Yep, I'm holding off HD-DVD and Blu-ray for the same reason (amongst other, more political ones). I've only got a cheapo DVD player, but my TV is a nice Loewe box that upscales very well (though it has only 720p resolution — no-one was selling 1080any for home TVs at that stage). The first DVD I played on it was Revenge of the Sith, and I was pretty much blown away by the appearance of the opening battle scenes. I've seen some HD demos, and short of watching them side-by-side, I would be hard-pressed to spot the difference. It only really tells in things like crowd scenes or wide-view nature shots, where there isn't enough detail in the SD input for upscaling to look sharp.
I _greatly_ prefer doing desktop apps. Great things about desktop apps:
No mucking around with messy CSS and Javascript trying to get trivial effects with positioning or controls.
Easy to use: you can design your UI around the needs of your users and what the usability studies show, not artificial limitations imposed by browser not-quite-standards and making everything a glorified dialog box.
Reliable deployment: you have complete control of everything.
Cross-platform support, if you are careful, comes for free.
Security: no single point of failure, less data stored remotely where it requires additional protocols to access, providing extra opportunities for vulnerabilities to occur.
Perhaps it has to do with familiarity, but from my perspective, doing web applications (especially by the time you deal with getting awkward UIs to work, browser incompatibilities, communications unreliability, security overheads and users constantly clicking "back" or "close" buttons you can't control) is a real pain.
</Devil's advocate>
However, I will say that many people I work with do not share my enthusiasm for web apps. There is a huge technology stack to learn when you need to deal with the chain of technologies involved from the server to the desktop. All the quirks of different browsers take some getting used to, and it requires a different mindset. It also requires you hold the belief that a website can be an application, which, amazingly, many still do not have.
I'm not sure that's actually that big a downside. I wanted to create some simple database-backed tools for a club I help to run a few years ago, so I sat down and learned CGI, Apache configuration, MySQL configuration and PHP. Coming from a general programming/CS background, and with the benefit of some decent documentation available on the web, none of these things took me more than half a day to get a decent working knowledge and identify the common problem areas in terms of performance, security, etc.
I had been avoiding the area of web programming (rather than simple HTML+CSS web design) for many years, assuming that it probably required a lot of different skills to desktop development and it would take a long time to learn all the relevant tools. In practice, this (as with most areas of software development, IME) turned out to be fear of the unknown rather than fear of what's actually there when you look. CGI is just a protocol for taking text input, following a few simple rules, and sending back some text output. PHP is just another scripting language like Perl or Python, it just happens that this one is typically embedded within HTML files and executed by a web server rather than run as a standalone script. Connecting to MySQL is just learning another, rather small, library of function calls that are built into PHP anyway. AJAX is just retrieving some data from a source using a protocol, and again, the libraries to do it are readily available. There is no magic, and none of this stuff is rocket science if you have a general programming background.
With all that said, there are still some things which are more suitably done as desktop applications. I think as things advance that list gets shorter and shorter.
I would actually phrase that one the other way around: most things are better done as desktop apps, and always will be, because the fundamental limitations of web applications (NB: not distributed applications generally) simply don't match up to what most categories of application need. Almost all web-based applications are just glorified database front-ends where the client-server situation is a central part of the software architecture anyway and much of the functionality consists of simple form-filling and report-generating UI. Those web apps that aren't just DB front-ends typically don't have any compelling technical reason to run in a browser rather than as a standalone application anyway, it's just that writing them that way is sometimes the least inconvenient way to achieve client-server communications because all the other protocols suck more.
I suppose if you're referring to Java development, or some other technology, then I can't really form an opinion as I don't have much experience. I can only speak to my experience from C++ (Win32 API and MFC) and Windows Forms (.NET) development, and I find it a headache compared to web development.
In fairness, while I can understand your experience (I've done my share of development using those tools, too), it is not a characteristic of desktop application development, merely of Microsoft being **** at software architecture. There should be absolutely no need to do anything during installation, other than (a) copy a few files into a suitable location, and (b) possibly call a few system APIs to register the application in whatever ways make sense, if this needs to be done before the application itself is run for some reason. Neither doing these things, nor undoing them again during an uninstall, requires some massive, complex installer system. Problems like DLL hell and WinSxS and registry hacking are entirely artificial barriers created by people who tried to be too clever, and basically don't exist anywhere except for Microsoft world.
Do you have the right OS? Right version? The right drivers? Is your antivirus interfering? Is your Registry befuddled?
It's funny, I've been writing software for decades, much of it "serious" desktop applications, and nothing I've written has ever broken because of any of the above. You'd almost think this was just an urban legend that had caught on with management/consultants, which can be addressed simply by writing desktop software that doesn't suck, wouldn't you?
But you're right: as long as it has caught on with them, the rest of us are doomed until we convince them of the error of their ways. This is going to be particularly tricky in this case, because obviously there are times when web-based applications generally do work well, particularly for a lot of the simple, database-type applications that many businesses rely on and managers often see.
Anonymous Cowards in Slashdot have been the single largest source of valuable information and dialogue, in the single largest technology forum (Slashdot) over a large period of time.
Have they? Not IME.
