Your point, that data can be more valuable than system integrity and is not protected by Linux-style user vs. root access control, is excellent. I just wanted to pick up on this comment:
For me, at least, my personal data is far more important than my OS! Corporate networks may disagree.
Anywhere I've ever worked, the corporate network would agree with you, and strongly. Replacing a compromised machine is just a format and reinstall of a drive image, something Corporate IT do all the time with new machines anyway. On the other hand, losing confidential information about business plans, trade secrets, or God forbid anything sensitive that has been provided in confidence by a client or business partner, can be crippling to the point of killing projects or destroying the business.
This is why threats from within (employees gone bad) are usually the most dangerous, but the same principle applies to any external attacks.
Part of the problem with trying to have a sensible discussion on this topic is that so many people do pretty much claim $FOSS_APP is perfect: with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow, yada yada. If a large chunk of your culture and advocacy is based on that sort of foolishness, you're bound to get negative press when inevitably you can't always live up to your own hype.
Even the parent poster seems to be somewhat guilty of this, throwing in a couple of knee-jerk IE bashing responses. Have you actually looked at the security record of IE vs. Firefox in recent versions, particularly the number of vulnerabilities and the time required to get systems in the field patched against them? Firefox still runs all its tabs under the same process, so its fans are hardly in a position to be throwing stones at anyone else over security and reliability.
Sure, the hello.com example is obviously the trivial case, but the same sorts of bloat it demonstrates apply all too easily on larger scales as well.
I am currently running 47 processes on my WinXP box. Those include:
a tool that draws simple things like a clock or the title of the track I'm playing in Media Player on the LCD display on my keyboard (14MB)
an e-mail client (50MB)
a web browser with half a dozen tabs open on simple pages like Slashdot (137MB)
various completely idle server daemons (MySQL, Apache, SVN, etc.) (10–20MB each)
a souped up task manager utility (33MB)
multiple processes to support my many-buttoned Logitech mouse (total about 18MB)
an audio control panel for my sound card (24MB).
The list goes on, but you get the point. It is crazy that such simple applications should take multi-megabyte footprints (and those are the working sets I'm talking about, not all the stuff that's paged out).
Does this matter? Well, yes, when all the trivial background stuff adds up to nearly 1GB of RAM. That is significant even on today's PCs, if you want to run an application like a high-end game or graphics package that actually needs a lot of RAM to hold the data to do its job. And of course, the more you load up and possibly page out, the slower the system boots and applications load, the less effective caches become, etc., so there is a performance hit as well.
I'll see you that and raise you the infamous Question Time episode with Nick Griffin. It was rather tragic that even with all the legitimate, logical, evidence-based ways you could challenge Griffin's political views and policies, the total contribution of the representatives from all the mainstream political parties was approximately equal to a five-year-old sticking his fingers in his ears and shouting "Nyaaaah, I can't hear you! And you smell, because!".
I despair more and more about who I'm going to vote for on 6 May. Every time I see a frontbench speaker from any of the big three parties in England, it reminds me why I don't want to support any of them. And every time I see a smaller party whose views seem at first glance to be somewhat in line with my own, they turn out to be woefully amateurish, fickle, hiding a few dark secrets, or otherwise entirely unsuitable to hold public office with any credibility.
To my knowledge, there will most likely be no candidate in my constituency for whom I will be comfortable voting.:-(
Well, I would find it rather disheartening that the most effective checks and balances on our current administration's insanity seem to come from unelected Lords, quangos, courts or European government organisations, but fortunately as a Jedi I've learned to control my emotions.:-)
I'm sorry, perhaps I should have explicitly included the time to create all the solution/workspace/project/perspective/whatever junk that modern IDEs use in my definition of "started up with a blank file".
In any case, the point I was refuting was the claim that to get rid of the 11k, you'd have to "make real programs either slower or bigger, or make compilation slower". I contend that in no modern C IDE can you create and build a working "Hello, world!" program that is superior in any of those respects to my insta-.com version.
The same spot in ram is shared between all programs that are using it making the total ram spent for each program rather small, probably even smaller than if you would statically link the object files of the functions you need.
Given the number of functions in a library like libc and the number of programs likely to need each of them at any given time, that is probably the least convincing argument ever made for using dynamic libraries.
On top of that, many applications wind up depending on subtly different versions of dynamic libraries, effectively reloading the same one multiple times and negating the space advantage. The alternative, as we learned the hard way, is DLL Hell.
