a mess was created by someone in over their head. And can you imagine the ability to say to management, "No, I cannot sign up for that ridiculous deadline you pulled out of the air - I could be disbarred for being that irresponsible".
To nitpick this guy on this point though is a cheap shot - the way this industry is today, that has no bearing on his real technical competency. He should have been prepared to defend it though - not sound so incompetent.
I wonder how many of the RIAA's 'musicians' actually have a Bachelor of Arts in Music Performance?
So the customers don't want it, the music execs don't want it, the vendors don't want it, and I don't think he musicians are clamoring for it either... Why do we have DRM again?
I say someone needs to call the bluff.
Viacom, a company with VERY deep pockets, has just violated your copyright. You can bet that if you took a video of theirs and claimed it as your own, some nasty lawyers would come knocking. They just did the same to you. Go find yourself a lawyer who is used to filing nuisance cases, and make some money off their mistake!
The only way this mistake will be unlikely to happen in the future is if the mistake costs them a lot *now*.
db-
Simple...
Most people don't understand the issues.
For most people, this 'computer stuff' is just plain hard. They don't understand all the moving pieces of the puzzle and get easily frustrated. That is why they call on people like us to help them. People feel ignorant and stupid when dealing with computer hassles... If my Father-in-law ran into issues upgading Vista, he would lump it in the same category as having trouble putting in his color printer cartridge and give me a call. He has _no idea_ that these hassles are caused because Microsoft is not truly focusing on the user experience (as much as they would have you believe they are).
If his neighbor left a bag of trash or a pile of leaves in his driveway, he would understand and have something to say about that... but there are things in software literally and figuratively in his way as much as his neighbor's trash, but he just thinks "I just don't understand how to use the computer".
Does this mean they are also going to delist auctions for domain names, downloadable software, and other, not-so-game-oriented property that also happens to be virtual?
Get involved in your local user groups. Java, Ruby, Linux, and others have huge communities out there. There are opportunities to learn, to present, and to volunteer. The work you do there can be high profile, good for references, and good for finding job leads.
Comarting something like Jave EE to Ajax isn't even like comparing apples to oranges, it's like comparing apples to blue. They are totally, totally different things, and live at different conceptual points in the hierarchy.
Of course, that is actually the point of the article... That Java EE shouldn't be a bunch of specs for implementation, that it should be a bunch of loosely coupled ideas that end up getting something done. I mean, AJAX originally stood for Asynchronous Javascript and XML, but today, you see things that don't use XML and aren't asynchronous using the buzzword. Ajax is 'just a bunch of ideas'.
Of course, those ideas are based on Javascript, html, cascading stylesheets, the XMLHTTPRequest function in browsers, etc. If these things weren't all spec'd out, Ajax wouldn't have come into existence. The article makes it seem like the author is somewhat against specs, so I find this rather ironic.
Bad students are bad students... A podcast isn't going to make up for it, and it is not your job to police them like you are their parents.
Put the information up for the students; wallpaper the planet with it like AOL did with CD roms. The students are paying for it and should get it whether they were in class or not.
Something tells me that a student who doesn't care enough to show up to class is still going to get a lousy grade. Drinking a big cup of coffee and watching a bunch of videos the day before an exam is not going to earn you a good grade.
I didn't see anyone else say wuite this argument, so I figured I'd add my 2 cents to this already crowded conversation.
The question over whether we need DRM is fundamentally different than the question of whether authors have rights that need protection in general.
If you don't agree author's have rights, then this whole thing is a mute point - it means that you believe that a creative work, once created, is the property of all to do whatever they want to with.
If you believe that authors have rights, the you believe that the author has some sort of interest in protecting how his/her work is used, and the right to profit from it.
DRM is about whether you think the authors have a further right to inconvenience/not trust/violate the fsir use righte/etc of your customers.
Authors CAN have rights to their work, AND use the law to protect them, WITHOUT using DRM.
You know the 'show within the show' that creates plausible deniability for the existence of the Stargate program? For some time I have been thinking that this might be very real... just like when Seinfeld did his 'show within the show' idea. Now we find out within weeks of each other that Cheyenne Mountain is shutting down, and Stargate is cancelled.
Coincidence?
If Oracle, Microsoft, and others can craft end user licenses that ban people from comparing their product against others and publishing those metrics, how about crafting a license that prevents people from reviewing and publishing information in context of copycat crimes?
The general population is so confused by technology they can easily take one concept they grasp and mis-apply it.
For instance, my sister-in-law is convinved her cell phone battery dies quicker when she is calling long distance numbers. To the average slashdotter, that is laughable... but think about it from her point of view - batteries die more quickly when they are used for more intensive stuff... her cell phone is calling a number further away. Throw in the 'power of suggestion', and the rest is an obviousl false conclusion. She has no idea how cell phones actually are talking to a local tower, so it is a reasonable but ignorant (in a non-insulting sense) conclusion.
I still had fun telling her my theory that global warning is caused by the extra hour of sunlight from daylight savings time, and that the ocean levels are rising because the chemicals we are dumping into the oceans are killing all the sponges.