I'm having a bit of a crisis of conscience at the moment, because I find my long-held views on various subjects such as privacy and free speech are coming into conflict.
On the one hand, I have always felt that anonymity on the Internet was over-rated. In real life, most of the theoretical advantages — particularly in the areas of political free speech and whistle blowing — don't add up to much in practice, because the authorities can often track down the author of a comment if they are willing to try hard enough. On the other hand, we see widespread examples of pseudo-anonymity being abused every day: spammers, phishing e-mails, breaking privacy/defamation/data protection laws causing anything from personal distress to huge financial losses, even first-posters and trolls on Slashdot.
On the other hand, as governments and surveillance technology improve, I am becoming more and more aware of the need for certain absolute legal safeguards over an individual's right to reasonable privacy. Here in the UK, we have no such laws, and at the same time, we now have government systematically data-mining its people under the pretence of anti-terrorism, identity theft as one of the fastest rising (and nastiest) crimes there is, and so on. One of the conclusions I reached some time ago is that it is not the collection of individual data points that is the insidious thing, but rather the mass archival and ability to data-mine all such points. It is the difference between someone in the street seeing me walk past, and government-owned CCTV cameras following my every step. It is the difference between posting a comment in a forum where it will live for a few days, and someone archiving every post to Usenet I ever made, without my knowledge or consent. (Yes, it's now relatively well-known that places like Google do this, but it wasn't when some of us first started posting there, and the legality of doing so is still questionable.)
The most effective counter to these technologies, in the absence of internationally recognised legal safeguards, is the use of pseudonyms, such as that I'm now posting under. I guess I'm a funny character on the 'net. Sometimes I post under my real name, sometimes I use an alias. Mostly I post serious content — helping people out on a tech forum, sharing knowledge of local services where I live on Usenet, that kind of thing — and sometimes I post things purely aiming for the "Funny points". Occasionally, I admit, I even give in to the urge to troll someone who obviously takes themselves too seriously.
On forums like Slashdot, I tend to use an alias, even though nearly all of my comments are intended to be constructive (and, reassuringly, the mods agree with this). It sometimes allows me to use real-life examples of things without causing any damage/offence to the people involved. I would stand by pretty much everything I write here even if it had my real name attached to it, though I would sometimes feel obliged to use different examples to protect others.
I do worry about the future consequences of having a large Internet footprint, though. A few days ago, after a brief trial period, I cancelled my Facebook account. I joined because a lot of my friends had signed up and were posting interesting photo albums there, but soon discovered that Facebook's whole purpose is to get everyone who knows you to spy on you and contribute unnecessary personal information about you for public (or at least Facebook's) consumption. I have stopped posting on another social networking site I was trying for similar reasons, too.
So what is my proposed solution to all this? The short answer is: I don't have one, and I don't think anyone else does, and I don't think anyone else can until the int
The imaginary problems we've dreamed up for entertainment are only there because they tend to touch raw human emotions and are grasp ones attention much more effectively, I hope we don't always have to live in societal "fear" of our oddly 1984-ish dystopian realm.
You think someone receiving death threats, and consequently cancelling speaking engagements and their blogging activities, is an "imaginary problem"?
Yes, the problem is sometimes overhyped. But that doesn't mean it's not really there and people aren't really being damaged by it. The world is not drawn in black and white.
Wow. Either I really touched a nerve there, or you're reading more into my post than I actually said.
And please tell me when should someone be deemed "grown up enough?"
I can't give you an absolute, universal answer to a question like that. I doubt anyone could. That's why being a parent is hard.
It's fine that you don't think the popular FPS where you can kill human types are good but please don't presume to know what is good for the rest of the people who play games or for their kids.
Well, for one thing, I didn't, I simply said where I'd probably draw the line if I had kids old enough for this to matter today.
However, since you raise it, there is a very legitimate concern that mass-market violent games are changing the nature of kids to make them more violent than they used to be. This isn't my personal opinion, it's what the research says. As I said, I'm not a fan of censorship of things like computer games and movies as a general principle, but the simple fact is that for those too young/irresponsible to deal with them, we are probably better off if limits are set, and thus we have TV watershed times, film certificates and so on.
Glamourize? Did you even play GTA? You can go around and kill every soul in the street, but it isn't required.
Sure. But that's still why most people buy the game.
Your argument is like saying they put those "Parental advisory: explicit lyrics" stickers on CDs to help parents avoid their children hearing words they're too young to hear. Maybe that's true for five parents somewhere in the world, but it's still really there to increase the appeal of the CD to younger teenagers who see it as a badge of honour.
I suspect that most people will think DRM is whatever their techie friends tell them it is.
And in this case, far more than in the case of DVD, early adopters/techie consumers will have been stung by things like buying a very expensive television with HD resolution and later finding they can't watch either of the new formats on that TV because it doesn't have an HDCP connection. The geeks are also wise now to the fact that disabling technologies are a PITA, since they've sat through numerous tedious copyright notices or even trailers that can't be skipped while waiting for DVDs they've paid for to start up. The idea that their system can be shut down on a whim by the same Big Media groups who imposed that sort of rubbish on us last time is not likely to sit well with them, and they are unlikely to speak well of it to friends.