Moreover, other than for near-universal functionality like libc or your basic OS integration stuff, how many libraries are really used by several different programs at the same time anyway?
Then you get to dependencies between libraries, where one "simple" library winds up pulling in half the files on your hard disk, even though nothing you're actually going to call in the main library needs any of the other stuff.
Next up, we have performance, or rather lack of it, since you can't globally optimise over code linked to a standard library the way you can to code linked statically.
Bottom line: dynamic libraries are, in nearly all cases, just a horrible mistake that history has yet to correct.
You could get rid of that 11k, but to do so, you'd have to make trade offs that either make real programs either slower or bigger, or make compilation slower.
I guess that's a matter of perspective. It's been nearly 20 years since I did this the first time, but off the top of my head and using nothing but debug.exe, I just produced a complete, working hello.com file in about 27 seconds. How many modern C IDEs would even have started up with a blank file in that time? (In case anyone's curious, it was 19 bytes long, which I suspect you can't beat on a Windows box without playing with video memory directly.)
I wonder how often we add "just another 11k" to our programs today by extending your argument, and how many of them could be avoided similarly easily. Given that it takes probably a minute for a basic OS and GUI to start up and reach a useful state on a contemporary high-end PC, I'm betting it's a hell of a lot more than necessary. All that flexibility has a price, to be sure, but I suspect at least part of the problem is that we just haven't got very good at building large software systems yet, either technically, or in terms of tools, or in terms of management.
Well, here in the UK, we're just copying the US model. I gather that for a long time, the average viewer of The Daily Show has been more informed than the average viewer of Fox News. Over here, the average viewer of Mock the Week or Have I Got News For You? (or the average listener to The News Quiz, if you prefer) is probably more informed than the average viewer of Panorama, Question Time or Newsnight.
It's a shame, because some of those flagship BBC current affairs programmes really were good once upon a time. I think their demise comes from a combination of over-editorialising and pushy presenters. In particular, when did it become acceptable for Paxman et al. to express their own (or their editors') views, while repeatedly cutting off guests with a pithy insult before they can even finish a sentence? Politicians have responded by just sending automatons who repeat the same talking point time after time whether or not it is relevent, and the whole thing loses any meaning as a one-on-one interview or a debate between people with differing view points.
Fortunately, it doesn't have to be this way. I was pleasantly surprised a few weeks ago when there were a couple of academics of quite different viewpoints on Newsnight, and they actually did engage in a civilised debate based on factual evidence and logical argument. Paxman did a good job, asking a few questions but hardly speaking at all during the answers, both guests made interesting and well-informed points, and it was the best episode of the programme I've seen in years.
I'm terribly sorry, but I'm afraid your information is out of date. We have no Jedi here, because after the government conducted a census for which everyone was legally required to provide information, the Powers That Be decided they knew better anyway and everyone who declared their religion as Jedi was just making it up.
Also, I am amused by the people who think we have an "atheist" state when there are still people sitting in the House of Lords with the power to legislate just because they hold high office in a church. No, really, there actually are.
On a more serious note, TFA is now slightly out of date as well. The House of Lords approved the Bill. Clause 17 (the three strikes provision) is still gone, but it looks like most of the rest made it through. Lord Clement-Jones, the Lib Dem peer who originally proposed the controversial amendments, seems to think that what went through was a good thing. Go figure.
There are way too many false dichotomies appearing in this discussion.
No-one is saying that the government don't try to keep things secret for political convenience. The point is that there are also legitimate reasons to keep things secret, and Wikileaks have demonstrated poor judgement on what to publish in the past so there is no reason to trust them to act responsibly in the future. Frankly, I'm surprised it has taken this long for plans to bring them down to appear, and even more surprised that no-one has yet dealt with them in the same way they would deal with anyone else who didn't respect official secrets.
That's an interesting analogy, but I think it needs more explanation. For example, where do your key figures of 5–20% come from? And why is it appropriate to compare copyright-supported revenues (which are charged only to those who benefit from the work in question, when they buy their copy) with taxation (which would presumably be charged to everyone, whether or not they benefitted from any given work)?
While your point is entirely fair and valid, I am still waiting for someone to propose a credible alternative to the principles of the current system (not to be confused with their current overweight implementation).
