In real-world projects, there's deadlines, there's a given group of managers and programmers that one has to work with, and there are ill-defined and constantly changing requirements. Nobody knows how to divide up such problems correctly among teams or how to solve many of the subproblems.
The first sentence there is clearly true, but I'm afraid the second simply isn't. IME, good management is in a minority in our industry, but it certainly exists, and plenty of successful projects do result. Contrary to what you wrote later in your post, you don't need the super-guru, 10x as wonderful programmers to make a successful project, nor exceptional management blessed with the insight of a genius. It is perfectly possible to do it with an average development team and merely competent management. The picture of doom you describe seems more like what I've seen in cheapskate businesses who pay well under the odds and consider an average programmer the office guru and anyone with five minutes' experience a project manager.
Most software today isn't slow because of lack of clever tricks or lack of fast algorithms, it's slow because people get basics like memory management, communications, and system design wrong.
And none of those things are based on algorithms, and they are the only areas that slow things down? Really?
My preconceptions are based on working in industry for 25 years and building products (in addition to teaching).
And yet you still assume that anyone with different experience and a different opinion from your own has "the mark of an average and fairly inexperienced programmer"?
BTW, you completely missed my point if you think clever tricks and fast algorithms equates to using a C compiler (for what, bit twiddling and in-line assembly?) and an algorithms textbook (do you think I'm just talking about CS 101 sorting and searching here?).
BTW, I think you an I agree - this is more directed at the grandparent.
I wrote the grandparent post, and I suspect you and I would agree as well. I'm not criticising unit tests: on the contrary, both my personal experience and the more formal studies I've seen tell me they are a solid, effective way of improving quality. What I'm criticising is the idea that unit tests are some sort of 100% reliable safety net, such that you can refactor away without risk as long as you have them; this is a common claim by TDD advocates and was the allusion I was concerned about in the post I originally replied to above.
No offence meant, but I think your preconceptions may be clouding your judgement here.
You claim that today's programming field is not about clever tricks and fast algorithms. I claim that if more people understood these old-fashioned concepts, we would have much better software today. For a start, anyone developing those "libraries implemented by specialists" you mentioned had better be very good, since a lot of other people's code is going to depend on them. Having worked in groups that develop various kinds of library, I can assure you that a little more general programming knowledge about clever tricks and fast algorithms wouldn't go amiss.
You claim that today's programming field is about big systems with many programmers. I claim that this is because management and technical leadership in most places isn't competent enough to divide up a big system in modular fashion and allow smaller, more flexible teams to solve the little problems before multiplying them all up to solve the big ones. Instead, the guys at the top tend to reduce all problems to the least common denominator, "throw enough people at it and we'll win eventually" philosophy. This explains how a small company with a few dozen employees can produce software that is better in every way than the competing offering from a larger company with hundreds of developers. You don't even need to have a dew dozen genius programmers; you just need to understand the concept that there are O(n^2) lines of communication between n individuals working in a single large team, but if your project is divided hierarchically then logarithms start coming into play, and if you can split a problem into several properly independent smaller ones this becomes a constant factor overhead. This elementary mathematics seems to be beyond a lot of senior management in the software business, and that has far more to do with the need to build monolithic systems maintained by zillions of developers than any actual project requirements do.
During the interview I was told that the company contained their costs by keeping salaries low.
Sorry, I realise this is off-topic, but isn't that like going into an interview as a candidate and stating that as a general policy, you do the minimal amount of work possible to give the appearance of meeting your responsibilities to your employer?
And that school of thought is fundamentally unsound, because it relies on the automated unit tests to find any change in behaviour, but you'll never get near 100% coverage for most practical projects. There was some good discussion of unit testing and TDD over on the programming reddit recently, where the brave author of a somewhat inflammatory blog post then tried to defend it against several critics.
Now, I've no problem with literate programming, but given that even semi-literate practices like "write good comments" hasn't caught on in many places, I think Don is flogging a dead horse by suggesting that code should be entirely documentation driven.
Perhaps his advocacy is futile, at least for now. However, given that he is one of the very few people on the planet who can honestly claim to have produced a substantial piece of widely useful software that is probably bug-free, I think he is entitled to speak with a certain authority on the subject.
Everyone benefits from not having to reload all the sidebars, etc. on a page when they click a link.
Not if they're writing the firmware for a washing machine, the operating system for a telephone switching system, the back-end of a corporate database application, the latest FPS blockbuster, the drivers for a new Linux file system...
Popular as in people using it, or popular as in lots of people writing about it?
Personally, I'm not convinced AJAX is that popular on the people-using-it count. It's a very useful technique for a particular niche, but it is only a niche.
I, along with many others, have been saying this same statement for years. Nobody actually "owns" their music. They own certain contractual rights to music owned by other people, also referred to as an intellectual property license.
Except, of course, that that isn't true either.
Nobody owns music, because music is not property. You can own a copy of some music, stored in some physical form. The law reserves the right to make certain uses of that copy to certain people, for example, via the copyright in the piece and in any particular performance of it. But the record industry or copyright holder no more own music I've paid for than I do, because music in intangible and not subject to ownership.
