I think your basic problem is that a lot of us have been doing this stuff for a living for years too, yet you seem to be the only one who's ever heard of this.
And yes, the US arm of my employer has accountants who deal with R&D tax provisions. And no, we don't track every line of code as "new" or "refactored".
Those who go against comments (me included) are not against documentation of the code. We are against documentation that may easily lose sync with the code, where better forms of documentation exist.
And what if commenting is the best form of documentation?
No offence, but if you often found your comments and code got out of sync, you were probably writing the wrong kind of comments. Good comments don't just repeat what the code does. They explain why and perhaps how it does it. They warn of subtleties not immediately obvious from the code (because sometimes, the appropriate algorithms or data structures just aren't obvious to someone unfamiliar with the code). They refer to other documentation with more detailed background information.
In short, they tell you the stuff the code can't, because sometimes code is too low level to represent the conceptual understanding of the programmer who wrote it. It's pretty hard for that sort of thing to get out of sync with the code without it being pretty darn obvious.
Also, no one who does understand these issues could, with a straight face, say that the law is clear in this area. I don't know about other jurisdictions, but at least in the US it is not at all clear.
Indeed. Unfortunately, WNight's original post that I criticised was rather more black and white than that. That was the only point I was making.
I believe the vast majority of computer users, even the savvy ones, don't understand this at all.
That may be true, but in case that was intended as a criticism of my judgement and/or level of knowledge, for the record I both work in the software business and have been actively involved in a recent government review of copyright in the UK, amongst other relevant experience. A major part of that review involved comparison with current policy in various other countries, incidentally.
Unfortunately, the majority of US courts haven't yet realized the "duress" part of your argument, even though it naturally follows when software is sold, not licensed. As a result, the majority opinion in the US is that if you agree to an EULA, it becomes binding upon you. The courts so far have viewed clicking the "I Agree" button as being voluntary, instead of as being under duress, which it actually is.
With respect, until the people decide that you are a higher legal authority than the statute books and the courts, the above is just your opinion, and like the other guys arguing with me, your opinion does not outrank the law.
I considered not replying to your post, since you're doing exactly the same as the other guy and attempting proof by intimidation. You also seem to be attacking me for a position you have invented and then assumed I hold, despite my post not even hinting at any position on this particular subject. However, if you do care what the law actually says and where it is untested, even obvious places like the "EULA" entry on Wikipedia or a Google search for "eula validity case law" immediately turn up numerous sources that show the picture isn't clear.
By way of summary, your "if it looks like a sale then it's a sale and you can't change it later" argument ignores several potentially relevant factors, such as copyright law that might apply at the time of installation, whether the existence of any EULA has been disclosed prior to the sale, and whether such a user has indicated acceptance of such an agreement during the installation process. You have a strange idea of what the average guy in the street thinks, too, I suggest, but since you've given no evidence whatsoever to support your claim it's hard to dispute it.
As for software being a special case, for a start, it has special provisions in several EU laws, which immediately makes it likely that every country in the EU has or will have corresponding special treatments. This is noted, among other places, in the UK government's consultation document to follow up the Gowers review, which was just published.
Please don't write posts like this if you're not going to back them up with reliable sources. Your personal views on the validity of EULAs in whatever jurisdiction you are in don't really count for much if the courts don't agree with you, and in any case are unlikely to be applicable universally.
I was reading through your post and nodding, but then I realised that I just can't agree with your underlying argument. I think this is the part of your post that captures the essence of what I mean:
You know, there was a time when formal methods were taught, when programmers were expected to know how to properly allocate and release memory. When things like calculating the size of the buffer, applying basic math(!) and testing your own code were considered just a part of the programmer's job. Now we're hearing people blame languages for the faults of the programmer.
While this is all true, the problem with this argument is that it fails to account for no-one being perfect. If a certain type of error is known to have occurred a non-zero number of times, and other things being equal the models in a certain programming language make that type of error impossible, then that programming language is unambiguously safer than one that doesn't prevent the error. It might only prevent it once in a blue moon when a really great programmer is using it, and probably a few more times when someone who thinks they're a really great programmer is using it, but it still prevents errors. Pride comes before a fall, and choosing a programming language that it unnecessarily vulnerable to certain classes of programmer error because you believe you're too good to ever make them is like tying your own shoelaces together before running a marathon.
But consider this: the most reliable operating systems to date were built on C (UNIX) and assembly (MVS). If a bunch of old farts (well, perhaps they were young then...) can crank out correct, reliable, fast code without an IDE and a bunch of GUI tools, clearly the language is not to blame.
And if a bunch of old farts had cranked out correct, reliable, fast code in that way, I'd be impressed. Since this has almost never been achieved in the entire history of software development, however, this doesn't tell us much. These are, after all, the same old farts who brought us joys like the gets library function in C. (If you're Donald Knuth, I'll acknowledge that you're an exception on the correct, reliable, fast count, but we really need to talk about usability.)
Your answer to these ailments appears to work exclusively on a "cure" basis: use better processes so more people look at things, use better tools to pick up errors, etc. But prevention is better than cure. If you're using a programming language where the problem simply can't happen, you know the reviews and tools won't miss anything.
