Those are fair points, but there are also paid-for e-mail services that offer similar facilities to Google and friends without downsides like ads.
Also, setting up basic hosting facilities and getting your own domain aren't really any more complicated than many other technical tasks non-geeks perform all the time. For example, plenty of these hosting services would let you do all of that from a user-friendly web-based control panel, without going anywhere near a command line. I think the problem here is as much the lack of general education about how the Internet works as anything else.
Wow. I'd heard assorted horror stories about poor ISPs and people not having a choice in the US, but I always assumed they were at least slightly exaggerated. There is really no effective competition for Internet connectivity in the US in 2014?
I could sign up with dozens of different ISPs here in England. It's true that much of that flexibility came from some surprisingly sensible rules a few years ago that required BT (the dominant phone company) to share access to certain facilities. But even without relying on BT or a cable company, there are various mobile providers with 3G and soon 4G connections, there are rural areas where people literally use satellites to get their access because they are too far from a telephone exchange to use the same facilities most urban households do, and there have been a few unique stories where locals have clubbed together and set up something unusual (but sometimes achieving better speeds and/or lower costs to regular providers).
This was just meant as a side anecdote that fitted neatly in with the general strategy I have for paying a little more than the entry-level of everything to get much better results, and doesn't really affect my basic point about how to manage facilities like e-mail without becoming dependent on Google and the like. But I'm surprised and sorry to hear that not everyone can do things we take for granted over hear.
Then most of the free email providers ended their services, and now I'm down to gmail. yahoo, and hotmail.
I pay a few GBP a year for a hosted Linux shell account from a local IT firm. I can run whatever web sites I want from it, have it collect and/or forward e-mails and run any related systems I want, etc. It's not free, and neither are the handful of domains I own.
Because I own the domains, I'm paying for the hosting, and everything is set up with real, standardised tools, I can shift anything around any time I want. I can't be held hostage by any business having my data locked up in their proprietary system, or by any one technology that doesn't export things to someone else's alternative platform. This mostly doesn't matter, because I also get actual customer service from the IT guys in return for paying them actual money.
Personally, I download the mail to my main PC, where I run an actual e-mail program instead of relying on webmail. However, I could set up a local mail store on my home network or install any web front end I wanted on the hosted account if some other set-up became more useful.
None of this is rocket science, and there are plenty of hosting companies that will offer a similar basic plan for a modest fee (a small fraction of what I pay every year in, say, phone bills). I also pay a bit more than average to use a good ISP with solid technical specs, clueful people at the other end of the phone on the rare occasions anything does go wrong, things like a static IP address as standard, etc.
Basically, you just have to look beyond free-as-in-you're-the-product on-line services, absurdly cheap junk hosting, and mass market ISPs, and much of the frustration of the modern Internet goes away. It's just a shame that most people don't realise that, so the big name companies continue to dominate and there is a limited market for smaller-but-better services.
The solution, though, is clearly to grant different maximum term lengths for different classes of work.
I think we already do this to some extent in most jurisdictions, but I agree with your point all the same.
The best mechanism for dealing with this, I'm convinced, is to grant very short copyright terms which must be registered for
Here I do disagree, for the simple reason that as someone trying to run multiple small businesses, overhead is the #1 enemy, and registration of routine practices is a particularly wasteful form of overhead. We don't all have accountants, lawyers or admin staff; for some of us, any time taken to deal with the paperwork is time directly taken away from the handful of people doing actual creative work, and if we're developing work for others then presumably that overhead roughly doubles because there's going to have to be some sort of assignment executed around the time we get paid as well for any such system to work.
This way, if a copyright holder fails to renew, because he doesn't care enough to bother to do so
The catch here is that there are plenty of other reasons the holder might fail to act. I'm not against the idea of a renewable right in all cases, but the burden of enforcing copyright can already be prohibitive for a small business with limited legal resources. The last thing they need is for a manager who also has statutory obligations relating to everything from business registration and rent payments through to filing tax statements and signing client contracts to find they've lost all rights to their only product because of a paperwork screw-up while they were off sick or simply because they didn't understand the rules (which my accountants and lawyers tell me happens all the time for small businesses when it comes to other legal/tax regs, not least because the way the rules are written is itself not always clear).
Your numbers sound reasonable, but to me they suggest something more like an upper bound on how long protection should last, not necessarily a target.
I believe copyright is best treated as a purely economic tool; it may have some desirable side-effects like giving credit to artists or maintaining confidentiality, but these are usually better treated as separate issues IMHO. On that basis, the job of copyright is to provide sufficient economic support to allow reasonable financial returns to be generated from creating and distributing useful works.