Although, having said all of that, DRM is starting to become a "dirty word" to the general public, too. On the BBC News web site, in a poll on an article about DRM, an overwhelming majority of respondents (something like 90%) said there were too many restrictions on digital content. Now, sure, that isn't a proper statistical study, but then again, it's also a survey on one of the most popular web sites in the UK, with an audience drawn from the general public rather than geeks. Combine that with the music industry finally starting to realise its mistake, and the issue gets a much higher profile than it used to, even with non-geeks.
I suspect it's a matter of degrees of realism. There is a big difference between playing Doom, where you're shooting at bad guys who are fireball-throwing aliens, and playing recent GTA-style games that glamorise killing civilians in a realistic setting.
I don't like censorship as a general principle, but I have no problem with restricting what people are exposed to until they're grown up enough to understand what is real and what is pretend. This is probably where I would draw my line, if I had kids old enough for it to matter.
For what it's worth, I don't think the best games tend to be the photorealistic people-maiming types anyway. They can be entertaining for a while and have pretty pictures, but they tend to lack the depth of things like puzzle games, RTS or RPG titles. The only time they really have long-term value is when played in a co-operative environment with other real humans, and that changes the atmosphere fundamentally anyway.
I'm not saying OSS participation can't get you work. Obviously it could, for example in the circumstances you suggest. I'm just challenging the rather dramatic statements in the post I originally I replied to (e.g., "Open source is the future") that seem to be saying that the traditional ways of getting highly-paid work in software development will just disappear in favour of those with reputations for contributing to OSS. I have seen no evidence that this is the case nor likely to be so any time soon, and I can't imagine why we should expect it to be.
There were dual G4's and quad G5's and now 8-way Core Xeon and every time they adjusted the software to suit and made it easy for third party developers to do the same.
With due respect, I think you are underestimating the difficulty in adapting software to run in parallel. Nothing Apple does is going to magically convert intricate mathematical algorithms to parallel form. Doing that mechanically is a notoriously difficult problem, and the solutions are frequently based around the underlying design in the specific application domain.
Curiously, quite a lot of the people criticising the programme (including the politicians from several parties in the UK) haven't actually seen it.
As I mentioned in another post, it was inevitable that the documentary was going to come in for some strong criticism, since those it criticises itself are pretty much forced to defend themselves or lose any credibility. Moreover, it's very likely that such criticism of the documentary is justified some of the time: they've certainly been caught presenting dubious graphics and relying on out-of-date information in places.
On the other hand, I have read many of the "second round" comments from both the programme's critics and its makers, and I still have not seen even slightly convincing defences to the attacks the programme made on the economic and political nature of the "scientific debate".
Al Gore's own comments, defending the 800 year lag issues in an interview after the documentary was shown, were far from convincing. The arguments seem to have gone something like this:
An Inconvenient Truth: Look, temperature and CO2 follow the same pattern in this graph, so the CO2 is responsible for the temperature rise!
The inconvenient documentary: Erm... the CO2 changes lag the temperature changes by a few centuries. Oh, and correlation does not imply causation.
Gore's follow-up interview: Well, it's a feedback loop, then!
Critics: So if the feedback effect is significant, why has the CO2 level consistently followed the temperature both up and down, regardless of how high or low each went, with about the same time lag?
To be continued...
Personally, I'm no longer willing to take either side of this debate at their word. The presentation by both groups is so unscientific that it's impossible for me to know who to trust. I am cautious that the climate change proponents may be correct, in which case we should act to protect ourselves. On the other hand, I am deeply suspicious of the whole climate change lobby now, since it has reached the point where it is (a) a high-profile political issue, and (b) a profitable position to take regardless of the scientific merit. It's not like people haven't known about and campaigned on this issue for years, so how come in the past year or two it's suddenly become so much more urgent?
I tried RSS back when it was new. I gave up within 48 hours, because it simply isn't structured enough to track busy sites like Slashdot efficiently. I can just as easily glance at half a dozen home pages (if that) when I'm browsing, each of them set to display the stories I actually care about.
It was inevitable that the programme was going to be challenged. Its entire purpose was to argue that the prevailing scientific consensus was not based on good science and the people backing it were often subject to political influences. Of course the scientists making those claims are going to say it's not true.
It was also a pretty safe bet that they'd make mistakes of their own, such as the acknowledged flaw with the graphics at one point.
However, I have seen only laughable attempts to discredit most of the really damaging claims made by the program: that the "2,500 scientists" mostly aren't, that even people whose names are given on the IPCC reports don't necessarily agree with the conclusions, that political factors are influential in who gets research funding and therefore scientists have a vested interest in drawing the "right" conclusions, that a lot of the high-profile arguments given in An Inconvenient Truth are based on bad statistics or draw conclusions that simply aren't supported by the data given, that the "funded by oil" argument about the critics is simply not justified by the numbers (there is way, way more money in backing the "scientific consensus" view), that the economies of the western nations now strongly supporting the climate change arguments can use this as a very effective tool to keep less developed nations from advancing to the point of becoming economically competitive, and so on.
