Copyright isn't meant to be fair. It's meant to get the greatest benefit for the public at the least cost to the public. If 10 year copyright is just as much of an incentive to artists in terms of them actually creating works as 100 year copyright is, then the former is the only acceptable choice.
But things are rarely so black and white. Just as we can debate whether a copyright duration of X or Y years is the appropriate thing to enshrine in law, so we can debate the "greatest benefit at least cost" motivation. After all, if a law isn't meant to be fair, why is it a good law and why should we keep it?
As we often observe around these parts, just because that's what the law currently says, that doesn't mean it coincides with everyone's ethical perspective. For example, during a recent discussion I had with a work colleague, he expressed the opinion that copyright should last until at least the death of the artist involved. His reasoning was simply that since others had done nothing to contribute to the work, they should have no automatic right to benefit financially from it. Now, regardless of whether any of us agree with that particular view, as an ethical perspective, it's a perfectly valid and reasonable view to take.
Taking a broader view, a very significant proportion of our society is an artist in some form or another. A law more biased towards artists (which is not the same as more biased towards businessess/middlemen/distributors/PR hotshots/parasites) would therefore benefit a significant proportion of our society, and one could make an argument that the voice of someone who is contributing works should be heard louder than the voice of someone who is a mere consumer.
In other words, I don't think your blanket statement about one thing being the "only acceptable choice" is at all valid. It's only the only acceptable choice if we take as an axiom that the motivation for copyright law is to further the distribution of works at any price, and there are no other considerations, such as compensating artists.
Your descriptive names are probably only decriptive to you, or are so long that the code becomes unreadable. You also have a weird belief that design documents bear any resembelance to the code.
I think you prejudge too much.
For one thing, it is common for members of my team to ask for a quick second opinion on naming conventions if there's any doubt about what the most descriptive terminology would be or what others might understand. This takes all of ten seconds at the coffee machine, so it's hardly some huge burden. Things like code review (formal, informal, pair programming, however you do it) also help with this. So in fact, I'm pretty sure that the naming used by myself and my colleagues is generally descriptive.
I have no idea where you get that idea about long names. Descriptive does not imply long. On the contrary, IME many of the best variable/function/type names are remarkable more for their conciseness than their verbosity.
Finally, if your design docs don't reflect reality, then you have either the wrong information in them or the wrong procedures for maintaining them. Our design docs are integrated with the source code using tools like Doxygen, and reflect the high-level design for each area of our code. Someone new to an area could read the design doc and then use that as a starting point for browsing the code to explore the detailed design, which is described by the comments and conventions within the code itself. I agree 100% that huge, "print out all your class diagrams as they were three years ago" documents are an almost complete waste of time, but they are hardly the only way to do it.
There is no such thing as self-documenting code; even if you use Literal Programming techniques (which not nearly enough people do, and which help a great deal) you still need to put actual line comments in.
But you don't need very many of them. If your code uses a clean design and descriptive names in the implementation, then what your code is doing (from a low level perspective) should be pretty obvious to anyone who already understands the high level design and the overall goals. The latter things are what comments (and design docs, etc.) are for.
Oh come on, the universal absolute term of business is money.
In the long run, that's mostly true, though it's not as universal and absolute as you say. There are organisations running as businesses but with a not-for-profit approach, legal and regulatory considerations, short term planning vs. long term investment where money now may be swapped for advantages in the future, "ethical" businesses, etc.
In any case, I've seen studies like this come out of both the MS and the anti-MS camps, and most of them aren't really worth the paper they're printed on. The non-MS groups are just as guilty of presenting unreliable statistics to back dubious claims.
For what it's worth, I write software that builds on pretty much every major desktop OS around: Windows, MacOS, Linux, several Unices, etc. We therefore deal with kit that uses each of those operating systems on a regular basis at work. Moreover, the staff at my office are generally pretty smart, and have a variety of backgrounds using different platforms. If non-MS systems were ever going to flourish, it would be in an environment like this.
Looking at the problems we have and the systems that people choose to use (and, nearly always, it is a genuine choice and they could use another if they wanted to) we don't seem to have any particular bias one way or the other. We use tools on all the platforms. We have developers using both Windows and Linux as their preferred desktop OS. And we have problems with all of the platforms from time to time, too. I can't help thinking that if MS really were as bad as some in these Slashdot discussions make out, and the alternatives really were so much better for productivity, then most of the MS-using folks in my office would have switched to the alternatives a long time ago.