This isn't an open source issue, this isn't a coding issue, this isn't even a technology issue. This is a contract issue, plain and simple.
The Government should have written their proposal to build the garage and the accompanying contract so that they own code that runs the system. This would also allow them to have it peer reviewed by others without a vested interest in anything other than a successful peer review.
This isn't an open source issue either... While that would give the government agencies access to the code in question, it isn't like armies of engineers are going to be contributing code back to the project (although I guess it is possible). In fact, (at least in my experience with Federal Government contracting), such source code would be considered in the 'public domain', and accessible via a Freedom of Information Act request.
Slashdot's title of 'replacing humans' aside, this article is right on. We do peer reviews of our code, but before we do, we make sure it meets our checkstyle conventions, and fix at least some of the egregious things that PMD, Findbugs, and a couple of the other reports we can get out of our Maven build system without any real effort.
This makes our reviews more productive, because people don't get caught up in discussions over curly brances, finding copied code, issues with contructor and exception idioms, etc.
The slashdot crowd is going to envison pointy-haired bosses basing performance reviews on this kind of stuff, which is a legitimae fear and shouldn't happen. Used in the hands of real software engineers though, this is similar in spirit to the woodworker's adage "measure twice, cut once". Loosely applied, "You know what you are doing, but be your own safety net".
-db
This iPod adapter that Honda makes does this; it reads to you the names of your albums, and you select the one you want when it says it.
Too bad it sucks. First of all, it would take, like, 2 hours to read me all of my albums on my iPod, so I can't jump to anything quickly... also, you have to click a button with a second or so of it reading the one you want. This is a bad idea when driving; the only thing I should have to respond to in a timely manner while driving is, well, driving.
One review I read of it likened the experience to handing your iPod to a friend on the other side of a door and having them read the contents to you, then poking them with a coathanger when they read the song you want.
So, does this mean their local CBS affiliate cannot broadcast CSI anymore? It takes place in Las Vegas, and occasionally have plots that involve the transmission of 'gambling information'.
How about Star Trek, the Next Generation? They showed the Senior officers playing poker occasionally - Data even explains the game in one episode. There was even an episode entitled "Casino Royale" which involved data altering a pair of dice in a craps game. This is *clearly* the transmission of gambling information, including the knowledge of the games, methods of cheating, etc.
Can I order books on gambling from Amazon and have them shipped to WA? This involves the transmission of the horrid 'gambling information'.
I'm all for having a 'desktop that folds' over a miscule little laptop for the way I work, but this screen is just pathetic. The resolution is only 1680 x 1050... my Inspiron 9300 is 17 inches, and gives me 1900 x 1200. I need screen real estate more than I need just sheer size; at that resolution this screen make this the "Readers Digest Large Print Edition" of the laptop world.
I got 2 things out of this article:
1) If Steve Ballmer can't even go to a friend's wedding without getting the "Hey - you know a lot about computers, can you help me?" tired old line, then I don't feel so bad when it happens to me (and it happens to me a LOT).
2) So, the whole jist of this article is how neither Steve nor some of the best minds at Microsoft could fix a malware infected computer... So they create Microsoft Live OneCare? And this is suppost to be some kind of great thing? What a horrible endorsement of the service, "Use Microsoft Line OneCare... our best engineers can't really fix it either..." I guess when they sign up customers, Steve Ballmer will be running down the hallway saying, "Hey! We've got a Live one!"
Forget the prior art angle, this should lose on the merit of 'non-obvious to a practitioner in the field' part of patent law.
If you met the friend of a friend, hit it off, and said, "Hey, can you give me your phone number?", you are violating the spirit of this patent. That is the "exchange of in order to establish a direct communications link".
From the article:
This is just plain wrong, and is an example of the marketing machine creating a myth that most people will believe without challenging it. From my personal experience with dozens of people, you can put OpenOffice in front of them and they won't even be able to even tell the difference between OpenOffice and Word for most things they use it for.
Most people want to type a letter, do a little formatting, choose a few text styles, spellcheck it, and print it out. Most people get confused when they step outside this use case with the most trivial things, like headers and footers. Most people are not writing 150 page documents with 2 columns on a page, alternating between landscape and portrait pages, etc. Even if they are, they are struggling with Word to make it happen; I'd rather struggle with it, keep $495 per license in my IT budget, and know that the data is in a format I can DO something with outside of the tool that created it
This is like saying the right to Health Care is only useful to those people who are doctors.
The 'freedom' of free software can be asserted by non-technical people/organizations. If my dentist uses some open source piece of software to run his client and medical record database, he can always hire a comptetent consultant to fix or modify something for him - in this sense it is no different than his plumbing, x-ray machine, and other tools in his office. If he uses a closed-source product to do this, there is every chance that his data will be locked in a format he won't be able to use if the company that owns that software goes out of business.
Douglas Hofstadter would be proud of you.
Replace Rob with Todd and Fritos with Cheetos, and this song could be my biography. My wife even used to be the receptionist where I work!
This is neat and all, but who is going to want to buy a license for something like Microsoft Word when someone has already used up some of the words you can type? I mean, is there an easy way to figure out how many of a particular word is left?
welcome to the barrell...