Personally, as a trained scientist but not an expert in this field, I'm not sure who to believe, but I'm pretty sure a lot of the current publicity is hype. Otherwise, it's remarkable that in the past year or two we've noticed that we're faced with imminent disaster (what, again?), while the issue had certainly been known about but hadn't gained such political momentum for many years before that. And I still haven't seen anyone who can explain why we're headed for disaster within decades now due to a change of just a few degrees in temperature, when whatever other data we might have, we can see that the temperatures in Europe have been both much higher and much lower than they are now within the past few centuries.
I hope you're not talking about the "2,500 scientists" supporting the IPCC research when you talk about "all those scientists around the globe, that practice science everyday". That would be unfortunate, given that one of the things exposed by the documentary mentioned was the fact that most of the 2,500 contributors aren't scientists at all, and even those who are listed as contributing to the IPCC reports don't necessarily agree with them (one going as far as to threaten legal action to get his name removed from the list).
The irony, of course, is that in this case, those opposing the current sacred cow of politics may actually be right. I wonder how many people who consider the IPCC to be paragons of the scientific community have seen "an inconvenient documentary"?
For those who haven't, it's well worth watching if you're interested. The claims by former members of the IPCC panel are a fascinating insight into how unscientific modern science can become.
Unfortunately, what I need in this case is focus-follows-eyes. If I remembered to move the mouse to the other screen, I'd probably remember to click there, too.:-)
I actually had your post down as interesting rather than funny, but in any case, I doubt it will ever happen.
As anyone involved with typography and graphic design can tell you, the length of text lines that humans can read comfortably is pretty short. Guidelines vary, some based around numbers of alphabets set at a typical reading size, some more formally expressed in terms of angles through which the eyes move. The end results are fairly consistent, though: on a modern 19" monitor, with a full-screen window open, at a typical resolution of say 1280x960, and with the user sitting at a typical distance from the screen, the text is already far too wide for most people to read it optimally.
Now, programmers perhaps suffer less from this than those working with ordinary text documents, because most programming languages use some form of indentation to represent things like block structure. Thus the lines within any given block -- those which the programmer will most likely want to read over in sequence -- tend to be shorter. Even so, it's also undesirable to nest too deeply in most programming languages, which limits the effect of this style. So, while old guidelines about 80 character line lengths are rare these days, restricting individual lines to 80 characters between their first and last visible text probably isn't a bad idea.
In other words, I don't think most programmers will ever write lines much longer than they do today, no matter how big monitors get. It will simply be uncomfortable to read them, and therefore they will adopt a different style where lines are broken at natural places, just as mathematicians have long done when typesetting equations.
And yes, this does all have implications for window managers, particularly as widescreen monitors seem to be becoming more popular on both desktops and laptops. I'm slightly surprised that the mainstream hasn't yet given up on the idea of maximising a window to the full screen, and provided some concept of zones, so you can lock a window to fill exactly the left or right half of your monitor, say. Such a viewable area is far more useful on the sort of physical sizes and resolutions that are seen for high-end screens today, for everything from web browsing to editing documents, and even for code on the wider screens.
I'm sorry, but I think you're overestimating the relevance of the OSS community.
To give an obvious example, my employer is currently recruiting. The senior technical guys doing the interviews/selection know plenty about Linux and GCC, since we use them all the time. However, I doubt they've heard of anyone in the OSS community apart from maybe Linus and RMS. IME software development is a small world, and unless you're looking for your first or second job, it's far more likely that someone at a prospective employer will have worked with you before or know someone who did than that they will have read the credits of some piece of OSS you contributed to, remembered that your name was 17th on the list, and actively pursued you.
This isn't to knock the value of contributing to OSS. Doing so can help you learn a lot, demonstrates a willingness to volunteer your time to something you think is worthwhile, and often shows that you can get things done as part of a large, distributed team. These are all good news for a prospective employer, so go ahead and put the work on your CV. Just don't have any illusions about headhunters coming knocking at your door because you once fixed a bug in $OBSCURE_OSS_TOOL. It just isn't going to happen, except for a very lucky few.
Unless you are actually needing to see more things at the same time, extra monitors are a waste of desk space and electricity.
But what about those of us whose work does involve seeing more things at the same time?
At work, a lot of us have been picking up older screens to use as second monitors over the past year or so. This was mostly luck, rather than a management decision: someone noticed that the standard-issue graphics cards in one generation of PCs we had included two output ports, and tried it out with an old 17" CRT that was otherwise sitting idle.
Among other times this is useful for us in our everyday work:
code vs. on-line help
debugger vs. running program
documentation tool vs. whatever is being documented (code, UI, etc.)
diff tools (see full-width code lines side by side, one on each screen).
I could list many more, but those are fairly typical examples of things we do a lot during the course of our development jobs. It's not hard to imagine applications either: anything involving applications with lots of toolbars and such (graphics, CAD) must be a good candidate.
I don't have any quantitative data, but having made the switch myself a few months ago, I definitely spend a lot less time messing around changing windows and arranging desktops than I used to. The only annoyance is that I sometimes switch to look at the other screen without making the application there active, and then start typing.:-/
OK, this is from a different context, but I'm talking about a non-profit organisation of which I was elected president for two years, leading a committee of 40 or so volunteers organising things for thousands of people.