I know the old joke that the surest sign of intelligent life in space is that we don't know about it. However, in the real world, there is nothing in copyright law today that would prevent entrepreneurs in creative industries from adopting new business models that do not rely on copyright protection. If those models were more successful, they would therefore be a better incentive to create and share works, and businesses following them would be more profitable. That being the case, it is telling that in a forum like this, full of geeks with an interest in the subject, no-one seems to have heard of such alternative models taking over yet.
Implementing IP laws is a net loss for any economy
If that is so, then why do countries in the West with relatively strong IP laws have thriving markets for books, films, music, software, etc., while places like China where there isn't such strong protection for IP have a thriving thriving market for copied stuff that originated in the West?
Of course artificial monopolies created by IP laws are a net loss after the works have been made, where they deliberately restrict what would otherwise be cheap mass distribution of the works. If we repealed all copyright protection tomorrow, society would benefit enormously, for the next year or two. But this completely ignores the incentivisation aspect of our current IP systems, and what would happen five or ten or twenty years down the line.
So in fact draconian intellectual property laws are antithetical to prosperity.
Isn't any draconian law antithetical to prosperity?
I think the interesting question in this case is where the line is between "draconian" and "impotent". You'd think there would be a huge area in between, but we don't seem to be able to find it: a few people are getting penalised absurdly for relatively minor infractions, while millions of people continue to break the law at the expense of legal rightsholders and get away with it.
I guess I just react badly to anyone who issues dogmatic rules, whether it's line length, function length, max levels of indentation, or whatever.
It has been my experience that those who write good code naturally use sensible line and function lengths, don't use deep nesting pointlessly, and so on. They probably have views similar to your final line: a reasonable rule of thumb, and acknowledging the possibility of occasional exceptions.
It has also been my experience that those who say you should never break such-and-such a limit (possibly even enforced by tools at the source control stage) are the kind of people who think a three-line database query in a business logic layer is as complicated as programming gets. Some problems simply have more essential complexity than that, and therefore so does the code that models them, but trying to argue that with someone so hopelessly lacking in both breadth of experience and imagination that they can't even see their blind spot is usually futile. Unfortunately, sometimes those people wind up writing the coding standards at your office or sitting on the committee that defines the programming language or libraries you use, and there's not really much you can do then except make better choices next time.
Good use of white space certainly does improve readability, because it allows separation between different topics while visually associating related material. However, sticking a source file with lines averaging say 40 characters long into a 1920px-wide window doesn't help with either of these things, it just wastes all that space to the right of the code. Similarly, sticking a short source file (or a long source file where you are presently only interested in a short excerpt) into a full-height window is wasteful of vertical space. The nicest thing about the Code Bubbles approach, IMHO, is that it seems to allow effective use of more of the screen without mandating some clumsy tiled layout.
As for interface ornaments, we'll just have to agree to disagree on that one. A lot of modern UIs are horribly overcrowded, to the detriment of their usability, and IDEs might be the worst offenders of the lot. Powerful doesn't have to imply complicated, but apparently the UI designers at Microsoft, Eclipse, etc. didn't get the memo. Ironically, if they removed a lot of the details and minor controls and just used more whitespace and a simpler presentation of UI elements, things would probably be a lot better.
Full screen mode is all very well, but doesn't really address the other half of the problem: while it clears away the clutter, it still doesn't use the space particularly efficiently for displaying and exploring code.
Actually, as I watched the video, the one thing I kept thinking was how nice it would be to use my current (1920x1200) screen efficiently for programming.
The typical Microsoft/Eclipse/whatever GUI today is horribly wasteful: vast areas are wasted on window dressing, toolbars, menus, scrollbars, title bars, line number margins, breakpoint margins, bookmark margins... I'm lucky if more than 1/2 of the pixels on my screen are actually showing me code at any given time, and the moment you mention compiling or debugging anything you're lucky if it's over 1/3 of the pixels.
Moreover, as others have noted, typical code formatting conventions today are wasteful as well. Any arbitrary limit on line width belongs in another century, and IME just results in developers who have a good reason to write a relatively long line messing around with awkward formatting hacks or truncating identifiers in order to obey the letter of the law. Equally, there is no point having lines that average perhaps half that length filling all 1920 pixels of my widescreen monitor's width.
There were plenty of ideas in the presentation that I thought had potential, though many of them have been tried by others before as well. Of all of those ideas, the one thing I wish every IDE would do tomorrow is let me open lots of smaller windows as I navigate my code, organise the windows automatically, and hide all the other clutter unless I actually want it. The Code Bubbles IDE seems to do a decent job of that.