The old adage still applies: a poor workman blames his tools.
Perhaps. But a good workman knows his tools, and chooses the right one for the job.
While there certainly is an ethical issue at work here, the problem with buffer overflows can usually be avoided through purely technical means. In the context of a TCP/IP stack, I question whether it's really necessary to resort to known error-prone implementation technologies. We're not talking about an OS kernel or some ludicrously high performance mathematical algorithm, and any performance penalties associated with using a slightly safer language would surely be negligible.
(Incidentally, I work on high performance maths software, typically with fairly low level languages. We do use reviews and automated tools, and they tell me I don't personally make the kind of memory management error you're criticising, so I have no axe to grind here nor any particular bias towards high level languages when they're not appropriate.)
I've grumbled many times about this concentration on Java, and the resultant lack of detailed understanding about programing, but each time I did so at my university I was disregarded, and someone always trotted out that age old nonsense "not re-inventing the wheel". I mean, sure, I see the point, but surely you should have a basic idea of how wheels are made?
Amen.
When I was younger, my father wouldn't let me have an electronic calculator until I proved to him that I could do long division and I knew my times tables. He wouldn't let me have a scientific calculator until I could explain square roots, the basic trig functions, and the idea of logarithms.
Would I do these things by hand today, in a non-trivial context? Of course not, I have tools for that. But there was never any danger of using a tool I didn't really understand, or picking the wrong tool for the job as a result, and I am forever grateful to my father for making me invent the wheel the first time.
A bit older and hopefully a bit wiser myself, I see a lot of the same things in programming today. Junior developers come straight out of education and don't care about understanding pointers. They reckon they don't need to understand sorting algorithms, because they'll just use a sort function from a library. They don't need to understand data structures either, because again they have a whole toolbox full of them. In fact, they don't really want to understand what's going on under the hood of their program at all, because apparently (so they tell me) one day we'll have a sufficiently smart compiler and it will optimise away any unnecessary overheads they introduce. Presumably some uber-l337 hax0r is going to write that for them.;-)
<sigh> And we wonder how a modern PC literally thousands of times faster than those of a decade ago can possibly take the same length of real time to do simple, everyday things, and how in an Internet-connected world where spyware and malware cost society billions every year we still have basic security flaws that let the script kiddies in the door. Won't it be ironic if the educational gaps left in a whole generation by modern universities catering to a cookie-cutter programming industry wind up being addressed by the veteran programmers in industry who needed to get stuff done properly?:-)
Documents are used differently these days
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Goodbye Cruel Word
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Initially, it was obvious that word processing and desktop publishing were two very different things, and never the twain shall meet. We'd all be a lot better off if this distinction had stayed, because the problem with word processors today is not that they're trying to be all things to all people, but that they're trying to do two different things at the same time.
Personally, I'd take your position even further. The tools we need today are not the same as the tools we needed in the '80s. Documents are not handled in the same ways, nor published via the same media.
I think there are at least three major areas of interest for a modern document preparation system.
Preparing the text and related material. This has absolutely nothing to do with rendering that text, but concerns logical structure and content. (This area is very poorly supported in most classical word processors and DTP packages, which is why all the niche products for writers with numerous note-taking and organisation features are springing up.)
Automatic rendering of long documents with relatively simple layout rules, such as a book, research paper, formal specification or contract.
Manual rendering of an entire document or part of it where customised formatting is required, such as a magazine, newsletter, flyer or brochure.
Clearly the first of these will typically be used in combination with one or both of the others, but the tools and application interface required in each category are quite different (but sometimes overlapping).
On top of this, there is the fact that a document won't necessarily be published in paper form these days. Distribution in electronic formats such as PDF is widespread, and on-line collaboration in the writing and editing of a document may be as important in many business contexts as the finished article that gets signed off. Then there's web publishing: while the same content almost certainly won't be appropriate to use in both formal/printed documents and web pages unedited, providing a common interface so that a single application can target multiple media with professional quality output is likely to become increasingly important IMHO.
In other words, traditional word processors, DTP packages, typesetting systems and HTML editors are all dead; they just don't know it yet. Frankly, most software in these industries sucks badly, but no-one has been brave/foolish enough to attempt a comprehensive, professional standard replacement to bridge the gaps and make the others literally redundant.
I don't want to be a garbageman, but it wouldn't be realistic if everyone in society also chose not to be a garbageman. Are you saying that my only ethical choice is to be a garbageman?
Actually, that's not as far-fetched as you think. If no-one in society is willing to do some unpleasant work, but the work must be done, then yes, I think it's entirely ethical that everyone takes their turn and does their fair share of the work if they're able to.
In reality, different folks have different abilities and different preferences. In first world countries, we have evolved a system of economics such that this kind of situation is rare (though perhaps a similar situation applies to the ethics of people who are perfectly able to work but choose not to and to live off state benefits instead). However, in less developed societies, often you pull your weight or you become unwelcome. After all, why is your desire to avoid doing some unpleasant but necessary work more important than anyone else's?