Fortunately, us stoopid Brits do understand enough statistics to know that drawing conclusions about the whole population from a sample of one is unlikely to give reliable results.:-)
Not everyone has the same definition of "doing it better" in our world.
There is no universal "right tool for everyone". Different people require different tools. So do different jobs.
There are few perfect tools in software, and pretty much no perfect non-trivial tools.
There are never enough skilled and experienced people available at a price you think you can afford.
Not everyone can reach the same level of skill, even with training.
When you start to think of the world in less absolute, universal terms, you'll realise why a lot of businesses do make decisions for the sorts of reasons I mentioned before. More importantly, you'll realise why such decisions can be right for those businesses under their own particular circumstances at the time the decision is made.
Ironically, I suspect your comment actually demonstrates why, in real terms, a lot of businesses find MS cheaper.
You may get more horsepower and flexibility out of a non-MS environment. That's great, and makes non-MS the way to go if a business is employing people like you.
Now, would you describe yourself (being honest) as a smarter-than-average sysadmin, a Linux/Mac/whatever specialist, an experienced geek...? In other words, are you a typical sysadmin that a typical company will hire, with typical experience on the various platforms, or would such a person require more experience/training/skill to get the same good results out of non-MS systems that you do?
On the flip side, do you (being honest) have less than average experience/skill with MS systems, perhaps as a result of specialising elsewhere, and would you therefore require more training and expertise to get the same quality of results others do out of MS server software?
Obviously, I can't read your mind, and I'm not going to put words into your fingertips by guessing your answers. But I can make an educated guess that there are a lot more people around who know how to get OKish results out of MS stuff than there are who know how to get much better results out of non-MS stuff, and that the MS-using folks therefore tend to be easier to find and cheaper to hire. That has a major effect on the bottom line of a business, and is why (for many places) MS is going to look like the safer bet on TCO grounds for at least a while yet.
There's a pretty obvious implicit assumption in the article that private offices (I don't know what Aeron chairs have to do with anything) are better than open plan offices. There's plenty of research that suggests otherwise, at least in some lines of work.
In response to others posting in this subthread, yes, I work in an open plan office with around 25 other people on this floor, and yes, we have a couple of guys who work in other one-man offices and effectively telecommute. The extra impromptu conversations, which are the main advantage of being open plan, are very helpful. For the rest, there's not much that can't be addressed with some simple courtesy to fellow workers, providing enough properly-equipped meeting rooms and using them sensibly, occasional on-site visits by teleworkers, etc.
All of us who wear glasses? We should have been culled. All these people developing diabetes from eating too much sugar? Selected against. Asthma? You get the picture.
Sure I do, but your picture is a very narrow view of the idea of natural selection.
Consider that humans are the dominant species on the planet today for essentially two reasons: we form communities, and we develop tools to overcome our weaknesses. Neither of these has anything in particular to do with any individual's physical strengths or weaknesses.
Continuing this argument, there is no particular reason that a physically imperfect individual can't make a more significant contribution to a community or develop better tools than a physically superior specimen. Would you say someone with an unfortunate genetic flaw that prevents them having children is worthless in terms of the survival of the species? What if that person spent half their life developing the device that would save humanity from the next global-killing natural disaster, and the rest of their life co-ordinating its manufacture and training people to use it?
And of course, this is only talking about the survival of the species. What the species could achieve in terms of science, or art, or any other development you consider important is a whole separate subject.
This is definitely the beginning of the end of online commerce.
Only if IBM win.
There is a big difference between initiating legal action against someone and successfully arguing your case in court, perhaps more so in the US business world than anywhere else.
There is also a world of difference between attempting to use your huge patent portfolio to put pressure on a single target with a limited portfolio of its own, and attempting to use your huge patent portfolio against half the business world (and their own collective portfolio and ability to counter-sue you) all at once.
Besides, it looks like the relevant patents will expire fairly soon, so I'm pretty sure on-line commerce will survive, even if there are a few short term casualties in the worst case.
It seems like it has the potential to land them in hot water from an antitrust perspective, but it should be enforceable under contract law.
Perhaps it is, but surely that applies only if another party has entered into that contract. AFAICS, there is nothing to stop anyone from just observing what Microsoft applications do, and coding a user interface that works similarly without the help of MS's guidelines.
Ironically, it is exactly the kind of study you talk about that led Microsoft to produce this new UI. There will inevitably be resistance to change, but after a while I suspect the usability guys will win, because they have solid research behind them and users are fickle creatures.