The push exists primarily among the political elite who have managed to play the system such that they retain power and influence without being accountable. Find me an elected representative, at any level of government, from any EU nation, who will openly advocate a United States of Europe and I'll be impressed.
This is, of course, an excellent argument for not allowing anyone with that kind of power to be appointed rather than directly elected, but that is another debate.
My company in England has just received information from HM Revenue & Customs (our central tax collection agency) about how to file the various information that we are legally required to submit. In several cases, we are now legally required to submit that information on-line via HMRC's web site. Lack of Internet access would make it impossible to run a business legally with the law as it now stands in the UK.
I'm pretty sure that preventing someone from making a living is going to violate the fundamental right to work enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and the associated European Court were created on the basis of that declaration, but don't explicitly recognise the right to work, so I don't know exactly what the legal situation would be there.
Why do you say that? Countries in the EU tend to have very strong national identities, with their own long histories and distinct cultures. And most of us, aside from a few politicians and industrial heavyweights, like it that way.
Pushing toward some harmonized United States of Europe is pretty much our "third rail", as you can tell from the fact that most national governments have avoided giving their people a referendum on constitution-level reform in Europe and the agreements that made it through did so only against popular sentiment in many of the EU member states.
It might be worth explaining for non-European readers that the balance of power between the (elected) Parliament and the (appointed) Commissioners shifted significantly as a result of the Lisbon Treaty, which recently took effect. There was plenty to worry about in that treaty, but this part, at least, they did get right.
A similar difference in opinion between MEPs and the appointed guys explains the recent oddities about allowing the US access to bank records: that provision was pushed through by the appointed government weenies literally hours before Lisbon came into effect, and the MEPs have been working to get it fixed since the change.
Fortunately, I somehow doubt that the rest of the world is going to start adopting universal ID because one or two governments think it's a good idea. At the risk of triggering Godwin's Law, Germany doesn't exactly have a great record in this area. And lately, the US probably has the most abusive anti-privacy/state intrusion laws in the western world, and I think many other places are getting a bit sick of the US throwing its weight around.
Meanwhile, privacy and the database state are becoming a significant electoral issue here in the UK, where we've had more than our fair share of state intrusion under the Blair/Brown administrations. Far more politicians are making an active campaign issue out of promoting privacy issues than "war on terror" and similar rhetoric. And I get the feeling many of our neighbours have always felt more strongly about this than we collectively have until recently.
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Your point, that data can be more valuable than system integrity and is not protected by Linux-style user vs. root access control, is excellent. I just wanted to pick up on this comment:
For me, at least, my personal data is far more important than my OS! Corporate networks may disagree.
Anywhere I've ever worked, the corporate network would agree with you, and strongly. Replacing a compromised machine is just a format and reinstall of a drive image, something Corporate IT do all the time with new machines anyway. On the other hand, losing confidential information about business plans, trade secrets, or God forbid anything sensitive that has been provided in confidence by a client or business partner, can be crippling to the point of killing projects or destroying the business.
This is why threats from within (employees gone bad) are usually the most dangerous, but the same principle applies to any external attacks.
No one claims Firefox is perfect
Part of the problem with trying to have a sensible discussion on this topic is that so many people do pretty much claim $FOSS_APP is perfect: with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow, yada yada. If a large chunk of your culture and advocacy is based on that sort of foolishness, you're bound to get negative press when inevitably you can't always live up to your own hype.
Even the parent poster seems to be somewhat guilty of this, throwing in a couple of knee-jerk IE bashing responses. Have you actually looked at the security record of IE vs. Firefox in recent versions, particularly the number of vulnerabilities and the time required to get systems in the field patched against them? Firefox still runs all its tabs under the same process, so its fans are hardly in a position to be throwing stones at anyone else over security and reliability.
Sure, the hello.com example is obviously the trivial case, but the same sorts of bloat it demonstrates apply all too easily on larger scales as well.
I am currently running 47 processes on my WinXP box. Those include:
The list goes on, but you get the point. It is crazy that such simple applications should take multi-megabyte footprints (and those are the working sets I'm talking about, not all the stuff that's paged out).
Does this matter? Well, yes, when all the trivial background stuff adds up to nearly 1GB of RAM. That is significant even on today's PCs, if you want to run an application like a high-end game or graphics package that actually needs a lot of RAM to hold the data to do its job. And of course, the more you load up and possibly page out, the slower the system boots and applications load, the less effective caches become, etc., so there is a performance hit as well.