Since you seem to think about these issues carefully, I will try to argue similarly objectively here.
Before a start, let me explicitly agree with you that DRM doesn't really serve anyone's interests. Technologically, it doesn't work, or at least not 100%, which is what it would need to do its job effectively against "serious casual" infringement or professional pirates. In terms of market forces, it makes the legitimate copy of a work inferior to what someone could rip illegally from an on-line source, which is obviously not an incentive to buy the real thing. In terms of PR, the whole idea of trying to control content someone has already paid for so that it may not be used in ways that are otherwise legal is an own goal for Big Media.
That said, I respectfully suggest that your argument about whether content would still be produced in a different environment is based too much on absolutes. The world is not a binary system, where either content is produced and shared or it is not. There are issues of both quality and quantity, and each lies on a continuous, open-ended scale. There is a further issue of distribution, which is to say how many people benefit from any given work.
It is certainly true that artists have always made art. In particular, it is certainly true that some artists working on commission made a substantial amount of art before copyright existed, and it is also certainly true that some artists make and give away art today. Heck, I've done both myself.
The question I would ask you is: if we took the pro-piracy arguments to their logical conclusion and effectively abolished copyright, do you really believe there would not be a reduction in the quality, quantity and/or distribution of works?
I personally find that very hard to believe. If producing and sharing good works was as inherent in human nature as you seem to be suggesting, then would all these volunteer producers not be giving the world such works already?
If so, then where are the really great films from privately funded, independent producers? Sure, people have mentioned Clerks, but that's one film in several decades of film production, and however good it is, I doubt most people have ever heard of it anyway. Hollywood alone produces several blockbusters a year that millions find entertaining enough to pay to see them, even if any given person might prefer something more artsy and less based on a big name actor, special effects or whatever.
Where are the free TV dramas that people prefer to The West Wing or 24 or Lost? The sci-fi shows that more people enjoyed than Battlestar Galactica or Stargate — surely a world full of geeks so keen to volunteer their time must have produced one such work? The documentaries that beat Planet Earth?
What about light family entertainment, say Dancing with the Stars? I choose this example because it's slightly ironic: most of the professional dancers don't get paid that much considering the commitment they have to make to the show, and instead make their money by getting private teaching and demonstration gigs as a result of the publicity. That sounds a lot like it ought to undermine the copyright argument, by showing that good artists can make their money through one-off performances, but without the copyright framework that paid for the show in the first place, how many of those artists could have afforded to take four months out of their calendars speculatively? Pretty much none of them. And even without that, DWTS reaches millions of people, while all those follow-up performances reach only a few thousand combined, so the TV show is meeting the goal of sharing art more widely.
To give some other examples, where is the freely distributed book that entertains millions of children as Harry Potter has? Where are all the free textbooks good enough to use in schools — surely places that would much prefer to use high quality, low cost alternatives given their ty
While everything you wrote there seems to be common sense, please remember that we are not currently talking about copyright extension. DRM is primarily about copyright enforcement, or at least a probably futile attempt at it. I am hardly a supporter of Big Media, but unless you think people are pirating content that would have run out of copyright before the extensions but now has not, rather than the latest songs and blockbuster movies of the past few years, I don't think your points are applicable to this particular debate.
Re:Morals aside - what's the end result?
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Sony BMG Dropping DRM
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I'm not coming out for or against piracy here, but when we have these discussions, we should at least try to look at things from a realistic perspective instead of dogmatic positions.
I believe you're missing the underlying ethical implication of the GPP. The point isn't that it's realistic for everyone to suddenly stop watching movies. The point is that for a behaviour to be ethical, it has to remain realistic if everyone in society did choose to act the same way. In this case, if everyone ripped content illegally and no-one paid for it, there would be very little content available for anyone. That means that the people who do act in that way today aren't just getting the content for free; they're actively taking advantage of everyone who does play by the rules for their own selfish benefit. The more people who choose to follow that path, the worse things get for everyone, and such a policy is unsustainable.
Re:Morals aside - what's the end result?
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Sony BMG Dropping DRM
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Here's the thing: copyright is a balance between the insanity of allowing ideas to be owned, and the insanity of few people creating art because we need to eat.
Here's the thing: it's nothing like that at all.
Copyright is primarily an economic tool. It provides an incentive for people to create and share new works.
Arguments like yours are put as if the alternative to copyright is a world where all the same works are created and shared freely, as if you can eat your cake and have it too. But the problem is, most of the time, you can't. It takes time, skill and often significant amounts of cash to make worthwhile works. If you don't provide a sufficient economic incentive for people to make that commitment ahead of time, the alternative is that you don't get most of the work at all.
So, reality check, please. The amount of work created and shared under the current incentive scheme, regardless of its flaws, is vastly greater than either the amount of work created and shared on a voluntary basis today, and than the amount of work any given member of society had access to under the old work-for-hire economics of yestercentury.