So, if a AAA console game has made 90% of the revenues it will ever generate today after the first few weeks, or a Hollywood blockbuster makes 90% of its revenues within a couple of years because that's when cinema showings, DVD releases and first runs on broadcast TV happen, then a period of perhaps five years from first public performance might be sufficient.
On the other hand, something like a school textbook can be very labour intensive to produce in good quality, but might bring in substantial revenues over several years if it can be adapted to produce slightly modified editions suitable for different national markets, not all of them necessarily available immediately in the first year of publication. A period as short as five years might cause a sharp reduction in returns in this case, potentially meaning it's no longer worth putting in the effort to produce a good textbook and corners get cut instead. This clearly isn't a desirable outcome if our goal is to promote the creation and distribution of good quality works, so maybe longer protection is needed in such cases to maintain sufficient incentive.
This would set a de-facto worldwide standard of 50 years.
I appreciate that there is an element of fighting for what you can realistically achieve in political matters. I'm also generally in favour of retaining the basic principle of copyright, at least until a better idea for promoting the creation and distribution of new works comes along.
Even so, I think the fundamental problem with your position is that it still implicitly accepts that a copyright term comparable to many humans' adult lifetimes is reasonable. With the rise of modern technologies, a much shorter term would still provide a substantial commercial incentive to create and share new works, without locking up aspects of our culture to the same degree. I'm open to discussions on the specifics for different types of work and for special cases like orphan works or works that continue to be developed over time, but I would expect a period of no more than 10-20 years from public disclosure should be more than adequate in just about any case today.
It has been my contention that when websites no longer serve malware through Ads, then they can start complaining that users blocks ads.
Indeed. I block 100% of ads my tools can identify, I consider this a routine security precaution, and I make no exceptions. Sorry to the honest site operators, I won't take offence if you decide to block me because I block your ads, but no, I won't whitelist you. This became my policy shortly after the only virus infection I've ever been aware of picking up on any computer I operate, which was a Java zero day exploit I picked up browsing normally reputable tech news sites.
Surge protectors aren't there to protect against something as powerful as a lightning strike. However, a decent surge protector will help with the everyday minor fluctuations in supply, and that alone can noticeably improve the longevity of just about any connected electrical devices.
For a few bucks a time, you can buy ones that work just like slightly bulkier extension leads, and at least in the UK most of the ones I've seen come with an associated insurance policy as a bonus. Unless you already have more effective protection anyway or you're in an area with a very stable electricity supply, you'd be foolish not to use surge protectors routinely for any expensive electrical gear these days.
The trouble with the idea of licensing software developers is that no-one really knows yet how to develop software well in general. At most, so far, we have some people who have found practices that worked well on previous projects in their parts of the software development world, and sometimes when the stars align they share their ideas for mutual benefit. This is still a long way short of the standards found in true engineering disciplines.
I suspect the inevitable result of licensing today would be that a lot of consultants who talk a good talk would convince the relevant officials that they knew best, and some sort of dubiously authoritative body would be created to mandate that everyone else should follow the will of the consultants. Imagine a world where Robert C. Martin's claim that if you don't do TDD then you can't possibly be a professional software developer actually carried the force of law.
I don't think you can credibly claim a big name consultant like Robert C. Martin is not a TDDer, but when you watch interviews like this it seems pretty clear that he would object to your claim. See also the infamous Sudoku contrast between Ron Jeffries' TDD attempts and Peter Norvig's version, assorted comments by Kent Beck ("It's an analysis technique, a design technique, really a technique for structuring all the activities of development."), etc.
How did APIs get into this discussion? We're talking about users running back-ups. In any sane system, the standard operating system UI(s) ought to allow copying files for back-up purposes, including preserving all relevant metadata, out of the box. The fact that this won't happen if the relevant data isn't actually stored in a proper filesystem but rather as some hack in another part of the disk is a significant problem, to which I suggest the solution is not allowing any application-level code to store data that way in the first place.
In any case, we seem to have drifted rather off-topic, so I'll stop there.
you can't write the tests before knowing what the program is supposed to do first and for that you need to know the bounds it needs to adhere to...
I read the context, as given in the summary and TFA, as switching between different algorithms at certain bounds, not necessarily limited to only accepting input at all if it's within certain bounds. In other words, the bounds and algorithm switching could be implementation details, not necessarily exposed in the relevant interface.
FWIW, what you're describing seems more practical to me. However, if you start from a position that "You should not be doing almost any programming until the design is done" then you're already a long way from how many TDDers practise and from the process that many who advocate TDD, including big name consultants and authors, describe.