I'll see you that and raise you the infamous Question Time episode with Nick Griffin. It was rather tragic that even with all the legitimate, logical, evidence-based ways you could challenge Griffin's political views and policies, the total contribution of the representatives from all the mainstream political parties was approximately equal to a five-year-old sticking his fingers in his ears and shouting "Nyaaaah, I can't hear you! And you smell, because!".
I despair more and more about who I'm going to vote for on 6 May. Every time I see a frontbench speaker from any of the big three parties in England, it reminds me why I don't want to support any of them. And every time I see a smaller party whose views seem at first glance to be somewhat in line with my own, they turn out to be woefully amateurish, fickle, hiding a few dark secrets, or otherwise entirely unsuitable to hold public office with any credibility.
To my knowledge, there will most likely be no candidate in my constituency for whom I will be comfortable voting. :-(
Well, I would find it rather disheartening that the most effective checks and balances on our current administration's insanity seem to come from unelected Lords, quangos, courts or European government organisations, but fortunately as a Jedi I've learned to control my emotions. :-)
I'm sorry, perhaps I should have explicitly included the time to create all the solution/workspace/project/perspective/whatever junk that modern IDEs use in my definition of "started up with a blank file".
In any case, the point I was refuting was the claim that to get rid of the 11k, you'd have to "make real programs either slower or bigger, or make compilation slower". I contend that in no modern C IDE can you create and build a working "Hello, world!" program that is superior in any of those respects to my insta-.com version.
The same spot in ram is shared between all programs that are using it making the total ram spent for each program rather small, probably even smaller than if you would statically link the object files of the functions you need.
Given the number of functions in a library like libc and the number of programs likely to need each of them at any given time, that is probably the least convincing argument ever made for using dynamic libraries.
On top of that, many applications wind up depending on subtly different versions of dynamic libraries, effectively reloading the same one multiple times and negating the space advantage. The alternative, as we learned the hard way, is DLL Hell.
Moreover, other than for near-universal functionality like libc or your basic OS integration stuff, how many libraries are really used by several different programs at the same time anyway?
Then you get to dependencies between libraries, where one "simple" library winds up pulling in half the files on your hard disk, even though nothing you're actually going to call in the main library needs any of the other stuff.
Next up, we have performance, or rather lack of it, since you can't globally optimise over code linked to a standard library the way you can to code linked statically.
Bottom line: dynamic libraries are, in nearly all cases, just a horrible mistake that history has yet to correct.
You could get rid of that 11k, but to do so, you'd have to make trade offs that either make real programs either slower or bigger, or make compilation slower.
I guess that's a matter of perspective. It's been nearly 20 years since I did this the first time, but off the top of my head and using nothing but debug.exe, I just produced a complete, working hello.com file in about 27 seconds. How many modern C IDEs would even have started up with a blank file in that time? (In case anyone's curious, it was 19 bytes long, which I suspect you can't beat on a Windows box without playing with video memory directly.)
I wonder how often we add "just another 11k" to our programs today by extending your argument, and how many of them could be avoided similarly easily. Given that it takes probably a minute for a basic OS and GUI to start up and reach a useful state on a contemporary high-end PC, I'm betting it's a hell of a lot more than necessary. All that flexibility has a price, to be sure, but I suspect at least part of the problem is that we just haven't got very good at building large software systems yet, either technically, or in terms of tools, or in terms of management.
Genius. :-)
Well, here in the UK, we're just copying the US model. I gather that for a long time, the average viewer of The Daily Show has been more informed than the average viewer of Fox News. Over here, the average viewer of Mock the Week or Have I Got News For You? (or the average listener to The News Quiz, if you prefer) is probably more informed than the average viewer of Panorama, Question Time or Newsnight.
It's a shame, because some of those flagship BBC current affairs programmes really were good once upon a time. I think their demise comes from a combination of over-editorialising and pushy presenters. In particular, when did it become acceptable for Paxman et al. to express their own (or their editors') views, while repeatedly cutting off guests with a pithy insult before they can even finish a sentence? Politicians have responded by just sending automatons who repeat the same talking point time after time whether or not it is relevent, and the whole thing loses any meaning as a one-on-one interview or a debate between people with differing view points.