In this context, the idea of a temporary control over the distribution of a work (which isn't really ownership, of course) isn't insane at all. In fact, it's no more insane than actual ownership of real, physical property: it's a legal convention, which society by and large adheres to because on balance it's in society's interest for everyone to do so. Heck, the same is true of just about any law, for that matter, particularly any law related to economics. Copyright is no different and no more artificial.
Unfortunately, the content creators don't feel the need to honor the deal--they just want to own the ideas outright, forever and ever. I don't particularly blame them--everyone's always looking out for number 1--but the fact remains that they're violating it every time they ask for extensions.
It's not unreasonabe to wonder why one side should agree to a deal that the other side is violating.
That's just one big straw man. We're not talking about copyright extensions here, we're talking about DRM and the ethics of piracy. And right now, give or take the current imbalance between fair use doctrine and technological protections (which is recent and mainly confined to the US), the use of DRM doesn't inherently break any part of the deal and piracy clearly does.
For the avoidance of doubt, I don't like DRM. I think it sucks for everyone involved, and I'm not at all sorry to see the back of it. I've been arguing for some time that it was dead and just didn't realise it yet, but also that things had to get bad enough for significant numbers of people to get stung and become aware of the issue before things would start to improve. But using DRM isn't in itself a violation of the basic principle of copyright.
The key is that it has nothing to do with the content. A boycott is generally useful for when you don't like what someone is saying, or even how they're saying it. Copyright is a weird beast that really doesn't fall into either of these areas.
I'm sorry, but I don't see how your concluding paragraph even makes sense, and I don't see how any possible interpretation I can think of is necessarily true.
Re:Morals aside - what's the end result?
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Sony BMG Dropping DRM
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Even if the whole business isn't "respectable" by your standards, you obviously respect their work enough to watch it. To never pay is to vote for a world where that work is never produced.
It's a shame my mod points just expired, or you'd have had one.
It's about time a few people around here realised the hypocrisy of advocating piracy as a counter-strategy to DRM. If you don't like the way the material is offered, fine, vote with your wallet and tell people why. That's your right. But watching the films and listening to the music anyway just says you want the stuff but aren't willing to pay for it like everyone else.
It's funny, I went to Amazon the other day to see what was available for DRM-free download. Do you know what the answer was?
Nothing. For some strange reason, the service is only available to those in the US. The rest of us are still stuck in 2000 or something.
Still, at least the light bulb is starting to glow. Next, you'll be telling me I can buy legal DVDs that don't make me sit through several minutes of tedious anti-piracy drivel that doesn't even apply in my jurisdiction, just like all the illegal ones I could have bought more cheaply instead...
May I ask what you have against Nielsen? Aside from his rampant self-promotion in recent years, which ironically has reduced the value of his own web site according to his own principles, much of his real content has always struck me as quite useful and based on objective evidence.
The problem is that what users want and what they need may be two very different things. To give a simple example, a lot of users still think they work faster with the keyboard than the mouse in a typical office application like a word processor or spreadsheet, despite the fact that most of them are measurably wrong when observed objectively.
As a sales pitch, giving users what they want (i.e., what they think they need) may be smarter than giving them what you know from evidence that they actually need. Then again, sometimes that's just a short-term illusion. If you want to make working software and get long term satisfaction from your users, you might be better to rely on the research. After all, "everyone knew" that the Office 2007 interface was going to suck because it was so different and they'd have to relearn everything... until they tried it.
One of the things I've heard is that we can keep track of seven things at once -- so try to keep seven items or less that the user has to keep track of, and add depth if you need to. (If you have 20 or 30 config options, split them into categories.)
As a point of interest, that's mostly an urban legend in this context. See the magical number 7±2.
That's not to say that keeping your options organised into reasonably sized, coherent groups is a bad thing, of course. It's just that the number seven isn't quite as special in this context as a lot of developers seem to believe.
In the UK, we had the Gowers Review, a government review of the general framework for copyright and other types of IP, conducted a couple of years ago. Needless to say, Big Media were lobbying aggressively for, amongst other things, increases in copyright terms (and retroactively, too). Their efforts were supported by the likes of Sir Cliff Richard. And yet, if you read the submissions from members of the public (which you can do from the Review's web site if you like; just look it up on a search engine) the overwhelming majority of those stating a view on that question opposed the extension of the copyright term.
The Review came down pretty clearly on the side of the public on that one, or at least, on the side of the public who could be bothered to comment.
I believe the point our AC friend is missing is that on most social networking sites, it's you who supply the information about yourself. On Facebook, more often than not, it's someone else, as the site actively encourages everyone to do so.
The UK does not have ID Cards. Ok, the Government wants to introduce them but AFAIK, the bill to introduce them has not been passed by Parliament and received Royal Ascent( The Queen's Signature )
The first legal battle has already been lost. Now it's down to either electing someone to repeal the law before it really takes hold, or sufficient civil disobedience to undermine the law. Fortunately, both of those events are quite likely.
Have you also noticed that their entire modus operandi is basically to get friends to provide information about each other? And that if you've ever created an account there, even if you deactivate it, they still keep your personal information around indefinitely and allow people to continue doing things like tagging you in photos?
I don't know how anyone rational can view services like Facebook as not being a serious threat to privacy.