That depends. If you're are a die-hard TDD fan, for example, then you'll be writing your (unit) tests before you necessarily know where any such boundaries are. Moreover, there is nothing inherent in that process to bring you back to add more tests later if boundaries arise or move during refactoring. It's not hard to imagine that a developer who leaves academia and moves straight into an industrial TDD shop might never have been exposed to competing ideas.
(I am not a die-hard TDD fan, and the practical usefulness of white box testing is one of the reasons for that, but I suspect many of us have met the kind of person I'm describing above.)
The trouble is, some of these schemes don't use files/registry where you're supposed to store data, they mess around with private areas like your boot sector. Why on earth should my OS allow some random application software on my computer anywhere near my boot sector? Aside from the glaring security hole, there is no systematic control and co-ordination for such access, so multiple DRM schemes could conflict, dual-booting could get messed up, etc.
Also, it shouldn't be necessary to run specialist backup tools to deal with file data. If the standard issue copy commands in the OS can't readily copy everything in the filesystem, then once again I think that OS is poor.
I'm not arguing against your point, I just think it's irrelevant. The same argument would apply to any software from any vendor that messes around with your disk behind the scenes, whether it's a game or a $10,000/seat specialist design tool.
I do think it's pretty low of these software vendors to rely on copy protection systems that screw real users. I also think it's a blatant security hole in Windows that application software can do this sort of thing in the first place. The fact remains that having a reliable SSD would avoid these kinds of problems ever coming up, and if SSDs are most useful as system/software drives, arguments like "just back it all up" or "don't put any data you care about on the SSD" are not constructive.
Dont buy shit software from EA then, because really we know they are the biggest retailer using DRM still.
Every piece of $1,000+/seat software we use at my company comes with some form of obnoxious DRM/copy protection technology.
Every. Single. One.
We are not talking about expendable games here, we are talking about software that only gets away with those prices and poor customer service because it's still so much better at what it does than any cheaper and less encumbered alternatives.
To be fair, even if you dont agree and continue to buy software that is copy protected, that is the issue, not the SSD.
Well, no, it's both.
If the SSD didn't fail, there would be no problem. If the SSD even failed with more than one minute's warning, there probably still would be no problem, since typically you can deactivate licences for software on this level if you can fire it up for a few seconds with an active Internet connection. It might be wise to back up anything you can, but a drive that fails young, suddenly, and with limited options to recover because of poor design decisions is still the drive manufacturer's fault.
Of course plenty of blame also goes to the software vendors, and as you can imagine, we have about as much respect for them in my industry as their customer service warrants.
That's cute, but approximately 100% of professionals working in graphic design would disagree with you. If someone else made products anywhere the level of Creative Suite and with better customer service than Adobe, plenty of us would use them.
Of course the DRM crap is Adobe's fault, and they did eventually resolve the issue. However, it took a couple of weeks, demonstrating almost comically bad customer service except that it wasn't actually funny at the time. As I mentioned, the problem was finally fixed only when my patience ran out and I sent them the recorded letter that starts formal legal proceedings.
Regardless of where any blame belonged, the facts are that if the SSD had not died suddenly, this could all have been avoided by just deactivating the software first, and that backing up the relevant data is simply not possible using normal tools, because to back it up, you must first know that it exists and where to find it, and you must be able to restore it (assuming that it would still be the same after swapping out the disk anyway, which a hardware signature used in a DRM system might not be).
So, a better SSD would have been worth a lot to me in that situation, and saying "Just back everything up" still isn't a good answer.
This is all a great theory, until the "data" in question is something like copy protection hackery that someone's high-end software puts on your SSD boot disk without necessarily telling you anything about it.
The only time I had an SSD failure, the hardware guys were great and got a replacement to me the next day, while it took literally weeks (and, in the end, a recorded letter threatening legal action) to get Adobe to let me use the software I already f**king bought on the same f**king PC it was always installed on, after I'd reinstalled everything on the replacement SSD.
If that had been an isolated occurrence, I might be willing to drop the point, but since I know of others who have also been screwed by Adobe's DRM/copy protection mess after a drive failure and I also know of other high-end software providers who play similar games, I don't think "just back everything up" is a good enough answer to unreliable drives. A drive failure typically costs some of us at least an order of magnitude more than just replacing the hardware itself once you factor in downtime, and we shouldn't have to mess around with RAID arrays of SSDs just to compensate for poorly designed products that fail unnecessarily.
No, but he presumably appoints the senior staff whose teams ultimately will write code, and capture requirements, and run tests, and all the rest. For something on this level he probably had a direct say in things like budget and timescales and the scope and high-level organisation of the project as well. If he asked for the impossible, he bears responsibility for that. If he didn't know it was impossible, he should have hired better advisors before committing to the project. And if it wasn't impossible but failed anyway, he should have appointed a senior management team that was up to the job.