Fortunately, it doesn't have to be this way. I was pleasantly surprised a few weeks ago when there were a couple of academics of quite different viewpoints on Newsnight, and they actually did engage in a civilised debate based on factual evidence and logical argument. Paxman did a good job, asking a few questions but hardly speaking at all during the answers, both guests made interesting and well-informed points, and it was the best episode of the programme I've seen in years.
I'm terribly sorry, but I'm afraid your information is out of date. We have no Jedi here, because after the government conducted a census for which everyone was legally required to provide information, the Powers That Be decided they knew better anyway and everyone who declared their religion as Jedi was just making it up.
Also, I am amused by the people who think we have an "atheist" state when there are still people sitting in the House of Lords with the power to legislate just because they hold high office in a church. No, really, there actually are.
On a more serious note, TFA is now slightly out of date as well. The House of Lords approved the Bill. Clause 17 (the three strikes provision) is still gone, but it looks like most of the rest made it through. Lord Clement-Jones, the Lib Dem peer who originally proposed the controversial amendments, seems to think that what went through was a good thing. Go figure.
There are way too many false dichotomies appearing in this discussion.
No-one is saying that the government don't try to keep things secret for political convenience. The point is that there are also legitimate reasons to keep things secret, and Wikileaks have demonstrated poor judgement on what to publish in the past so there is no reason to trust them to act responsibly in the future. Frankly, I'm surprised it has taken this long for plans to bring them down to appear, and even more surprised that no-one has yet dealt with them in the same way they would deal with anyone else who didn't respect official secrets.
That's an interesting analogy, but I think it needs more explanation. For example, where do your key figures of 5–20% come from? And why is it appropriate to compare copyright-supported revenues (which are charged only to those who benefit from the work in question, when they buy their copy) with taxation (which would presumably be charged to everyone, whether or not they benefitted from any given work)?
While your point is entirely fair and valid, I am still waiting for someone to propose a credible alternative to the principles of the current system (not to be confused with their current overweight implementation).
I know the old joke that the surest sign of intelligent life in space is that we don't know about it. However, in the real world, there is nothing in copyright law today that would prevent entrepreneurs in creative industries from adopting new business models that do not rely on copyright protection. If those models were more successful, they would therefore be a better incentive to create and share works, and businesses following them would be more profitable. That being the case, it is telling that in a forum like this, full of geeks with an interest in the subject, no-one seems to have heard of such alternative models taking over yet.
Implementing IP laws is a net loss for any economy
If that is so, then why do countries in the West with relatively strong IP laws have thriving markets for books, films, music, software, etc., while places like China where there isn't such strong protection for IP have a thriving thriving market for copied stuff that originated in the West?
Of course artificial monopolies created by IP laws are a net loss after the works have been made, where they deliberately restrict what would otherwise be cheap mass distribution of the works. If we repealed all copyright protection tomorrow, society would benefit enormously, for the next year or two. But this completely ignores the incentivisation aspect of our current IP systems, and what would happen five or ten or twenty years down the line.
So in fact draconian intellectual property laws are antithetical to prosperity.
Isn't any draconian law antithetical to prosperity?
I think the interesting question in this case is where the line is between "draconian" and "impotent". You'd think there would be a huge area in between, but we don't seem to be able to find it: a few people are getting penalised absurdly for relatively minor infractions, while millions of people continue to break the law at the expense of legal rightsholders and get away with it.
I guess I just react badly to anyone who issues dogmatic rules, whether it's line length, function length, max levels of indentation, or whatever.
It has been my experience that those who write good code naturally use sensible line and function lengths, don't use deep nesting pointlessly, and so on. They probably have views similar to your final line: a reasonable rule of thumb, and acknowledging the possibility of occasional exceptions.
It has also been my experience that those who say you should never break such-and-such a limit (possibly even enforced by tools at the source control stage) are the kind of people who think a three-line database query in a business logic layer is as complicated as programming gets. Some problems simply have more essential complexity than that, and therefore so does the code that models them, but trying to argue that with someone so hopelessly lacking in both breadth of experience and imagination that they can't even see their blind spot is usually futile. Unfortunately, sometimes those people wind up writing the coding standards at your office or sitting on the committee that defines the programming language or libraries you use, and there's not really much you can do then except make better choices next time.
Good use of white space certainly does improve readability, because it allows separation between different topics while visually associating related material. However, sticking a source file with lines averaging say 40 characters long into a 1920px-wide window doesn't help with either of these things, it just wastes all that space to the right of the code. Similarly, sticking a short source file (or a long source file where you are presently only interested in a short excerpt) into a full-height window is wasteful of vertical space. The nicest thing about the Code Bubbles approach, IMHO, is that it seems to allow effective use of more of the screen without mandating some clumsy tiled layout.