Of course, I'm about as likely to get sympathy for that view on Slashdot as I am when I say I think Google is the greatest threat to privacy in the history of humanity. That doesn't make either statement any less true, but there you go.
Slashdot Mirror
I think your basic problem is that a lot of us have been doing this stuff for a living for years too, yet you seem to be the only one who's ever heard of this.
And yes, the US arm of my employer has accountants who deal with R&D tax provisions. And no, we don't track every line of code as "new" or "refactored".
Those who go against comments (me included) are not against documentation of the code. We are against documentation that may easily lose sync with the code, where better forms of documentation exist.
And what if commenting is the best form of documentation?
No offence, but if you often found your comments and code got out of sync, you were probably writing the wrong kind of comments. Good comments don't just repeat what the code does. They explain why and perhaps how it does it. They warn of subtleties not immediately obvious from the code (because sometimes, the appropriate algorithms or data structures just aren't obvious to someone unfamiliar with the code). They refer to other documentation with more detailed background information.
In short, they tell you the stuff the code can't, because sometimes code is too low level to represent the conceptual understanding of the programmer who wrote it. It's pretty hard for that sort of thing to get out of sync with the code without it being pretty darn obvious.
What the #!$% are you talking about?!
Also, no one who does understand these issues could, with a straight face, say that the law is clear in this area. I don't know about other jurisdictions, but at least in the US it is not at all clear.
Indeed. Unfortunately, WNight's original post that I criticised was rather more black and white than that. That was the only point I was making.
But what would be Perl suicide? Let yourself be trampled by camels?
<obligatory> There's more than one way to do it! </obligatory>
I believe the vast majority of computer users, even the savvy ones, don't understand this at all.
That may be true, but in case that was intended as a criticism of my judgement and/or level of knowledge, for the record I both work in the software business and have been actively involved in a recent government review of copyright in the UK, amongst other relevant experience. A major part of that review involved comparison with current policy in various other countries, incidentally.
Unfortunately, the majority of US courts haven't yet realized the "duress" part of your argument, even though it naturally follows when software is sold, not licensed. As a result, the majority opinion in the US is that if you agree to an EULA, it becomes binding upon you. The courts so far have viewed clicking the "I Agree" button as being voluntary, instead of as being under duress, which it actually is.
With respect, until the people decide that you are a higher legal authority than the statute books and the courts, the above is just your opinion, and like the other guys arguing with me, your opinion does not outrank the law.
I considered not replying to your post, since you're doing exactly the same as the other guy and attempting proof by intimidation. You also seem to be attacking me for a position you have invented and then assumed I hold, despite my post not even hinting at any position on this particular subject. However, if you do care what the law actually says and where it is untested, even obvious places like the "EULA" entry on Wikipedia or a Google search for "eula validity case law" immediately turn up numerous sources that show the picture isn't clear.
By way of summary, your "if it looks like a sale then it's a sale and you can't change it later" argument ignores several potentially relevant factors, such as copyright law that might apply at the time of installation, whether the existence of any EULA has been disclosed prior to the sale, and whether such a user has indicated acceptance of such an agreement during the installation process. You have a strange idea of what the average guy in the street thinks, too, I suggest, but since you've given no evidence whatsoever to support your claim it's hard to dispute it.
As for software being a special case, for a start, it has special provisions in several EU laws, which immediately makes it likely that every country in the EU has or will have corresponding special treatments. This is noted, among other places, in the UK government's consultation document to follow up the Gowers review, which was just published.
Please don't write posts like this if you're not going to back them up with reliable sources. Your personal views on the validity of EULAs in whatever jurisdiction you are in don't really count for much if the courts don't agree with you, and in any case are unlikely to be applicable universally.
I was reading through your post and nodding, but then I realised that I just can't agree with your underlying argument. I think this is the part of your post that captures the essence of what I mean:
You know, there was a time when formal methods were taught, when programmers were expected to know how to properly allocate and release memory. When things like calculating the size of the buffer, applying basic math(!) and testing your own code were considered just a part of the programmer's job. Now we're hearing people blame languages for the faults of the programmer.
While this is all true, the problem with this argument is that it fails to account for no-one being perfect. If a certain type of error is known to have occurred a non-zero number of times, and other things being equal the models in a certain programming language make that type of error impossible, then that programming language is unambiguously safer than one that doesn't prevent the error. It might only prevent it once in a blue moon when a really great programmer is using it, and probably a few more times when someone who thinks they're a really great programmer is using it, but it still prevents errors. Pride comes before a fall, and choosing a programming language that it unnecessarily vulnerable to certain classes of programmer error because you believe you're too good to ever make them is like tying your own shoelaces together before running a marathon.
But consider this: the most reliable operating systems to date were built on C (UNIX) and assembly (MVS). If a bunch of old farts (well, perhaps they were young then...) can crank out correct, reliable, fast code without an IDE and a bunch of GUI tools, clearly the language is not to blame.