(I'm not in the US and have no allegiance to any US political party, so please don't try to turn this into some sort of red vs. blue flamewar. I'm just translating the same general principles that apply to senior management for any infrastructure project into the specific context of healthcare.gov.)
One of the most insightful truths ever told to me:
It is always management's fault.
This goes right to the root of the tree, because by definition if the people further out couldn't get the job done or didn't have the right resources to do it, it was management's responsibility to fix those problems. The buck stops with the most senior managers on a project, whose only two choices are to explain what is needed to succeed and then do so if given those things, or to fail.
The thing is, I'm not sure they do have the political capital to pass a law mandating this. Cameron clearly has significant problems keeping his back-benchers in line. In this case a politician hardly anyone had ever heard of before is drumming up a bit of attention by shouting "think of the children". Cameron has gone along with it by holding meetings and by making press statements, all the time carefully leaving wriggle room if it becomes a headline issue for the wrong reasons.
The reaction I've seen so far has been some combination of "Meh" and "People still use those ISPs?!" and "This is just the nanny state again, people should raise their children responsibly and supervise them properly". But of course most people I know already had Internet connections and often with other ISPs, so most of us aren't affected at all by these new measures anyway.
There is a lot of ambiguous or misleading commentary going around here.
The main child safety/evil censorship* tools making the news in recent weeks are being adopted by the top few largest ISPs in the UK. If you don't like it, for now you can still choose another ISP that doesn't do this sort of thing. No need to vocally object, just vote with your wallet, and if you feel like it, tell others that they can do the same.
I suspect that if the government actually tried to institute compulsory censorship, at least if everyone knew about it because it was actually used, that government would not survive the next general election, and it's highly unlikely that the ministers responsible would still be in office by that time.
All of them are hired by the production company. They don't get any share of the copyright. As long as the film is made with decent budget, they'll get hired whether or not copyright exists.
Those words "made with a decent budget" are where I have trouble with this argument. Of course the supporting staff are paid out of an overall project budget, but if anyone is free to copy and redistribute a work as soon as it's available, do you really think it's going to be worth investing the same scale of money in making it? I just don't think that is a credible position to take.
Works like feature films could still make some money, of course, for example via cinematic release where your customers are paying for the experience and never have direct control of the material. But things like DVD/Blu-Ray and on-line distribution are dead, and those increasingly represent the bulk of the profits in the movie industry.
Do you realize that the existence of current copyright-backed content industry leaves very little space for evolution of any alternative economic model?
Nonsense. There is absolutely nothing about today's copyright landscape stopping someone from funding a new work via pre-copyright mechanisms like patronage. With the ability to crowdsource on the Internet, there are potentially interesting new options as well. And yet so far, the biggest successes from the likes of Kickstarter are still orders of magnitude smaller than Hollywood blockbusters or AAA games, and the closest example we have to major patronage is probably big commercial contributors to Open Source in the software world, which usually have self-interest as a significant motivation and then share the results because they have no reason not to.
One of the most promising alternative models today is that a single creator or small group who know what they're doing can now viably go it alone and make real money by marketing and selling on-line. Old middleman services like book publishers and music studios are under a real threat of being out-competed by (or turning themselves into) service providers that work for the creative people, not the other way around. This is great news for returning the power and lost of the rewards to the people actually doing the creative work, and bad news for anyone who's been comfortably brokering deals but adding little real value for years. But this approach doesn't scale to large team, high production value, mass market products as it stands.
Any open-source software that's widely used in business environment reaches commercial quality pretty quickly.
For geek tools -- servers, software development, networking tools, that kind of thing -- sure.
For mainstream business use, I contend that no Open Source software exists today that is widely used in business environments, and that the Open Source software that is used in small parts of the business world outside of geekdom is rarely of the same quality as traditional commercial alternatives and is chosen for other reasons. I hate coughing up for Office and Creative Suite as much as the next business owner, and I have a pretty low opinion of both Microsoft's and Adobe's recent offerings compared to what they've made in the past. Even so, the idea that LibreOffice and the GIMP are credible replacements for general business use is still as absurd today as it always has been.
But software world will be taken over by open-source software anyway because current proprietary software giants don't have the same power over the entire software market as Hollywood does over culture.
The proprietary software giants don't need the same kind of power. They make better products, and will continue to do so for a long time. Most of the people who would chose the OSS alternative were never going to pay the proprietary/commercial vendors for their product anyway, because piracy.
Slashdot Mirror
Those are fair points, but there are also paid-for e-mail services that offer similar facilities to Google and friends without downsides like ads.