One of the harsh realities you discover when you take on such a role is that sometimes leadership and executive decision-making have a place, but at the same time, most people contributing their time and/or resources to your project aren't the leader and still want to have their views taken into consideration.
The bottom line is that if people are volunteering for an effort you lead, you have nothing on them but the support you inspire and any vested interest they have in supporting/influencing your project. If they do not feel sufficiently involved, they will leave.
On the other hand, if you let them remain involved but they are incompetent (or otherwise unwelcome), they may actually be damaging to your project. There comes a point where someone's contribution is a net loss, and you have to ask them (or, if necessary, force them) to step down.
There really isn't much of a middle-ground by default, and it's very hard to create one. If you want their input you have little choice but to permit their actions and respect their opinions to some extent, even if you do not agree with them all the time. The best I could ever do was try to keep people focused on the areas where their main interests lay, which at least tended to keep them motivated, happy/courteous, and at least somewhat useful.
FWIW, I usually found that being positive with people about what they did well worked better for keeping that focus than being critical of what people did badly. Put another way, IME you're asking the wrong question, or at least looking for the wrong answer. But this really varies from person to person and your mileage most certainly will vary.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, I'm holding off HD-DVD and Blu-ray for the same reason (amongst other, more political ones). I've only got a cheapo DVD player, but my TV is a nice Loewe box that upscales very well (though it has only 720p resolution — no-one was selling 1080any for home TVs at that stage). The first DVD I played on it was Revenge of the Sith, and I was pretty much blown away by the appearance of the opening battle scenes. I've seen some HD demos, and short of watching them side-by-side, I would be hard-pressed to spot the difference. It only really tells in things like crowd scenes or wide-view nature shots, where there isn't enough detail in the SD input for upscaling to look sharp.
<Devil's advocate>
I _greatly_ prefer doing desktop apps. Great things about desktop apps:
Perhaps it has to do with familiarity, but from my perspective, doing web applications (especially by the time you deal with getting awkward UIs to work, browser incompatibilities, communications unreliability, security overheads and users constantly clicking "back" or "close" buttons you can't control) is a real pain.
</Devil's advocate>
I'm not sure that's actually that big a downside. I wanted to create some simple database-backed tools for a club I help to run a few years ago, so I sat down and learned CGI, Apache configuration, MySQL configuration and PHP. Coming from a general programming/CS background, and with the benefit of some decent documentation available on the web, none of these things took me more than half a day to get a decent working knowledge and identify the common problem areas in terms of performance, security, etc.
I had been avoiding the area of web programming (rather than simple HTML+CSS web design) for many years, assuming that it probably required a lot of different skills to desktop development and it would take a long time to learn all the relevant tools. In practice, this (as with most areas of software development, IME) turned out to be fear of the unknown rather than fear of what's actually there when you look. CGI is just a protocol for taking text input, following a few simple rules, and sending back some text output. PHP is just another scripting language like Perl or Python, it just happens that this one is typically embedded within HTML files and executed by a web server rather than run as a standalone script. Connecting to MySQL is just learning another, rather small, library of function calls that are built into PHP anyway. AJAX is just retrieving some data from a source using a protocol, and again, the libraries to do it are readily available. There is no magic, and none of this stuff is rocket science if you have a general programming background.
I would actually phrase that one the other way around: most things are better done as desktop apps, and always will be, because the fundamental limitations of web applications (NB: not distributed applications generally) simply don't match up to what most categories of application need. Almost all web-based applications are just glorified database front-ends where the client-server situation is a central part of the software architecture anyway and much of the functionality consists of simple form-filling and report-generating UI. Those web apps that aren't just DB front-ends typically don't have any compelling technical reason to run in a browser rather than as a standalone application anyway, it's just that writing them that way is sometimes the least inconvenient way to achieve client-server communications because all the other protocols suck more.
In fairness, while I can understand your experience (I've done my share of development using those tools, too), it is not a characteristic of desktop application development, merely of Microsoft being **** at software architecture. There should be absolutely no need to do anything during installation, other than (a) copy a few files into a suitable location, and (b) possibly call a few system APIs to register the application in whatever ways make sense, if this needs to be done before the application itself is run for some reason. Neither doing these things, nor undoing them again during an uninstall, requires some massive, complex installer system. Problems like DLL hell and WinSxS and registry hacking are entirely artificial barriers created by people who tried to be too clever, and basically don't exist anywhere except for Microsoft world.
And then it gets edited out for the final version anyway, to be replaced by computer-generated special effects! :-)
It's funny, I've been writing software for decades, much of it "serious" desktop applications, and nothing I've written has ever broken because of any of the above. You'd almost think this was just an urban legend that had caught on with management/consultants, which can be addressed simply by writing desktop software that doesn't suck, wouldn't you?
But you're right: as long as it has caught on with them, the rest of us are doomed until we convince them of the error of their ways. This is going to be particularly tricky in this case, because obviously there are times when web-based applications generally do work well, particularly for a lot of the simple, database-type applications that many businesses rely on and managers often see.
Have they? Not IME.