Now, if the record industry have taken someone's money in return for giving them a copy of some music, and then subsequently undermine the consumer's ability to enjoy that music in an expected way, then that is changing the rules. If the original contract, implied or otherwise, granted the rights to enjoy the music in normal fashion, then taking away this facility is breaking the contract and I don't see why whoever took the money shouldn't be liable for part of the cost representing the value lost. If the original contract contained some lawyerly weasel words about this possibility, then I think there is a decent ethical (and possibly legal too) argument that such terms would not normally be expected by someone buying their copy of the music and the one-sided contract terms should be invalidated.
This is simple contract law and ethics, and DRM and the technical means involved don't really matter other than as the means to the end. As with all technology, DRM in itself is ethically neutral; it's how it's used that is ethical or evil. In this case, for example, there would be no problem now if upon selling the DRM'd copies of the music to customers, the provider had also been compelled to lodge a DRM-free version in escrow, to be released in circumstances such as this so that customers did not lose out. It's the way that no such arrangement appears to be in place here and the law seems to do nothing to protect the consumer at this point that makes the situation unjust, not the DRM.
The fact that this remained headline news for several months should probably serve as an indicator that it's not something that's exactly common.
Well, that's OK then. If systematic failures by the police in co-ordinating their teams, sharing their intelligence, communicating reliably in a fast-moving situation, authorising the use of lethal force using weapons and tactics denied to most of us, not jumping to conclusions based on poor observations of basic facts and applying a little damn common sense only result in the death of an innocent man once in a while, I guess we don't need to worry about how often the same failings, abuses and incompetences result in something less serious or might result in another fatality. He was an illegal anyway, and we still have the death penalty for them, right?
Maybe I lived the sheltered life down in Devon, but neither of those things are exactly common occurences.
Perhaps not as extreme as the examples given, but the so-called anti-terrorism legislation is widely abused and used far too often for things that have absolutely nothing to do with terrorism.
For example, just a few days ago, there was a story on our local news about how a local council literally had spies watching a family covertly for several days to determine whether they really lived within a school catchment area. They did. The surveillance was apparently triggered by a random tip-off that someone might be abusing the system, and instead of doing something like, say, going around to the house to knock on the door and see if they were home, they used authority under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act to watch the people like something out of a crime movie, keeping logs of their movements and parked discreetly down the road from their house. Don't even ask how much public money was spent on that. The council officials whose organisation did this weren't even repentant after they were caught at it, mumbling some rubbish about the need to make sure the school admissions system isn't being abused. In other words, we have small-time local authority officials invoking anti-terrorism legislation to spy on ordinary families living on ordinary streets at vast expense and with huge invasion of privacy because of some random tip-off that the family might be doing something slightly out of order in applying for a school place. Do you really not see a problem with a legal framework that allows this?
If you really think this sort of thing is rare, just look at the statistics for how many people are arrested or stopped and searched under anti-terrorism legislation and compare that figure with how many people are even charged with (not necessarily convicted of) a terrorism-related offence. Then consider that those little mistakes have a way of completely screwing up someone's life (you try living with the stigma of your friends and family thinking you might be a terrorist for the rest of your days) and consider that the conviction rate is so low that it makes the headlines pretty much any time a couple of people are successfully prosecuted, and it's far from clear that a "greater good" argument applies here either.
Actually Supreme Commander is one of few games that is (can be) CPU-bound.
That's true, and it can be pretty bad. But at the times it gets CPU-bound, another 10% on the Hz count isn't going to help you. Using all four cores on my Q6600 sensibly instead of depending primarily on one of them would have helped a lot more! It's a shame, because a lot of the publicity when Supreme Commander came out was mentioning its ability to use multiple cores. I guess they just pass off some of the donkey work to a second core or something in practice, because they certainly don't use all four at anything close to 100% when things are getting busy in the game.
I don't really see the point in this sort of study.
The games mentioned, particularly Crysis, are going to get limited by graphics cards rather than processors anyway beyond the very lowest level processors and the most simplistic in-game graphics settings.
Some of the processors overclock much better than others, and for anyone who's actually reading an article like this and going to do anything with the information, this is likely to be very relevant.
FWIW, it's only a few months since I put together my latest rig. At the time, the widely agreed sweet spots in price/performance were the newly released E6850 and the Q6600. The E6850 runs at 3GHz but has only two cores; the Q6600 runs at only 2.4GHz but has four cores and double the cache. Unless you've got a demanding application that can take proper advantage of all the cores (and I've got a load of benchmarks that tell me neither of the games mentioned in TFA do so in practice, despite some of the publicity surrounding their releases) that made the E6850 seem like the better buy in the short term, but probably the Q6600 the more future-proof choice if you expect your PC to last long enough for demanding applications like games to get multicore right. But then you realise that actually the Q6600 is well-known for being highly overclockable, and numerous places will supply components or build you a whole machine to match a Q6600 running at 3GHz or more. That made the Q6600 a complete no-brainer.
And for what it's worth, looking at both Crysis and Supreme Commander running at 1920x1200 with high quality settings on an 8800GTX and the aforementioned Q6600@3GHz, the answer is "fast enough, because it's the graphics that limit things anyway, but when the processor matters a few more Hz won't help if you're ignoring most of your cores anyway".
It's not about two lines, it's about awareness — and I don't just mean knowing about robots.txt, I mean being aware of all possible eventualities that might adversely affect your site, being technically competent to configure your robots.txt such that they do not happen, and being able to deal with any sites that do not respect robots.txt anyway. I claim that a very substantial number of people who put web sites up, possibly even the majority, do not have this knowledge.