And if a bunch of old farts had cranked out correct, reliable, fast code in that way, I'd be impressed. Since this has almost never been achieved in the entire history of software development, however, this doesn't tell us much. These are, after all, the same old farts who brought us joys like the gets library function in C. (If you're Donald Knuth, I'll acknowledge that you're an exception on the correct, reliable, fast count, but we really need to talk about usability.)
Your answer to these ailments appears to work exclusively on a "cure" basis: use better processes so more people look at things, use better tools to pick up errors, etc. But prevention is better than cure. If you're using a programming language where the problem simply can't happen, you know the reviews and tools won't miss anything.
The old adage still applies: a poor workman blames his tools.
Perhaps. But a good workman knows his tools, and chooses the right one for the job.
While there certainly is an ethical issue at work here, the problem with buffer overflows can usually be avoided through purely technical means. In the context of a TCP/IP stack, I question whether it's really necessary to resort to known error-prone implementation technologies. We're not talking about an OS kernel or some ludicrously high performance mathematical algorithm, and any performance penalties associated with using a slightly safer language would surely be negligible.
(Incidentally, I work on high performance maths software, typically with fairly low level languages. We do use reviews and automated tools, and they tell me I don't personally make the kind of memory management error you're criticising, so I have no axe to grind here nor any particular bias towards high level languages when they're not appropriate.)
I've grumbled many times about this concentration on Java, and the resultant lack of detailed understanding about programing, but each time I did so at my university I was disregarded, and someone always trotted out that age old nonsense "not re-inventing the wheel". I mean, sure, I see the point, but surely you should have a basic idea of how wheels are made?
Amen.
When I was younger, my father wouldn't let me have an electronic calculator until I proved to him that I could do long division and I knew my times tables. He wouldn't let me have a scientific calculator until I could explain square roots, the basic trig functions, and the idea of logarithms.
Would I do these things by hand today, in a non-trivial context? Of course not, I have tools for that. But there was never any danger of using a tool I didn't really understand, or picking the wrong tool for the job as a result, and I am forever grateful to my father for making me invent the wheel the first time.
A bit older and hopefully a bit wiser myself, I see a lot of the same things in programming today. Junior developers come straight out of education and don't care about understanding pointers. They reckon they don't need to understand sorting algorithms, because they'll just use a sort function from a library. They don't need to understand data structures either, because again they have a whole toolbox full of them. In fact, they don't really want to understand what's going on under the hood of their program at all, because apparently (so they tell me) one day we'll have a sufficiently smart compiler and it will optimise away any unnecessary overheads they introduce. Presumably some uber-l337 hax0r is going to write that for them. ;-)
<sigh> And we wonder how a modern PC literally thousands of times faster than those of a decade ago can possibly take the same length of real time to do simple, everyday things, and how in an Internet-connected world where spyware and malware cost society billions every year we still have basic security flaws that let the script kiddies in the door. Won't it be ironic if the educational gaps left in a whole generation by modern universities catering to a cookie-cutter programming industry wind up being addressed by the veteran programmers in industry who needed to get stuff done properly? :-)
Initially, it was obvious that word processing and desktop publishing were two very different things, and never the twain shall meet. We'd all be a lot better off if this distinction had stayed, because the problem with word processors today is not that they're trying to be all things to all people, but that they're trying to do two different things at the same time.
Personally, I'd take your position even further. The tools we need today are not the same as the tools we needed in the '80s. Documents are not handled in the same ways, nor published via the same media.
I think there are at least three major areas of interest for a modern document preparation system.
Clearly the first of these will typically be used in combination with one or both of the others, but the tools and application interface required in each category are quite different (but sometimes overlapping).
On top of this, there is the fact that a document won't necessarily be published in paper form these days. Distribution in electronic formats such as PDF is widespread, and on-line collaboration in the writing and editing of a document may be as important in many business contexts as the finished article that gets signed off. Then there's web publishing: while the same content almost certainly won't be appropriate to use in both formal/printed documents and web pages unedited, providing a common interface so that a single application can target multiple media with professional quality output is likely to become increasingly important IMHO.
In other words, traditional word processors, DTP packages, typesetting systems and HTML editors are all dead; they just don't know it yet. Frankly, most software in these industries sucks badly, but no-one has been brave/foolish enough to attempt a comprehensive, professional standard replacement to bridge the gaps and make the others literally redundant.
I don't want to be a garbageman, but it wouldn't be realistic if everyone in society also chose not to be a garbageman. Are you saying that my only ethical choice is to be a garbageman?
Actually, that's not as far-fetched as you think. If no-one in society is willing to do some unpleasant work, but the work must be done, then yes, I think it's entirely ethical that everyone takes their turn and does their fair share of the work if they're able to.
In reality, different folks have different abilities and different preferences. In first world countries, we have evolved a system of economics such that this kind of situation is rare (though perhaps a similar situation applies to the ethics of people who are perfectly able to work but choose not to and to live off state benefits instead). However, in less developed societies, often you pull your weight or you become unwelcome. After all, why is your desire to avoid doing some unpleasant but necessary work more important than anyone else's?
Since you seem to think about these issues carefully, I will try to argue similarly objectively here.