I'm having a bit of a crisis of conscience at the moment, because I find my long-held views on various subjects such as privacy and free speech are coming into conflict.
On the one hand, I have always felt that anonymity on the Internet was over-rated. In real life, most of the theoretical advantages — particularly in the areas of political free speech and whistle blowing — don't add up to much in practice, because the authorities can often track down the author of a comment if they are willing to try hard enough. On the other hand, we see widespread examples of pseudo-anonymity being abused every day: spammers, phishing e-mails, breaking privacy/defamation/data protection laws causing anything from personal distress to huge financial losses, even first-posters and trolls on Slashdot.
On the other hand, as governments and surveillance technology improve, I am becoming more and more aware of the need for certain absolute legal safeguards over an individual's right to reasonable privacy. Here in the UK, we have no such laws, and at the same time, we now have government systematically data-mining its people under the pretence of anti-terrorism, identity theft as one of the fastest rising (and nastiest) crimes there is, and so on. One of the conclusions I reached some time ago is that it is not the collection of individual data points that is the insidious thing, but rather the mass archival and ability to data-mine all such points. It is the difference between someone in the street seeing me walk past, and government-owned CCTV cameras following my every step. It is the difference between posting a comment in a forum where it will live for a few days, and someone archiving every post to Usenet I ever made, without my knowledge or consent. (Yes, it's now relatively well-known that places like Google do this, but it wasn't when some of us first started posting there, and the legality of doing so is still questionable.)
The most effective counter to these technologies, in the absence of internationally recognised legal safeguards, is the use of pseudonyms, such as that I'm now posting under. I guess I'm a funny character on the 'net. Sometimes I post under my real name, sometimes I use an alias. Mostly I post serious content — helping people out on a tech forum, sharing knowledge of local services where I live on Usenet, that kind of thing — and sometimes I post things purely aiming for the "Funny points". Occasionally, I admit, I even give in to the urge to troll someone who obviously takes themselves too seriously.
On forums like Slashdot, I tend to use an alias, even though nearly all of my comments are intended to be constructive (and, reassuringly, the mods agree with this). It sometimes allows me to use real-life examples of things without causing any damage/offence to the people involved. I would stand by pretty much everything I write here even if it had my real name attached to it, though I would sometimes feel obliged to use different examples to protect others.
I do worry about the future consequences of having a large Internet footprint, though. A few days ago, after a brief trial period, I cancelled my Facebook account. I joined because a lot of my friends had signed up and were posting interesting photo albums there, but soon discovered that Facebook's whole purpose is to get everyone who knows you to spy on you and contribute unnecessary personal information about you for public (or at least Facebook's) consumption. I have stopped posting on another social networking site I was trying for similar reasons, too.
So what is my proposed solution to all this? The short answer is: I don't have one, and I don't think anyone else does, and I don't think anyone else can until the int
You think someone receiving death threats, and consequently cancelling speaking engagements and their blogging activities, is an "imaginary problem"?
Yes, the problem is sometimes overhyped. But that doesn't mean it's not really there and people aren't really being damaged by it. The world is not drawn in black and white.
Wow. Either I really touched a nerve there, or you're reading more into my post than I actually said.
I can't give you an absolute, universal answer to a question like that. I doubt anyone could. That's why being a parent is hard.
Well, for one thing, I didn't, I simply said where I'd probably draw the line if I had kids old enough for this to matter today.
However, since you raise it, there is a very legitimate concern that mass-market violent games are changing the nature of kids to make them more violent than they used to be. This isn't my personal opinion, it's what the research says. As I said, I'm not a fan of censorship of things like computer games and movies as a general principle, but the simple fact is that for those too young/irresponsible to deal with them, we are probably better off if limits are set, and thus we have TV watershed times, film certificates and so on.
Sure. But that's still why most people buy the game.
Your argument is like saying they put those "Parental advisory: explicit lyrics" stickers on CDs to help parents avoid their children hearing words they're too young to hear. Maybe that's true for five parents somewhere in the world, but it's still really there to increase the appeal of the CD to younger teenagers who see it as a badge of honour.
I suspect that most people will think DRM is whatever their techie friends tell them it is.
And in this case, far more than in the case of DVD, early adopters/techie consumers will have been stung by things like buying a very expensive television with HD resolution and later finding they can't watch either of the new formats on that TV because it doesn't have an HDCP connection. The geeks are also wise now to the fact that disabling technologies are a PITA, since they've sat through numerous tedious copyright notices or even trailers that can't be skipped while waiting for DVDs they've paid for to start up. The idea that their system can be shut down on a whim by the same Big Media groups who imposed that sort of rubbish on us last time is not likely to sit well with them, and they are unlikely to speak well of it to friends.
Although, having said all of that, DRM is starting to become a "dirty word" to the general public, too. On the BBC News web site, in a poll on an article about DRM, an overwhelming majority of respondents (something like 90%) said there were too many restrictions on digital content. Now, sure, that isn't a proper statistical study, but then again, it's also a survey on one of the most popular web sites in the UK, with an audience drawn from the general public rather than geeks. Combine that with the music industry finally starting to realise its mistake, and the issue gets a much higher profile than it used to, even with non-geeks.