For the lawsuit you mentioned, did you mean Field vs. Google? If so, the case of Blake Field is hardly representative, given that the guy pretty actively set Google up and then tried to extract money from them in court. He was not your average guy setting up a family home page, your average volunteer setting up a simple web app for a local charity, or your average small-time contractor setting up a basic e-commerce site for a local speciality store.
As for alternatives, I am simply proposing that it should be necessary by default to opt-in to things that may be detrimental. I really don't care if that makes life harder for organisations that want to do those detrimental things. I also really don't care if it means some search engines won't index sites that don't opt-in.
There is no reason to believe that switching to an opt-in model would mean the end of humanity as we know it. Millions of people have worked out how to put a web page on-line, complete with hand-crafted HTML or learning to use some mark-up on their hosting service, dealing with ISPs, and so on. I'm quite sure they could work out how to add a file or flick a switch on their hosting service's control panel saying "willing to be indexed" or something. (If they can't, it rather undermines the credibility of arguing that robots.txt is an acceptable mechanism to opt-out anyway.)
I'm also not convinced that those who don't opt-in would be losing much. You seem to take it as an axiom that the Internet relies on search engines to be effective and that there would be some terrible cost to society by not implementing these disruptive things that we don't have at the moment and no-one really misses. Clearly I take a different position. We have no way of knowing what would have evolved or could still evolve if search engines were not as dominant as they are today. We do know that hyperlinks to related sites work very well as a way for people to find new information of interest, that numerous sites are willing to provide many such links to their visitors, that mass human scanning and indexing in centralised places is feasible (DMOZ), that centralised tools allowing people with similar interests to find sites you've enjoyed are feasible (StumbleUpon), and that alternative models such as social networks can become every bit as far-reaching and ubiquitous as search engines (see how fast the latest meme spreads through LiveJournal, Facebook and the like). It is far from clear to me that the world would be a worse place if Google hadn't arrived and other networking effects had effectively provided the same kind of functionality. After all, you're not going to get much of a page rank on Google until other credible sites have already linked to you anyway.
Every time anyone raises a question like this, someone trots out robots.txt as if it is some sort of magic solution to all the potential problems. It is not.
For one thing, it is voluntary. Google and some other major search engines may respect it today, but they are under no obligation to do so, nor to continue to do so if they do now.
For another thing, depending on robots.txt makes the whole game opt-out. This is, IMHO, the wrong default for potentially unwelcome visits. We can't keep pretending it's OK to hit sites with huge increases in traffic because "if it's on the Internet, they expect people to visit". Sure, they expect people to visit — not automated systems run by companies with vast resources that can push a typical small site into paying for extra bandwidth or being taken off-line in a matter of minutes.
It is not OK to just Slashdot a site out of the blue. It is not OK to aggressively attack every form on a site to see what you can find. It is not OK to set up a 1,000,000 computer botnet and then effect a DDoS attack against a web site your client doesn't like. It is not OK to send me so much spam that I have to waste hours of my life sorting through it to find legitimate e-mail. These are all variations of exactly the same principle: knowingly causing a huge, unexpected and potentially expensive or damaging increase in traffic to someone without their knowledge or consent. And most of them are already illegal in a lot of jurisdictions.
It doesn't take a genius to spot that this is unethical behaviour, and it's long past time we stopped pretending it was OK because Google can Do No Evil(TM) and we like Slashdot. The current approach is unsustainable, and since the Internet's days as an unmetered, untaxed medium appear to be numbered in the current political climate, the sooner the robots.txt advocates get it, the better.
What's it to Google (or a third party) if they mess up your pathetically-designed form?
That depends. If they effectively launch a denial-of-service attack and eat zilliabytes of people's limited bandwidth by attempting to submit with all possible combinations of form controls and large amounts of random data in text fields, would that be:
antisocial?
negligent?
the almost immediate end of their reign as most popular search engine as numerous webmasters blocked their robots?
The irony here is that while all this is going on in the broadband review, another government review process is pretty solidly rejecting the idea of imposing a levy on blank media as compenstion for a format shifting exception to copyright on the basis that it would be unfair to people who do unreasonable things like backing up their own data.
Low end today for a new computer might be a dual core, 2GB box. But most people don't have new computers, and the idea that you automatically upgrade machines every three years is well past its sell-by date. Heck, I write high-end maths libraries for a living, and while our developer boxes at work are mostly less than 2–3 years old, we have a bunch of support machines substantially older that still work just fine for hosting web/DB apps, build/test pools for continuous integration, and a whole bunch of other stuff. At home, it's a few months since I bought my current beast, but I tend to buy machines towards the high end in the expectation that they will last me nearer five years than three. I suspect this slowing in the upgrade cycle, as people just don't need more powerful machines to get useful things done, has as much to do with Microsoft's impending doom as anything.
Unfortunately, every few years the iSimulator breaks and their whole iLifeStory is lost because their Life Rights Management stops them transferring it to new hardware. On the bright side, this does mean you can go back and buy a new iLife where you never made that mistake with the not-really-that-cute girl in your last year of high school.
Bah... If you can't do it in under a minute while a gorgeous girl is <ahem> distracting you and John Travolta is holding a gun to your head, you're no-one.