Also, setting up basic hosting facilities and getting your own domain aren't really any more complicated than many other technical tasks non-geeks perform all the time. For example, plenty of these hosting services would let you do all of that from a user-friendly web-based control panel, without going anywhere near a command line. I think the problem here is as much the lack of general education about how the Internet works as anything else.
Wow. I'd heard assorted horror stories about poor ISPs and people not having a choice in the US, but I always assumed they were at least slightly exaggerated. There is really no effective competition for Internet connectivity in the US in 2014?
I could sign up with dozens of different ISPs here in England. It's true that much of that flexibility came from some surprisingly sensible rules a few years ago that required BT (the dominant phone company) to share access to certain facilities. But even without relying on BT or a cable company, there are various mobile providers with 3G and soon 4G connections, there are rural areas where people literally use satellites to get their access because they are too far from a telephone exchange to use the same facilities most urban households do, and there have been a few unique stories where locals have clubbed together and set up something unusual (but sometimes achieving better speeds and/or lower costs to regular providers).
This was just meant as a side anecdote that fitted neatly in with the general strategy I have for paying a little more than the entry-level of everything to get much better results, and doesn't really affect my basic point about how to manage facilities like e-mail without becoming dependent on Google and the like. But I'm surprised and sorry to hear that not everyone can do things we take for granted over hear.
Then most of the free email providers ended their services, and now I'm down to gmail. yahoo, and hotmail.
I pay a few GBP a year for a hosted Linux shell account from a local IT firm. I can run whatever web sites I want from it, have it collect and/or forward e-mails and run any related systems I want, etc. It's not free, and neither are the handful of domains I own.
Because I own the domains, I'm paying for the hosting, and everything is set up with real, standardised tools, I can shift anything around any time I want. I can't be held hostage by any business having my data locked up in their proprietary system, or by any one technology that doesn't export things to someone else's alternative platform. This mostly doesn't matter, because I also get actual customer service from the IT guys in return for paying them actual money.
Personally, I download the mail to my main PC, where I run an actual e-mail program instead of relying on webmail. However, I could set up a local mail store on my home network or install any web front end I wanted on the hosted account if some other set-up became more useful.
None of this is rocket science, and there are plenty of hosting companies that will offer a similar basic plan for a modest fee (a small fraction of what I pay every year in, say, phone bills). I also pay a bit more than average to use a good ISP with solid technical specs, clueful people at the other end of the phone on the rare occasions anything does go wrong, things like a static IP address as standard, etc.
Basically, you just have to look beyond free-as-in-you're-the-product on-line services, absurdly cheap junk hosting, and mass market ISPs, and much of the frustration of the modern Internet goes away. It's just a shame that most people don't realise that, so the big name companies continue to dominate and there is a limited market for smaller-but-better services.
The solution, though, is clearly to grant different maximum term lengths for different classes of work.
I think we already do this to some extent in most jurisdictions, but I agree with your point all the same.
The best mechanism for dealing with this, I'm convinced, is to grant very short copyright terms which must be registered for
Here I do disagree, for the simple reason that as someone trying to run multiple small businesses, overhead is the #1 enemy, and registration of routine practices is a particularly wasteful form of overhead. We don't all have accountants, lawyers or admin staff; for some of us, any time taken to deal with the paperwork is time directly taken away from the handful of people doing actual creative work, and if we're developing work for others then presumably that overhead roughly doubles because there's going to have to be some sort of assignment executed around the time we get paid as well for any such system to work.
This way, if a copyright holder fails to renew, because he doesn't care enough to bother to do so
The catch here is that there are plenty of other reasons the holder might fail to act. I'm not against the idea of a renewable right in all cases, but the burden of enforcing copyright can already be prohibitive for a small business with limited legal resources. The last thing they need is for a manager who also has statutory obligations relating to everything from business registration and rent payments through to filing tax statements and signing client contracts to find they've lost all rights to their only product because of a paperwork screw-up while they were off sick or simply because they didn't understand the rules (which my accountants and lawyers tell me happens all the time for small businesses when it comes to other legal/tax regs, not least because the way the rules are written is itself not always clear).
Your numbers sound reasonable, but to me they suggest something more like an upper bound on how long protection should last, not necessarily a target.
I believe copyright is best treated as a purely economic tool; it may have some desirable side-effects like giving credit to artists or maintaining confidentiality, but these are usually better treated as separate issues IMHO. On that basis, the job of copyright is to provide sufficient economic support to allow reasonable financial returns to be generated from creating and distributing useful works.