I suspect it's a matter of degrees of realism. There is a big difference between playing Doom, where you're shooting at bad guys who are fireball-throwing aliens, and playing recent GTA-style games that glamorise killing civilians in a realistic setting.
I don't like censorship as a general principle, but I have no problem with restricting what people are exposed to until they're grown up enough to understand what is real and what is pretend. This is probably where I would draw my line, if I had kids old enough for it to matter.
For what it's worth, I don't think the best games tend to be the photorealistic people-maiming types anyway. They can be entertaining for a while and have pretty pictures, but they tend to lack the depth of things like puzzle games, RTS or RPG titles. The only time they really have long-term value is when played in a co-operative environment with other real humans, and that changes the atmosphere fundamentally anyway.
I'm not saying OSS participation can't get you work. Obviously it could, for example in the circumstances you suggest. I'm just challenging the rather dramatic statements in the post I originally I replied to (e.g., "Open source is the future") that seem to be saying that the traditional ways of getting highly-paid work in software development will just disappear in favour of those with reputations for contributing to OSS. I have seen no evidence that this is the case nor likely to be so any time soon, and I can't imagine why we should expect it to be.
With due respect, I think you are underestimating the difficulty in adapting software to run in parallel. Nothing Apple does is going to magically convert intricate mathematical algorithms to parallel form. Doing that mechanically is a notoriously difficult problem, and the solutions are frequently based around the underlying design in the specific application domain.
Curiously, quite a lot of the people criticising the programme (including the politicians from several parties in the UK) haven't actually seen it.
As I mentioned in another post, it was inevitable that the documentary was going to come in for some strong criticism, since those it criticises itself are pretty much forced to defend themselves or lose any credibility. Moreover, it's very likely that such criticism of the documentary is justified some of the time: they've certainly been caught presenting dubious graphics and relying on out-of-date information in places.
On the other hand, I have read many of the "second round" comments from both the programme's critics and its makers, and I still have not seen even slightly convincing defences to the attacks the programme made on the economic and political nature of the "scientific debate".
Al Gore's own comments, defending the 800 year lag issues in an interview after the documentary was shown, were far from convincing. The arguments seem to have gone something like this:
Personally, I'm no longer willing to take either side of this debate at their word. The presentation by both groups is so unscientific that it's impossible for me to know who to trust. I am cautious that the climate change proponents may be correct, in which case we should act to protect ourselves. On the other hand, I am deeply suspicious of the whole climate change lobby now, since it has reached the point where it is (a) a high-profile political issue, and (b) a profitable position to take regardless of the scientific merit. It's not like people haven't known about and campaigned on this issue for years, so how come in the past year or two it's suddenly become so much more urgent?
I tried RSS back when it was new. I gave up within 48 hours, because it simply isn't structured enough to track busy sites like Slashdot efficiently. I can just as easily glance at half a dozen home pages (if that) when I'm browsing, each of them set to display the stories I actually care about.
Maybe the GP poster used to be the next winner of a Nobel Prize? :-)
It was inevitable that the programme was going to be challenged. Its entire purpose was to argue that the prevailing scientific consensus was not based on good science and the people backing it were often subject to political influences. Of course the scientists making those claims are going to say it's not true.
It was also a pretty safe bet that they'd make mistakes of their own, such as the acknowledged flaw with the graphics at one point.
However, I have seen only laughable attempts to discredit most of the really damaging claims made by the program: that the "2,500 scientists" mostly aren't, that even people whose names are given on the IPCC reports don't necessarily agree with the conclusions, that political factors are influential in who gets research funding and therefore scientists have a vested interest in drawing the "right" conclusions, that a lot of the high-profile arguments given in An Inconvenient Truth are based on bad statistics or draw conclusions that simply aren't supported by the data given, that the "funded by oil" argument about the critics is simply not justified by the numbers (there is way, way more money in backing the "scientific consensus" view), that the economies of the western nations now strongly supporting the climate change arguments can use this as a very effective tool to keep less developed nations from advancing to the point of becoming economically competitive, and so on.
Personally, as a trained scientist but not an expert in this field, I'm not sure who to believe, but I'm pretty sure a lot of the current publicity is hype. Otherwise, it's remarkable that in the past year or two we've noticed that we're faced with imminent disaster (what, again?), while the issue had certainly been known about but hadn't gained such political momentum for many years before that. And I still haven't seen anyone who can explain why we're headed for disaster within decades now due to a change of just a few degrees in temperature, when whatever other data we might have, we can see that the temperatures in Europe have been both much higher and much lower than they are now within the past few centuries.
I hope you're not talking about the "2,500 scientists" supporting the IPCC research when you talk about "all those scientists around the globe, that practice science everyday". That would be unfortunate, given that one of the things exposed by the documentary mentioned was the fact that most of the 2,500 contributors aren't scientists at all, and even those who are listed as contributing to the IPCC reports don't necessarily agree with them (one going as far as to threaten legal action to get his name removed from the list).
The irony, of course, is that in this case, those opposing the current sacred cow of politics may actually be right. I wonder how many people who consider the IPCC to be paragons of the scientific community have seen "an inconvenient documentary"?