Before a start, let me explicitly agree with you that DRM doesn't really serve anyone's interests. Technologically, it doesn't work, or at least not 100%, which is what it would need to do its job effectively against "serious casual" infringement or professional pirates. In terms of market forces, it makes the legitimate copy of a work inferior to what someone could rip illegally from an on-line source, which is obviously not an incentive to buy the real thing. In terms of PR, the whole idea of trying to control content someone has already paid for so that it may not be used in ways that are otherwise legal is an own goal for Big Media.
That said, I respectfully suggest that your argument about whether content would still be produced in a different environment is based too much on absolutes. The world is not a binary system, where either content is produced and shared or it is not. There are issues of both quality and quantity, and each lies on a continuous, open-ended scale. There is a further issue of distribution, which is to say how many people benefit from any given work.
It is certainly true that artists have always made art. In particular, it is certainly true that some artists working on commission made a substantial amount of art before copyright existed, and it is also certainly true that some artists make and give away art today. Heck, I've done both myself.
The question I would ask you is: if we took the pro-piracy arguments to their logical conclusion and effectively abolished copyright, do you really believe there would not be a reduction in the quality, quantity and/or distribution of works?
I personally find that very hard to believe. If producing and sharing good works was as inherent in human nature as you seem to be suggesting, then would all these volunteer producers not be giving the world such works already?
If so, then where are the really great films from privately funded, independent producers? Sure, people have mentioned Clerks, but that's one film in several decades of film production, and however good it is, I doubt most people have ever heard of it anyway. Hollywood alone produces several blockbusters a year that millions find entertaining enough to pay to see them, even if any given person might prefer something more artsy and less based on a big name actor, special effects or whatever.
Where are the free TV dramas that people prefer to The West Wing or 24 or Lost? The sci-fi shows that more people enjoyed than Battlestar Galactica or Stargate — surely a world full of geeks so keen to volunteer their time must have produced one such work? The documentaries that beat Planet Earth?
What about light family entertainment, say Dancing with the Stars? I choose this example because it's slightly ironic: most of the professional dancers don't get paid that much considering the commitment they have to make to the show, and instead make their money by getting private teaching and demonstration gigs as a result of the publicity. That sounds a lot like it ought to undermine the copyright argument, by showing that good artists can make their money through one-off performances, but without the copyright framework that paid for the show in the first place, how many of those artists could have afforded to take four months out of their calendars speculatively? Pretty much none of them. And even without that, DWTS reaches millions of people, while all those follow-up performances reach only a few thousand combined, so the TV show is meeting the goal of sharing art more widely.
To give some other examples, where is the freely distributed book that entertains millions of children as Harry Potter has? Where are all the free textbooks good enough to use in schools — surely places that would much prefer to use high quality, low cost alternatives given their ty
While everything you wrote there seems to be common sense, please remember that we are not currently talking about copyright extension. DRM is primarily about copyright enforcement, or at least a probably futile attempt at it. I am hardly a supporter of Big Media, but unless you think people are pirating content that would have run out of copyright before the extensions but now has not, rather than the latest songs and blockbuster movies of the past few years, I don't think your points are applicable to this particular debate.
I'm not coming out for or against piracy here, but when we have these discussions, we should at least try to look at things from a realistic perspective instead of dogmatic positions.
I believe you're missing the underlying ethical implication of the GPP. The point isn't that it's realistic for everyone to suddenly stop watching movies. The point is that for a behaviour to be ethical, it has to remain realistic if everyone in society did choose to act the same way. In this case, if everyone ripped content illegally and no-one paid for it, there would be very little content available for anyone. That means that the people who do act in that way today aren't just getting the content for free; they're actively taking advantage of everyone who does play by the rules for their own selfish benefit. The more people who choose to follow that path, the worse things get for everyone, and such a policy is unsustainable.
Here's the thing: copyright is a balance between the insanity of allowing ideas to be owned, and the insanity of few people creating art because we need to eat.
Here's the thing: it's nothing like that at all.
Copyright is primarily an economic tool. It provides an incentive for people to create and share new works.
Arguments like yours are put as if the alternative to copyright is a world where all the same works are created and shared freely, as if you can eat your cake and have it too. But the problem is, most of the time, you can't. It takes time, skill and often significant amounts of cash to make worthwhile works. If you don't provide a sufficient economic incentive for people to make that commitment ahead of time, the alternative is that you don't get most of the work at all.
So, reality check, please. The amount of work created and shared under the current incentive scheme, regardless of its flaws, is vastly greater than either the amount of work created and shared on a voluntary basis today, and than the amount of work any given member of society had access to under the old work-for-hire economics of yestercentury.
In this context, the idea of a temporary control over the distribution of a work (which isn't really ownership, of course) isn't insane at all. In fact, it's no more insane than actual ownership of real, physical property: it's a legal convention, which society by and large adheres to because on balance it's in society's interest for everyone to do so. Heck, the same is true of just about any law, for that matter, particularly any law related to economics. Copyright is no different and no more artificial.
Unfortunately, the content creators don't feel the need to honor the deal--they just want to own the ideas outright, forever and ever. I don't particularly blame them--everyone's always looking out for number 1--but the fact remains that they're violating it every time they ask for extensions.