So, if a AAA console game has made 90% of the revenues it will ever generate today after the first few weeks, or a Hollywood blockbuster makes 90% of its revenues within a couple of years because that's when cinema showings, DVD releases and first runs on broadcast TV happen, then a period of perhaps five years from first public performance might be sufficient.
On the other hand, something like a school textbook can be very labour intensive to produce in good quality, but might bring in substantial revenues over several years if it can be adapted to produce slightly modified editions suitable for different national markets, not all of them necessarily available immediately in the first year of publication. A period as short as five years might cause a sharp reduction in returns in this case, potentially meaning it's no longer worth putting in the effort to produce a good textbook and corners get cut instead. This clearly isn't a desirable outcome if our goal is to promote the creation and distribution of good quality works, so maybe longer protection is needed in such cases to maintain sufficient incentive.
This would set a de-facto worldwide standard of 50 years.
I appreciate that there is an element of fighting for what you can realistically achieve in political matters. I'm also generally in favour of retaining the basic principle of copyright, at least until a better idea for promoting the creation and distribution of new works comes along.
Even so, I think the fundamental problem with your position is that it still implicitly accepts that a copyright term comparable to many humans' adult lifetimes is reasonable. With the rise of modern technologies, a much shorter term would still provide a substantial commercial incentive to create and share new works, without locking up aspects of our culture to the same degree. I'm open to discussions on the specifics for different types of work and for special cases like orphan works or works that continue to be developed over time, but I would expect a period of no more than 10-20 years from public disclosure should be more than adequate in just about any case today.
It has been my contention that when websites no longer serve malware through Ads, then they can start complaining that users blocks ads.
Indeed. I block 100% of ads my tools can identify, I consider this a routine security precaution, and I make no exceptions. Sorry to the honest site operators, I won't take offence if you decide to block me because I block your ads, but no, I won't whitelist you. This became my policy shortly after the only virus infection I've ever been aware of picking up on any computer I operate, which was a Java zero day exploit I picked up browsing normally reputable tech news sites.
Surge protectors aren't there to protect against something as powerful as a lightning strike. However, a decent surge protector will help with the everyday minor fluctuations in supply, and that alone can noticeably improve the longevity of just about any connected electrical devices.
For a few bucks a time, you can buy ones that work just like slightly bulkier extension leads, and at least in the UK most of the ones I've seen come with an associated insurance policy as a bonus. Unless you already have more effective protection anyway or you're in an area with a very stable electricity supply, you'd be foolish not to use surge protectors routinely for any expensive electrical gear these days.
The trouble with the idea of licensing software developers is that no-one really knows yet how to develop software well in general. At most, so far, we have some people who have found practices that worked well on previous projects in their parts of the software development world, and sometimes when the stars align they share their ideas for mutual benefit. This is still a long way short of the standards found in true engineering disciplines.
I suspect the inevitable result of licensing today would be that a lot of consultants who talk a good talk would convince the relevant officials that they knew best, and some sort of dubiously authoritative body would be created to mandate that everyone else should follow the will of the consultants. Imagine a world where Robert C. Martin's claim that if you don't do TDD then you can't possibly be a professional software developer actually carried the force of law.
I don't think you can credibly claim a big name consultant like Robert C. Martin is not a TDDer, but when you watch interviews like this it seems pretty clear that he would object to your claim. See also the infamous Sudoku contrast between Ron Jeffries' TDD attempts and Peter Norvig's version, assorted comments by Kent Beck ("It's an analysis technique, a design technique, really a technique for structuring all the activities of development."), etc.
How did APIs get into this discussion? We're talking about users running back-ups. In any sane system, the standard operating system UI(s) ought to allow copying files for back-up purposes, including preserving all relevant metadata, out of the box. The fact that this won't happen if the relevant data isn't actually stored in a proper filesystem but rather as some hack in another part of the disk is a significant problem, to which I suggest the solution is not allowing any application-level code to store data that way in the first place.
In any case, we seem to have drifted rather off-topic, so I'll stop there.
you can't write the tests before knowing what the program is supposed to do first and for that you need to know the bounds it needs to adhere to...
I read the context, as given in the summary and TFA, as switching between different algorithms at certain bounds, not necessarily limited to only accepting input at all if it's within certain bounds. In other words, the bounds and algorithm switching could be implementation details, not necessarily exposed in the relevant interface.
FWIW, what you're describing seems more practical to me. However, if you start from a position that "You should not be doing almost any programming until the design is done" then you're already a long way from how many TDDers practise and from the process that many who advocate TDD, including big name consultants and authors, describe.