I find your post interesting, primarily because it sounds like a reasonable interpretation of the three steps, yet it's quite different to what I'd come up with (as someone who has been actively involved in the consultations about this topic in the UK recently).
In particular, your version implies that anything that may cost the copyright holder any income cannot be fair use. I would qualify that (and I do think the phrasing of the TRIPS three-step test supports this) by saying that normal exploitation does not mean the same as absolute control. We could argue, for example, that selling a second full-price copy of software to someone because their installation DVD got scratched would be profitable for the copyright holder if making back-ups were illegal, but I think most people would consider this excessive exploitation and the law in most jurisdictions reflects this.
Getting back to the proposals at hand, I think if these rumours are true, the big content guys are going to have a tough time. What's happening right now is that several countries are seeing the balance of copyright tipping toward the copyright holder and finding their laws out of sync with common perceptions of what is reasonable (and done routinely, regardless of legality, by much of the population). We've had a string of investigations over the past two or three years, such as Gowers in the UK, which have proposed changes to redress the balance. The US actually has a pretty good deal with their fair use; while DRM/DMCA issues are screwing things up, the law is otherwise pretty reasonable and the four tests are fairly transparent. In most other countries, the law is not so general, and commonly expected behaviour like making back-up copies and format shifting is actually illegal in several places!
Now, we're seeing governments actively start to implement those proposals. For example, the UK government is consulting on a proposal to legitimise format shifting, which is technically illegal at the moment even though everyone does it and media industry organisations have stated publicly that they will not chase anyone to court for doing so. (The closing date for the consultation is today, so if anyone else thinks the exception should be far more general than just format shifting, get those e-mails in to the consultation response address!)
I suspect this is just making mountains out of mole-hills, though. The whole point of fair use is that there are plenty of things you can reasonably do with content you have legally obtained that are beneficial to you yet cause no unreasonable damage to the copyright holder, and the law should allow you to do these. No-one is talking about, for example, legalising P2P file sharing in breach of copyright or letting someone buy one legal download and then burn it to many CDCs and sell them on separately, which might actually do some real damage to the big media industries. It's hard to see how Big Media can credibly argue that the changes proposed in places like the UK are in violation of the three-step test when US fair use has allowed them since forever, the US is also a TRIPS signatory, yet until now Big Media has not attacked this position.
Please, people, SPF is broken, and so are all the other similar technologies.
For one thing, they are not standardised but in competition. That means most people don't use them. That means they are practically begging for a high proportion of false positives.
For another, the technical approach they tend to take is impractical. It's all very well saying big business should set up its DNS entries using this or that little hack, but most of us (yes, the vast majority of domains registered) are not running on dedicated hardware with full-time sysadmin staff who are paid to mess around with this stuff. It would be completely impractical for me, as the lone, volunteer-in-my-spare-time sysadmin of a small, local non-profit, to keep track of the dozen or more people who may legitimately send mail using our domain name and all the mail relays used by all the ISPs they use, and then to update our domain information accordingly every few days when something changes. Life's just too short for that kind of idiocy, which is presumably why of the small proportion of domains that do have SPF entries, a high proportion only say "allow from all", which pretty much defeats the point.
Don't get me wrong: I hate spam as much as the next guy. I set up some simple spam filtering on our incoming mail, using nothing but the standard issue tools our mail hosting service provides, and it blocks 95+% of our incoming spam with no false positives observed in more than two years of use. It's using one of common score-based systems that considers many indicators but will only block mail when the combination of factors is sufficiently strong to be very confident it really is just spam. It doesn't rely on any SPF or SendID or DomainKeys rubbish, and we do just fine.
Basically, the only people SPF is really hurting are those using poorly configured mail services that outright block incoming messages from sources without SPF because some know-it-all sysadmin bought the snake oil. Oh, and those of us who admin non-SPF'd systems, who get grief from these other people when mails they asked for don't arrive and after asking their know-it-all sysadmins they blame us.
OK, so we've established that the issue is not black and white: there are circumstances which both the guy in the street and the law would consider unreasonable (voyeurism) and that intent matters.
So now, does Google's action, which is apparently intended to compile a comprehensive set of photographs in a searchable form and not for some casual private purpose, still constitute something that's clearly ethical and/or lawful?
What about the circumstances where the shot is from outside a building, but it's a sensitive building, e.g., a drug rehabilitation centre. There have been cases brought in multiple jurisdictions that have found that people in such a place, including celebrities who are in the public eye as part of their work, have a right to privacy and that publishing photographs of them leaving such a place and identifying them constituted an illegal invasion of that privacy.
Please watch your jurisdictions. While what you say may be true in the US, it's not true at all for many of us (and obviously some of us are happier that way). In any case, my point is that if the law currently does say that sort of thing, I question whether it's good law.
I wonder how many of the people telling me how it's all my problem and I should get over it will still support that principle as stridently when technologies that are considerably more invasive than your average photographic camera today become widely available. For example, it's well known that various military and security organisations are trialling hardware that can effectively see through things like clothes and walls (and blinds and curtains and fences) to various degrees, and that can pick up sounds that physics makes available outside your home even if a casual passer by might not hear them, and that can reconstruct images displayed on certain types of electronic display without a direct line of sight. All of these things are therefore possible according to the laws of physics and nature's way, so there's no problem with someone using them all permanently right outside my critics' houses and publishing any information they discover for all to see, I assume.