For those who haven't, it's well worth watching if you're interested. The claims by former members of the IPCC panel are a fascinating insight into how unscientific modern science can become.
Blockquoth the AC:
Unfortunately, what I need in this case is focus-follows-eyes. If I remembered to move the mouse to the other screen, I'd probably remember to click there, too. :-)
I actually had your post down as interesting rather than funny, but in any case, I doubt it will ever happen.
As anyone involved with typography and graphic design can tell you, the length of text lines that humans can read comfortably is pretty short. Guidelines vary, some based around numbers of alphabets set at a typical reading size, some more formally expressed in terms of angles through which the eyes move. The end results are fairly consistent, though: on a modern 19" monitor, with a full-screen window open, at a typical resolution of say 1280x960, and with the user sitting at a typical distance from the screen, the text is already far too wide for most people to read it optimally.
Now, programmers perhaps suffer less from this than those working with ordinary text documents, because most programming languages use some form of indentation to represent things like block structure. Thus the lines within any given block -- those which the programmer will most likely want to read over in sequence -- tend to be shorter. Even so, it's also undesirable to nest too deeply in most programming languages, which limits the effect of this style. So, while old guidelines about 80 character line lengths are rare these days, restricting individual lines to 80 characters between their first and last visible text probably isn't a bad idea.
In other words, I don't think most programmers will ever write lines much longer than they do today, no matter how big monitors get. It will simply be uncomfortable to read them, and therefore they will adopt a different style where lines are broken at natural places, just as mathematicians have long done when typesetting equations.
And yes, this does all have implications for window managers, particularly as widescreen monitors seem to be becoming more popular on both desktops and laptops. I'm slightly surprised that the mainstream hasn't yet given up on the idea of maximising a window to the full screen, and provided some concept of zones, so you can lock a window to fill exactly the left or right half of your monitor, say. Such a viewable area is far more useful on the sort of physical sizes and resolutions that are seen for high-end screens today, for everything from web browsing to editing documents, and even for code on the wider screens.
For those a little too young to get that, here's the original. And yes, it's definitely worth reading. :-)
I'm sorry, but I think you're overestimating the relevance of the OSS community.
To give an obvious example, my employer is currently recruiting. The senior technical guys doing the interviews/selection know plenty about Linux and GCC, since we use them all the time. However, I doubt they've heard of anyone in the OSS community apart from maybe Linus and RMS. IME software development is a small world, and unless you're looking for your first or second job, it's far more likely that someone at a prospective employer will have worked with you before or know someone who did than that they will have read the credits of some piece of OSS you contributed to, remembered that your name was 17th on the list, and actively pursued you.
This isn't to knock the value of contributing to OSS. Doing so can help you learn a lot, demonstrates a willingness to volunteer your time to something you think is worthwhile, and often shows that you can get things done as part of a large, distributed team. These are all good news for a prospective employer, so go ahead and put the work on your CV. Just don't have any illusions about headhunters coming knocking at your door because you once fixed a bug in $OBSCURE_OSS_TOOL. It just isn't going to happen, except for a very lucky few.
But what about those of us whose work does involve seeing more things at the same time?
At work, a lot of us have been picking up older screens to use as second monitors over the past year or so. This was mostly luck, rather than a management decision: someone noticed that the standard-issue graphics cards in one generation of PCs we had included two output ports, and tried it out with an old 17" CRT that was otherwise sitting idle.
Among other times this is useful for us in our everyday work:
I could list many more, but those are fairly typical examples of things we do a lot during the course of our development jobs. It's not hard to imagine applications either: anything involving applications with lots of toolbars and such (graphics, CAD) must be a good candidate.
I don't have any quantitative data, but having made the switch myself a few months ago, I definitely spend a lot less time messing around changing windows and arranging desktops than I used to. The only annoyance is that I sometimes switch to look at the other screen without making the application there active, and then start typing. :-/
OK, this is from a different context, but I'm talking about a non-profit organisation of which I was elected president for two years, leading a committee of 40 or so volunteers organising things for thousands of people.
One of the harsh realities you discover when you take on such a role is that sometimes leadership and executive decision-making have a place, but at the same time, most people contributing their time and/or resources to your project aren't the leader and still want to have their views taken into consideration.
The bottom line is that if people are volunteering for an effort you lead, you have nothing on them but the support you inspire and any vested interest they have in supporting/influencing your project. If they do not feel sufficiently involved, they will leave.
On the other hand, if you let them remain involved but they are incompetent (or otherwise unwelcome), they may actually be damaging to your project. There comes a point where someone's contribution is a net loss, and you have to ask them (or, if necessary, force them) to step down.
There really isn't much of a middle-ground by default, and it's very hard to create one. If you want their input you have little choice but to permit their actions and respect their opinions to some extent, even if you do not agree with them all the time. The best I could ever do was try to keep people focused on the areas where their main interests lay, which at least tended to keep them motivated, happy/courteous, and at least somewhat useful.
FWIW, I usually found that being positive with people about what they did well worked better for keeping that focus than being critical of what people did badly. Put another way, IME you're asking the wrong question, or at least looking for the wrong answer. But this really varies from person to person and your mileage most certainly will vary.