That depends. If you're are a die-hard TDD fan, for example, then you'll be writing your (unit) tests before you necessarily know where any such boundaries are. Moreover, there is nothing inherent in that process to bring you back to add more tests later if boundaries arise or move during refactoring. It's not hard to imagine that a developer who leaves academia and moves straight into an industrial TDD shop might never have been exposed to competing ideas.
(I am not a die-hard TDD fan, and the practical usefulness of white box testing is one of the reasons for that, but I suspect many of us have met the kind of person I'm describing above.)
The trouble is, some of these schemes don't use files/registry where you're supposed to store data, they mess around with private areas like your boot sector. Why on earth should my OS allow some random application software on my computer anywhere near my boot sector? Aside from the glaring security hole, there is no systematic control and co-ordination for such access, so multiple DRM schemes could conflict, dual-booting could get messed up, etc.
Also, it shouldn't be necessary to run specialist backup tools to deal with file data. If the standard issue copy commands in the OS can't readily copy everything in the filesystem, then once again I think that OS is poor.
I'm not arguing against your point, I just think it's irrelevant. The same argument would apply to any software from any vendor that messes around with your disk behind the scenes, whether it's a game or a $10,000/seat specialist design tool.
I do think it's pretty low of these software vendors to rely on copy protection systems that screw real users. I also think it's a blatant security hole in Windows that application software can do this sort of thing in the first place. The fact remains that having a reliable SSD would avoid these kinds of problems ever coming up, and if SSDs are most useful as system/software drives, arguments like "just back it all up" or "don't put any data you care about on the SSD" are not constructive.
Dont buy shit software from EA then, because really we know they are the biggest retailer using DRM still.
Every piece of $1,000+/seat software we use at my company comes with some form of obnoxious DRM/copy protection technology.
Every. Single. One.
We are not talking about expendable games here, we are talking about software that only gets away with those prices and poor customer service because it's still so much better at what it does than any cheaper and less encumbered alternatives.
To be fair, even if you dont agree and continue to buy software that is copy protected, that is the issue, not the SSD.
Well, no, it's both.
If the SSD didn't fail, there would be no problem. If the SSD even failed with more than one minute's warning, there probably still would be no problem, since typically you can deactivate licences for software on this level if you can fire it up for a few seconds with an active Internet connection. It might be wise to back up anything you can, but a drive that fails young, suddenly, and with limited options to recover because of poor design decisions is still the drive manufacturer's fault.
Of course plenty of blame also goes to the software vendors, and as you can imagine, we have about as much respect for them in my industry as their customer service warrants.
Backup everything fools.
You can't.
That's cute, but approximately 100% of professionals working in graphic design would disagree with you. If someone else made products anywhere the level of Creative Suite and with better customer service than Adobe, plenty of us would use them.
Of course the DRM crap is Adobe's fault, and they did eventually resolve the issue. However, it took a couple of weeks, demonstrating almost comically bad customer service except that it wasn't actually funny at the time. As I mentioned, the problem was finally fixed only when my patience ran out and I sent them the recorded letter that starts formal legal proceedings.
Regardless of where any blame belonged, the facts are that if the SSD had not died suddenly, this could all have been avoided by just deactivating the software first, and that backing up the relevant data is simply not possible using normal tools, because to back it up, you must first know that it exists and where to find it, and you must be able to restore it (assuming that it would still be the same after swapping out the disk anyway, which a hardware signature used in a DRM system might not be).
So, a better SSD would have been worth a lot to me in that situation, and saying "Just back everything up" still isn't a good answer.
This is all a great theory, until the "data" in question is something like copy protection hackery that someone's high-end software puts on your SSD boot disk without necessarily telling you anything about it.
The only time I had an SSD failure, the hardware guys were great and got a replacement to me the next day, while it took literally weeks (and, in the end, a recorded letter threatening legal action) to get Adobe to let me use the software I already f**king bought on the same f**king PC it was always installed on, after I'd reinstalled everything on the replacement SSD.
If that had been an isolated occurrence, I might be willing to drop the point, but since I know of others who have also been screwed by Adobe's DRM/copy protection mess after a drive failure and I also know of other high-end software providers who play similar games, I don't think "just back everything up" is a good enough answer to unreliable drives. A drive failure typically costs some of us at least an order of magnitude more than just replacing the hardware itself once you factor in downtime, and we shouldn't have to mess around with RAID arrays of SSDs just to compensate for poorly designed products that fail unnecessarily.
The President doesn't write code.
No, but he presumably appoints the senior staff whose teams ultimately will write code, and capture requirements, and run tests, and all the rest. For something on this level he probably had a direct say in things like budget and timescales and the scope and high-level organisation of the project as well. If he asked for the impossible, he bears responsibility for that. If he didn't know it was impossible, he should have hired better advisors before committing to the project. And if it wasn't impossible but failed anyway, he should have appointed a senior management team that was up to the job.