Slashdot Mirror
In real-world projects, there's deadlines, there's a given group of managers and programmers that one has to work with, and there are ill-defined and constantly changing requirements. Nobody knows how to divide up such problems correctly among teams or how to solve many of the subproblems.
The first sentence there is clearly true, but I'm afraid the second simply isn't. IME, good management is in a minority in our industry, but it certainly exists, and plenty of successful projects do result. Contrary to what you wrote later in your post, you don't need the super-guru, 10x as wonderful programmers to make a successful project, nor exceptional management blessed with the insight of a genius. It is perfectly possible to do it with an average development team and merely competent management. The picture of doom you describe seems more like what I've seen in cheapskate businesses who pay well under the odds and consider an average programmer the office guru and anyone with five minutes' experience a project manager.
Most software today isn't slow because of lack of clever tricks or lack of fast algorithms, it's slow because people get basics like memory management, communications, and system design wrong.
And none of those things are based on algorithms, and they are the only areas that slow things down? Really?
My preconceptions are based on working in industry for 25 years and building products (in addition to teaching).
And yet you still assume that anyone with different experience and a different opinion from your own has "the mark of an average and fairly inexperienced programmer"?
BTW, you completely missed my point if you think clever tricks and fast algorithms equates to using a C compiler (for what, bit twiddling and in-line assembly?) and an algorithms textbook (do you think I'm just talking about CS 101 sorting and searching here?).
BTW, I think you an I agree - this is more directed at the grandparent.
I wrote the grandparent post, and I suspect you and I would agree as well. I'm not criticising unit tests: on the contrary, both my personal experience and the more formal studies I've seen tell me they are a solid, effective way of improving quality. What I'm criticising is the idea that unit tests are some sort of 100% reliable safety net, such that you can refactor away without risk as long as you have them; this is a common claim by TDD advocates and was the allusion I was concerned about in the post I originally replied to above.
No offence meant, but I think your preconceptions may be clouding your judgement here.
You claim that today's programming field is not about clever tricks and fast algorithms. I claim that if more people understood these old-fashioned concepts, we would have much better software today. For a start, anyone developing those "libraries implemented by specialists" you mentioned had better be very good, since a lot of other people's code is going to depend on them. Having worked in groups that develop various kinds of library, I can assure you that a little more general programming knowledge about clever tricks and fast algorithms wouldn't go amiss.
You claim that today's programming field is about big systems with many programmers. I claim that this is because management and technical leadership in most places isn't competent enough to divide up a big system in modular fashion and allow smaller, more flexible teams to solve the little problems before multiplying them all up to solve the big ones. Instead, the guys at the top tend to reduce all problems to the least common denominator, "throw enough people at it and we'll win eventually" philosophy. This explains how a small company with a few dozen employees can produce software that is better in every way than the competing offering from a larger company with hundreds of developers. You don't even need to have a dew dozen genius programmers; you just need to understand the concept that there are O(n^2) lines of communication between n individuals working in a single large team, but if your project is divided hierarchically then logarithms start coming into play, and if you can split a problem into several properly independent smaller ones this becomes a constant factor overhead. This elementary mathematics seems to be beyond a lot of senior management in the software business, and that has far more to do with the need to build monolithic systems maintained by zillions of developers than any actual project requirements do.
During the interview I was told that the company contained their costs by keeping salaries low.
Sorry, I realise this is off-topic, but isn't that like going into an interview as a candidate and stating that as a general policy, you do the minimal amount of work possible to give the appearance of meeting your responsibilities to your employer?
And that school of thought is fundamentally unsound, because it relies on the automated unit tests to find any change in behaviour, but you'll never get near 100% coverage for most practical projects. There was some good discussion of unit testing and TDD over on the programming reddit recently, where the brave author of a somewhat inflammatory blog post then tried to defend it against several critics.
Now, I've no problem with literate programming, but given that even semi-literate practices like "write good comments" hasn't caught on in many places, I think Don is flogging a dead horse by suggesting that code should be entirely documentation driven.
Perhaps his advocacy is futile, at least for now. However, given that he is one of the very few people on the planet who can honestly claim to have produced a substantial piece of widely useful software that is probably bug-free, I think he is entitled to speak with a certain authority on the subject.
Everyone benefits from not having to reload all the sidebars, etc. on a page when they click a link.
Not if they're writing the firmware for a washing machine, the operating system for a telephone switching system, the back-end of a corporate database application, the latest FPS blockbuster, the drivers for a new Linux file system...
Popular as in people using it, or popular as in lots of people writing about it?
Personally, I'm not convinced AJAX is that popular on the people-using-it count. It's a very useful technique for a particular niche, but it is only a niche.
I, along with many others, have been saying this same statement for years. Nobody actually "owns" their music. They own certain contractual rights to music owned by other people, also referred to as an intellectual property license.
Except, of course, that that isn't true either.
Nobody owns music, because music is not property. You can own a copy of some music, stored in some physical form. The law reserves the right to make certain uses of that copy to certain people, for example, via the copyright in the piece and in any particular performance of it. But the record industry or copyright holder no more own music I've paid for than I do, because music in intangible and not subject to ownership.