As for interface ornaments, we'll just have to agree to disagree on that one. A lot of modern UIs are horribly overcrowded, to the detriment of their usability, and IDEs might be the worst offenders of the lot. Powerful doesn't have to imply complicated, but apparently the UI designers at Microsoft, Eclipse, etc. didn't get the memo. Ironically, if they removed a lot of the details and minor controls and just used more whitespace and a simpler presentation of UI elements, things would probably be a lot better.
Full screen mode is all very well, but doesn't really address the other half of the problem: while it clears away the clutter, it still doesn't use the space particularly efficiently for displaying and exploring code.
Actually, as I watched the video, the one thing I kept thinking was how nice it would be to use my current (1920x1200) screen efficiently for programming.
The typical Microsoft/Eclipse/whatever GUI today is horribly wasteful: vast areas are wasted on window dressing, toolbars, menus, scrollbars, title bars, line number margins, breakpoint margins, bookmark margins... I'm lucky if more than 1/2 of the pixels on my screen are actually showing me code at any given time, and the moment you mention compiling or debugging anything you're lucky if it's over 1/3 of the pixels.
Moreover, as others have noted, typical code formatting conventions today are wasteful as well. Any arbitrary limit on line width belongs in another century, and IME just results in developers who have a good reason to write a relatively long line messing around with awkward formatting hacks or truncating identifiers in order to obey the letter of the law. Equally, there is no point having lines that average perhaps half that length filling all 1920 pixels of my widescreen monitor's width.
There were plenty of ideas in the presentation that I thought had potential, though many of them have been tried by others before as well. Of all of those ideas, the one thing I wish every IDE would do tomorrow is let me open lots of smaller windows as I navigate my code, organise the windows automatically, and hide all the other clutter unless I actually want it. The Code Bubbles IDE seems to do a decent job of that.
The push exists primarily among the political elite who have managed to play the system such that they retain power and influence without being accountable. Find me an elected representative, at any level of government, from any EU nation, who will openly advocate a United States of Europe and I'll be impressed.
This is, of course, an excellent argument for not allowing anyone with that kind of power to be appointed rather than directly elected, but that is another debate.
My company in England has just received information from HM Revenue & Customs (our central tax collection agency) about how to file the various information that we are legally required to submit. In several cases, we are now legally required to submit that information on-line via HMRC's web site. Lack of Internet access would make it impossible to run a business legally with the law as it now stands in the UK.
I'm pretty sure that preventing someone from making a living is going to violate the fundamental right to work enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and the associated European Court were created on the basis of that declaration, but don't explicitly recognise the right to work, so I don't know exactly what the legal situation would be there.
Doesn't seem to be the way the EU is going
Why do you say that? Countries in the EU tend to have very strong national identities, with their own long histories and distinct cultures. And most of us, aside from a few politicians and industrial heavyweights, like it that way.
Pushing toward some harmonized United States of Europe is pretty much our "third rail", as you can tell from the fact that most national governments have avoided giving their people a referendum on constitution-level reform in Europe and the agreements that made it through did so only against popular sentiment in many of the EU member states.
It might be worth explaining for non-European readers that the balance of power between the (elected) Parliament and the (appointed) Commissioners shifted significantly as a result of the Lisbon Treaty, which recently took effect. There was plenty to worry about in that treaty, but this part, at least, they did get right.
A similar difference in opinion between MEPs and the appointed guys explains the recent oddities about allowing the US access to bank records: that provision was pushed through by the appointed government weenies literally hours before Lisbon came into effect, and the MEPs have been working to get it fixed since the change.
Fortunately, I somehow doubt that the rest of the world is going to start adopting universal ID because one or two governments think it's a good idea. At the risk of triggering Godwin's Law, Germany doesn't exactly have a great record in this area. And lately, the US probably has the most abusive anti-privacy/state intrusion laws in the western world, and I think many other places are getting a bit sick of the US throwing its weight around.
Meanwhile, privacy and the database state are becoming a significant electoral issue here in the UK, where we've had more than our fair share of state intrusion under the Blair/Brown administrations. Far more politicians are making an active campaign issue out of promoting privacy issues than "war on terror" and similar rhetoric. And I get the feeling many of our neighbours have always felt more strongly about this than we collectively have until recently.