It's not unreasonabe to wonder why one side should agree to a deal that the other side is violating.
That's just one big straw man. We're not talking about copyright extensions here, we're talking about DRM and the ethics of piracy. And right now, give or take the current imbalance between fair use doctrine and technological protections (which is recent and mainly confined to the US), the use of DRM doesn't inherently break any part of the deal and piracy clearly does.
For the avoidance of doubt, I don't like DRM. I think it sucks for everyone involved, and I'm not at all sorry to see the back of it. I've been arguing for some time that it was dead and just didn't realise it yet, but also that things had to get bad enough for significant numbers of people to get stung and become aware of the issue before things would start to improve. But using DRM isn't in itself a violation of the basic principle of copyright.
The key is that it has nothing to do with the content. A boycott is generally useful for when you don't like what someone is saying, or even how they're saying it. Copyright is a weird beast that really doesn't fall into either of these areas.
I'm sorry, but I don't see how your concluding paragraph even makes sense, and I don't see how any possible interpretation I can think of is necessarily true.
Even if the whole business isn't "respectable" by your standards, you obviously respect their work enough to watch it. To never pay is to vote for a world where that work is never produced.
It's a shame my mod points just expired, or you'd have had one.
It's about time a few people around here realised the hypocrisy of advocating piracy as a counter-strategy to DRM. If you don't like the way the material is offered, fine, vote with your wallet and tell people why. That's your right. But watching the films and listening to the music anyway just says you want the stuff but aren't willing to pay for it like everyone else.
It's funny, I went to Amazon the other day to see what was available for DRM-free download. Do you know what the answer was?
Nothing. For some strange reason, the service is only available to those in the US. The rest of us are still stuck in 2000 or something.
Still, at least the light bulb is starting to glow. Next, you'll be telling me I can buy legal DVDs that don't make me sit through several minutes of tedious anti-piracy drivel that doesn't even apply in my jurisdiction, just like all the illegal ones I could have bought more cheaply instead...
May I ask what you have against Nielsen? Aside from his rampant self-promotion in recent years, which ironically has reduced the value of his own web site according to his own principles, much of his real content has always struck me as quite useful and based on objective evidence.
The problem is that what users want and what they need may be two very different things. To give a simple example, a lot of users still think they work faster with the keyboard than the mouse in a typical office application like a word processor or spreadsheet, despite the fact that most of them are measurably wrong when observed objectively.
As a sales pitch, giving users what they want (i.e., what they think they need) may be smarter than giving them what you know from evidence that they actually need. Then again, sometimes that's just a short-term illusion. If you want to make working software and get long term satisfaction from your users, you might be better to rely on the research. After all, "everyone knew" that the Office 2007 interface was going to suck because it was so different and they'd have to relearn everything... until they tried it.
One of the things I've heard is that we can keep track of seven things at once -- so try to keep seven items or less that the user has to keep track of, and add depth if you need to. (If you have 20 or 30 config options, split them into categories.)
As a point of interest, that's mostly an urban legend in this context. See the magical number 7±2.
That's not to say that keeping your options organised into reasonably sized, coherent groups is a bad thing, of course. It's just that the number seven isn't quite as special in this context as a lot of developers seem to believe.
Actually, I suspect you're wrong on that.
In the UK, we had the Gowers Review, a government review of the general framework for copyright and other types of IP, conducted a couple of years ago. Needless to say, Big Media were lobbying aggressively for, amongst other things, increases in copyright terms (and retroactively, too). Their efforts were supported by the likes of Sir Cliff Richard. And yet, if you read the submissions from members of the public (which you can do from the Review's web site if you like; just look it up on a search engine) the overwhelming majority of those stating a view on that question opposed the extension of the copyright term.
The Review came down pretty clearly on the side of the public on that one, or at least, on the side of the public who could be bothered to comment.
I believe the point our AC friend is missing is that on most social networking sites, it's you who supply the information about yourself. On Facebook, more often than not, it's someone else, as the site actively encourages everyone to do so.
The UK does not have ID Cards. Ok, the Government wants to introduce them but AFAIK, the bill to introduce them has not been passed by Parliament and received Royal Ascent( The Queen's Signature )
Unfortunately, you are mistaken. The Identity Cards Act received royal assent, becoming law, on 30 March 2006.
The first legal battle has already been lost. Now it's down to either electing someone to repeal the law before it really takes hold, or sufficient civil disobedience to undermine the law. Fortunately, both of those events are quite likely.
Wow, you're really kind to Facebook.
Have you also noticed that their entire modus operandi is basically to get friends to provide information about each other? And that if you've ever created an account there, even if you deactivate it, they still keep your personal information around indefinitely and allow people to continue doing things like tagging you in photos?
I don't know how anyone rational can view services like Facebook as not being a serious threat to privacy.
Of course, I'm about as likely to get sympathy for that view on Slashdot as I am when I say I think Google is the greatest threat to privacy in the history of humanity. That doesn't make either statement any less true, but there you go.