Now, if the record industry have taken someone's money in return for giving them a copy of some music, and then subsequently undermine the consumer's ability to enjoy that music in an expected way, then that is changing the rules. If the original contract, implied or otherwise, granted the rights to enjoy the music in normal fashion, then taking away this facility is breaking the contract and I don't see why whoever took the money shouldn't be liable for part of the cost representing the value lost. If the original contract contained some lawyerly weasel words about this possibility, then I think there is a decent ethical (and possibly legal too) argument that such terms would not normally be expected by someone buying their copy of the music and the one-sided contract terms should be invalidated.
This is simple contract law and ethics, and DRM and the technical means involved don't really matter other than as the means to the end. As with all technology, DRM in itself is ethically neutral; it's how it's used that is ethical or evil. In this case, for example, there would be no problem now if upon selling the DRM'd copies of the music to customers, the provider had also been compelled to lodge a DRM-free version in escrow, to be released in circumstances such as this so that customers did not lose out. It's the way that no such arrangement appears to be in place here and the law seems to do nothing to protect the consumer at this point that makes the situation unjust, not the DRM.
The fact that this remained headline news for several months should probably serve as an indicator that it's not something that's exactly common.
Well, that's OK then. If systematic failures by the police in co-ordinating their teams, sharing their intelligence, communicating reliably in a fast-moving situation, authorising the use of lethal force using weapons and tactics denied to most of us, not jumping to conclusions based on poor observations of basic facts and applying a little damn common sense only result in the death of an innocent man once in a while, I guess we don't need to worry about how often the same failings, abuses and incompetences result in something less serious or might result in another fatality. He was an illegal anyway, and we still have the death penalty for them, right?
Maybe I lived the sheltered life down in Devon, but neither of those things are exactly common occurences.
Perhaps not as extreme as the examples given, but the so-called anti-terrorism legislation is widely abused and used far too often for things that have absolutely nothing to do with terrorism.
For example, just a few days ago, there was a story on our local news about how a local council literally had spies watching a family covertly for several days to determine whether they really lived within a school catchment area. They did. The surveillance was apparently triggered by a random tip-off that someone might be abusing the system, and instead of doing something like, say, going around to the house to knock on the door and see if they were home, they used authority under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act to watch the people like something out of a crime movie, keeping logs of their movements and parked discreetly down the road from their house. Don't even ask how much public money was spent on that. The council officials whose organisation did this weren't even repentant after they were caught at it, mumbling some rubbish about the need to make sure the school admissions system isn't being abused. In other words, we have small-time local authority officials invoking anti-terrorism legislation to spy on ordinary families living on ordinary streets at vast expense and with huge invasion of privacy because of some random tip-off that the family might be doing something slightly out of order in applying for a school place. Do you really not see a problem with a legal framework that allows this?
If you really think this sort of thing is rare, just look at the statistics for how many people are arrested or stopped and searched under anti-terrorism legislation and compare that figure with how many people are even charged with (not necessarily convicted of) a terrorism-related offence. Then consider that those little mistakes have a way of completely screwing up someone's life (you try living with the stigma of your friends and family thinking you might be a terrorist for the rest of your days) and consider that the conviction rate is so low that it makes the headlines pretty much any time a couple of people are successfully prosecuted, and it's far from clear that a "greater good" argument applies here either.
Actually Supreme Commander is one of few games that is (can be) CPU-bound.
That's true, and it can be pretty bad. But at the times it gets CPU-bound, another 10% on the Hz count isn't going to help you. Using all four cores on my Q6600 sensibly instead of depending primarily on one of them would have helped a lot more! It's a shame, because a lot of the publicity when Supreme Commander came out was mentioning its ability to use multiple cores. I guess they just pass off some of the donkey work to a second core or something in practice, because they certainly don't use all four at anything close to 100% when things are getting busy in the game.
I don't really see the point in this sort of study.
The games mentioned, particularly Crysis, are going to get limited by graphics cards rather than processors anyway beyond the very lowest level processors and the most simplistic in-game graphics settings.
Some of the processors overclock much better than others, and for anyone who's actually reading an article like this and going to do anything with the information, this is likely to be very relevant.
FWIW, it's only a few months since I put together my latest rig. At the time, the widely agreed sweet spots in price/performance were the newly released E6850 and the Q6600. The E6850 runs at 3GHz but has only two cores; the Q6600 runs at only 2.4GHz but has four cores and double the cache. Unless you've got a demanding application that can take proper advantage of all the cores (and I've got a load of benchmarks that tell me neither of the games mentioned in TFA do so in practice, despite some of the publicity surrounding their releases) that made the E6850 seem like the better buy in the short term, but probably the Q6600 the more future-proof choice if you expect your PC to last long enough for demanding applications like games to get multicore right. But then you realise that actually the Q6600 is well-known for being highly overclockable, and numerous places will supply components or build you a whole machine to match a Q6600 running at 3GHz or more. That made the Q6600 a complete no-brainer.
And for what it's worth, looking at both Crysis and Supreme Commander running at 1920x1200 with high quality settings on an 8800GTX and the aforementioned Q6600@3GHz, the answer is "fast enough, because it's the graphics that limit things anyway, but when the processor matters a few more Hz won't help if you're ignoring most of your cores anyway".
It's not about two lines, it's about awareness — and I don't just mean knowing about robots.txt, I mean being aware of all possible eventualities that might adversely affect your site, being technically competent to configure your robots.txt such that they do not happen, and being able to deal with any sites that do not respect robots.txt anyway. I claim that a very substantial number of people who put web sites up, possibly even the majority, do not have this knowledge.