(I'm not in the US and have no allegiance to any US political party, so please don't try to turn this into some sort of red vs. blue flamewar. I'm just translating the same general principles that apply to senior management for any infrastructure project into the specific context of healthcare.gov.)
One of the most insightful truths ever told to me:
It is always management's fault.
This goes right to the root of the tree, because by definition if the people further out couldn't get the job done or didn't have the right resources to do it, it was management's responsibility to fix those problems. The buck stops with the most senior managers on a project, whose only two choices are to explain what is needed to succeed and then do so if given those things, or to fail.
The thing is, I'm not sure they do have the political capital to pass a law mandating this. Cameron clearly has significant problems keeping his back-benchers in line. In this case a politician hardly anyone had ever heard of before is drumming up a bit of attention by shouting "think of the children". Cameron has gone along with it by holding meetings and by making press statements, all the time carefully leaving wriggle room if it becomes a headline issue for the wrong reasons.
The reaction I've seen so far has been some combination of "Meh" and "People still use those ISPs?!" and "This is just the nanny state again, people should raise their children responsibly and supervise them properly". But of course most people I know already had Internet connections and often with other ISPs, so most of us aren't affected at all by these new measures anyway.
There is a lot of ambiguous or misleading commentary going around here.
The main child safety/evil censorship* tools making the news in recent weeks are being adopted by the top few largest ISPs in the UK. If you don't like it, for now you can still choose another ISP that doesn't do this sort of thing. No need to vocally object, just vote with your wallet, and if you feel like it, tell others that they can do the same.
I suspect that if the government actually tried to institute compulsory censorship, at least if everyone knew about it because it was actually used, that government would not survive the next general election, and it's highly unlikely that the ministers responsible would still be in office by that time.
* Delete as applicable.
All of them are hired by the production company. They don't get any share of the copyright. As long as the film is made with decent budget, they'll get hired whether or not copyright exists.
Those words "made with a decent budget" are where I have trouble with this argument. Of course the supporting staff are paid out of an overall project budget, but if anyone is free to copy and redistribute a work as soon as it's available, do you really think it's going to be worth investing the same scale of money in making it? I just don't think that is a credible position to take.
Works like feature films could still make some money, of course, for example via cinematic release where your customers are paying for the experience and never have direct control of the material. But things like DVD/Blu-Ray and on-line distribution are dead, and those increasingly represent the bulk of the profits in the movie industry.
Do you realize that the existence of current copyright-backed content industry leaves very little space for evolution of any alternative economic model?
Nonsense. There is absolutely nothing about today's copyright landscape stopping someone from funding a new work via pre-copyright mechanisms like patronage. With the ability to crowdsource on the Internet, there are potentially interesting new options as well. And yet so far, the biggest successes from the likes of Kickstarter are still orders of magnitude smaller than Hollywood blockbusters or AAA games, and the closest example we have to major patronage is probably big commercial contributors to Open Source in the software world, which usually have self-interest as a significant motivation and then share the results because they have no reason not to.
One of the most promising alternative models today is that a single creator or small group who know what they're doing can now viably go it alone and make real money by marketing and selling on-line. Old middleman services like book publishers and music studios are under a real threat of being out-competed by (or turning themselves into) service providers that work for the creative people, not the other way around. This is great news for returning the power and lost of the rewards to the people actually doing the creative work, and bad news for anyone who's been comfortably brokering deals but adding little real value for years. But this approach doesn't scale to large team, high production value, mass market products as it stands.
Any open-source software that's widely used in business environment reaches commercial quality pretty quickly.
For geek tools -- servers, software development, networking tools, that kind of thing -- sure.
For mainstream business use, I contend that no Open Source software exists today that is widely used in business environments, and that the Open Source software that is used in small parts of the business world outside of geekdom is rarely of the same quality as traditional commercial alternatives and is chosen for other reasons. I hate coughing up for Office and Creative Suite as much as the next business owner, and I have a pretty low opinion of both Microsoft's and Adobe's recent offerings compared to what they've made in the past. Even so, the idea that LibreOffice and the GIMP are credible replacements for general business use is still as absurd today as it always has been.
But software world will be taken over by open-source software anyway because current proprietary software giants don't have the same power over the entire software market as Hollywood does over culture.
The proprietary software giants don't need the same kind of power. They make better products, and will continue to do so for a long time. Most of the people who would chose the OSS alternative were never going to pay the proprietary/commercial vendors for their product anyway, because piracy.
This might change in the long term, but I'm not