For the lawsuit you mentioned, did you mean Field vs. Google? If so, the case of Blake Field is hardly representative, given that the guy pretty actively set Google up and then tried to extract money from them in court. He was not your average guy setting up a family home page, your average volunteer setting up a simple web app for a local charity, or your average small-time contractor setting up a basic e-commerce site for a local speciality store.
As for alternatives, I am simply proposing that it should be necessary by default to opt-in to things that may be detrimental. I really don't care if that makes life harder for organisations that want to do those detrimental things. I also really don't care if it means some search engines won't index sites that don't opt-in.
There is no reason to believe that switching to an opt-in model would mean the end of humanity as we know it. Millions of people have worked out how to put a web page on-line, complete with hand-crafted HTML or learning to use some mark-up on their hosting service, dealing with ISPs, and so on. I'm quite sure they could work out how to add a file or flick a switch on their hosting service's control panel saying "willing to be indexed" or something. (If they can't, it rather undermines the credibility of arguing that robots.txt is an acceptable mechanism to opt-out anyway.)
I'm also not convinced that those who don't opt-in would be losing much. You seem to take it as an axiom that the Internet relies on search engines to be effective and that there would be some terrible cost to society by not implementing these disruptive things that we don't have at the moment and no-one really misses. Clearly I take a different position. We have no way of knowing what would have evolved or could still evolve if search engines were not as dominant as they are today. We do know that hyperlinks to related sites work very well as a way for people to find new information of interest, that numerous sites are willing to provide many such links to their visitors, that mass human scanning and indexing in centralised places is feasible (DMOZ), that centralised tools allowing people with similar interests to find sites you've enjoyed are feasible (StumbleUpon), and that alternative models such as social networks can become every bit as far-reaching and ubiquitous as search engines (see how fast the latest meme spreads through LiveJournal, Facebook and the like). It is far from clear to me that the world would be a worse place if Google hadn't arrived and other networking effects had effectively provided the same kind of functionality. After all, you're not going to get much of a page rank on Google until other credible sites have already linked to you anyway.
Every time anyone raises a question like this, someone trots out robots.txt as if it is some sort of magic solution to all the potential problems. It is not.
For one thing, it is voluntary. Google and some other major search engines may respect it today, but they are under no obligation to do so, nor to continue to do so if they do now.
For another thing, depending on robots.txt makes the whole game opt-out. This is, IMHO, the wrong default for potentially unwelcome visits. We can't keep pretending it's OK to hit sites with huge increases in traffic because "if it's on the Internet, they expect people to visit". Sure, they expect people to visit — not automated systems run by companies with vast resources that can push a typical small site into paying for extra bandwidth or being taken off-line in a matter of minutes.
It is not OK to just Slashdot a site out of the blue. It is not OK to aggressively attack every form on a site to see what you can find. It is not OK to set up a 1,000,000 computer botnet and then effect a DDoS attack against a web site your client doesn't like. It is not OK to send me so much spam that I have to waste hours of my life sorting through it to find legitimate e-mail. These are all variations of exactly the same principle: knowingly causing a huge, unexpected and potentially expensive or damaging increase in traffic to someone without their knowledge or consent. And most of them are already illegal in a lot of jurisdictions.
It doesn't take a genius to spot that this is unethical behaviour, and it's long past time we stopped pretending it was OK because Google can Do No Evil(TM) and we like Slashdot. The current approach is unsustainable, and since the Internet's days as an unmetered, untaxed medium appear to be numbered in the current political climate, the sooner the robots.txt advocates get it, the better.
HTTP/1.1 426 Upgrade Required
Upgrade: Common courtesy/1.0, HTTP/1.1
What's it to Google (or a third party) if they mess up your pathetically-designed form?
That depends. If they effectively launch a denial-of-service attack and eat zilliabytes of people's limited bandwidth by attempting to submit with all possible combinations of form controls and large amounts of random data in text fields, would that be:
The irony here is that while all this is going on in the broadband review, another government review process is pretty solidly rejecting the idea of imposing a levy on blank media as compenstion for a format shifting exception to copyright on the basis that it would be unfair to people who do unreasonable things like backing up their own data.
Low end today for a new computer might be a dual core, 2GB box. But most people don't have new computers, and the idea that you automatically upgrade machines every three years is well past its sell-by date. Heck, I write high-end maths libraries for a living, and while our developer boxes at work are mostly less than 2–3 years old, we have a bunch of support machines substantially older that still work just fine for hosting web/DB apps, build/test pools for continuous integration, and a whole bunch of other stuff. At home, it's a few months since I bought my current beast, but I tend to buy machines towards the high end in the expectation that they will last me nearer five years than three. I suspect this slowing in the upgrade cycle, as people just don't need more powerful machines to get useful things done, has as much to do with Microsoft's impending doom as anything.
Unfortunately, every few years the iSimulator breaks and their whole iLifeStory is lost because their Life Rights Management stops them transferring it to new hardware. On the bright side, this does mean you can go back and buy a new iLife where you never made that mistake with the not-really-that-cute girl in your last year of high school.
Bah... If you can't do it in under a minute while a gorgeous girl is <ahem> distracting you and John Travolta is holding a gun to your head, you're no-one.
I find your post interesting, primarily because it sounds like a reasonable interpretation of the three steps, yet it's quite different to what I'd come up with (as someone who has been actively involved in the consultations about this topic in the UK recently).
In particular, your version implies that anything that may cost the copyright holder any income cannot be fair use. I would qualify that (and I do think the phrasing of the TRIPS three-step test supports this) by saying that normal exploitation does not mean the same as absolute control. We could argue, for example, that selling a second full-price copy of software to someone because their installation DVD got scratched would be profitable for the copyright holder if making back-ups were illegal, but I think most people would consider this excessive exploitation and the law in most jurisdictions reflects this.
Getting back to the proposals at hand, I think if these rumours are true, the big content guys are going to have a tough time. What's happening right now is that several countries are seeing the balance of copyright tipping toward the copyright holder and finding their laws out of sync with common perceptions of what is reasonable (and done routinely, regardless of legality, by much of the population). We've had a string of investigations over the past two or three years, such as Gowers in the UK, which have proposed changes to redress the balance. The US actually has a pretty good deal with their fair use; while DRM/DMCA issues are screwing things up, the law is otherwise pretty reasonable and the four tests are fairly transparent. In most other countries, the law is not so general, and commonly expected behaviour like making back-up copies and format shifting is actually illegal in several places!
Now, we're seeing governments actively start to implement those proposals. For example, the UK government is consulting on a proposal to legitimise format shifting, which is technically illegal at the moment even though everyone does it and media industry organisations have stated publicly that they will not chase anyone to court for doing so. (The closing date for the consultation is today, so if anyone else thinks the exception should be far more general than just format shifting, get those e-mails in to the consultation response address!)
I suspect this is just making mountains out of mole-hills, though. The whole point of fair use is that there are plenty of things you can reasonably do with content you have legally obtained that are beneficial to you yet cause no unreasonable damage to the copyright holder, and the law should allow you to do these. No-one is talking about, for example, legalising P2P file sharing in breach of copyright or letting someone buy one legal download and then burn it to many CDCs and sell them on separately, which might actually do some real damage to the big media industries. It's hard to see how Big Media can credibly argue that the changes proposed in places like the UK are in violation of the three-step test when US fair use has allowed them since forever, the US is also a TRIPS signatory, yet until now Big Media has not attacked this position.
Please, people, SPF is broken, and so are all the other similar technologies.
For one thing, they are not standardised but in competition. That means most people don't use them. That means they are practically begging for a high proportion of false positives.
For another, the technical approach they tend to take is impractical. It's all very well saying big business should set up its DNS entries using this or that little hack, but most of us (yes, the vast majority of domains registered) are not running on dedicated hardware with full-time sysadmin staff who are paid to mess around with this stuff. It would be completely impractical for me, as the lone, volunteer-in-my-spare-time sysadmin of a small, local non-profit, to keep track of the dozen or more people who may legitimately send mail using our domain name and all the mail relays used by all the ISPs they use, and then to update our domain information accordingly every few days when something changes. Life's just too short for that kind of idiocy, which is presumably why of the small proportion of domains that do have SPF entries, a high proportion only say "allow from all", which pretty much defeats the point.
Don't get me wrong: I hate spam as much as the next guy. I set up some simple spam filtering on our incoming mail, using nothing but the standard issue tools our mail hosting service provides, and it blocks 95+% of our incoming spam with no false positives observed in more than two years of use. It's using one of common score-based systems that considers many indicators but will only block mail when the combination of factors is sufficiently strong to be very confident it really is just spam. It doesn't rely on any SPF or SendID or DomainKeys rubbish, and we do just fine.
Basically, the only people SPF is really hurting are those using poorly configured mail services that outright block incoming messages from sources without SPF because some know-it-all sysadmin bought the snake oil. Oh, and those of us who admin non-SPF'd systems, who get grief from these other people when mails they asked for don't arrive and after asking their know-it-all sysadmins they blame us.
OK, so we've established that the issue is not black and white: there are circumstances which both the guy in the street and the law would consider unreasonable (voyeurism) and that intent matters.
So now, does Google's action, which is apparently intended to compile a comprehensive set of photographs in a searchable form and not for some casual private purpose, still constitute something that's clearly ethical and/or lawful?
What about the circumstances where the shot is from outside a building, but it's a sensitive building, e.g., a drug rehabilitation centre. There have been cases brought in multiple jurisdictions that have found that people in such a place, including celebrities who are in the public eye as part of their work, have a right to privacy and that publishing photographs of them leaving such a place and identifying them constituted an illegal invasion of that privacy.
Please watch your jurisdictions. While what you say may be true in the US, it's not true at all for many of us (and obviously some of us are happier that way). In any case, my point is that if the law currently does say that sort of thing, I question whether it's good law.
I wonder how many of the people telling me how it's all my problem and I should get over it will still support that principle as stridently when technologies that are considerably more invasive than your average photographic camera today become widely available. For example, it's well known that various military and security organisations are trialling hardware that can effectively see through things like clothes and walls (and blinds and curtains and fences) to various degrees, and that can pick up sounds that physics makes available outside your home even if a casual passer by might not hear them, and that can reconstruct images displayed on certain types of electronic display without a direct line of sight. All of these things are therefore possible according to the laws of physics and nature's way, so there's no problem with someone using them all permanently right outside my critics' houses and publishing any information they discover for all to see, I assume.