That doesn't negate your main point about free software alternatives not just cloning MS UI, of course. Look at Firefox: innovative UI features not present in the established MS product, in an overall clean and usable interface, makes a product that is eating MS market share at a rate that must have them taking notice. Compare and contrast with OpenOffice.org, where the UI is basically a poor quality clone of the equivalent MS Office applications, and pretty much no-one uses it outside of a few geeks. Firefox's method is better.
Most people simply don't understand that you *do not* need a $400 office suite for word processing.
I think perhaps it's you who doesn't understand. Most people don't pay $400 for MS Office. Businesses typically have volume licensing agreements that work out far cheaper. Those home users who have legal copies generally get one of the cut-down versions (possibly just Word) thrown in as part of a bundle with a new PC, just like Windows, and don't notice the cost because it's a relatively small part of a much larger number. Of the small number of home users who do buy it separately, most are smart enough to buy an upgrade rather than a new product, having established a chain of previously licensed software back to the dawn of time. Seriously, I don't know anyone who has ever paid anything like full price for the whole MS Office suite off-the-shelf.
You're absolutely right about the advanced features, though. It annoys the **** out of me that even though we use Word documents all the time at work, almost no-one understands basic concepts like style sheets for formatting. I sat in a video-enabled conference call with about a dozen senior members of staff the other day, and watched as the consultant leading the discussion spent literally minutes (out of a one-hour meeting) trying to get the extra bullet point we'd decided to add to a list to look the same as all the others. I shudder to think how much money that simple exercise cost due to the wasted time of all those other staff.
Is it merely coincidence that, after doubling the size of MI5, the number of 'terrorists' needed to be put under surveillance also doubled?
What was it Goering said to the intelligence officer during the Nuremberg trials? Oh, yes:
"Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
And on your other point:
But it's reassuring to know that every policeman from top to bottom is an honest, earnest and tireless worker having only your security and safety in mind as they covertly record your unique colonic geometry on their new databarse...
And we have far greater problems still with our current government's obsession with the perceived terrorist threat. Last week there was a big thing made of the head of one of our security services, stating that they had x groups and y individual terrorist suspects under surveillance, and knew of at least z active plans to hurt us. A lot of our media was hyping how terrible things really are, and now we really know how bad the real terrorist threat really is.
Me, I thought "Is that all?" and figured we'd do better if we spent the gazillions of pounds we throw at "anti-terror" activities on cutting KSI figures for road traffic accidents, researching promising medical treatments, and raising education standards. This is not to belittle those who belong to the security services. Indeed, I've no doubt that they do some valuable work and protect us from some genuine threats, and I'm grateful to them for it. But sometimes, the price of a little extra security (you can never have 100%, nor anywhere close) is just too high. Tony Blair has talked a lot during his time in office about taking tough decisions. The tough decision on terrorism is not to take all those headline-grabbing steps that ultimately reduce overall quality of life, in a futile attempt to make the country Safe And Secure(TM).
This camera thing is just another gimmick. It used to be that children would naturally respect a police officer and the local constable would stop and say hello to them in the park while walking his beat, yet today the police feel the need to cover their backsides with all kinds of video footage. Why have the police lost the implicit moral authority they used to have? Why is antisocial behaviour one of the biggest dirty marks on today's society? What happened to policing by consent? It is left as an exercise for the reader to decide whether the answers involve the threat of terrorism, or whether they're more to do with the government stripping parents and teachers of any legal right to effectively discipline children, misunderstanding human rights to mean treating convicted criminals like the second coming, adopting the nanny state view of legislation over education, enacting an extensive series of laws that are more about ease of enforcement than outlawing genuinely harmful behaviour, and eschewing all sense of personal responsibility from senior ministers on down in favour of a litigous, CYA, spin-laden society.
I've been wondering about this for a while. Anyone want to take bets on how much legal cover Microsoft's EULA gives them the first time a virus shuts down the entire US Federal Government?:-)
Slashdot Mirror
But things are rarely so black and white. Just as we can debate whether a copyright duration of X or Y years is the appropriate thing to enshrine in law, so we can debate the "greatest benefit at least cost" motivation. After all, if a law isn't meant to be fair, why is it a good law and why should we keep it?
As we often observe around these parts, just because that's what the law currently says, that doesn't mean it coincides with everyone's ethical perspective. For example, during a recent discussion I had with a work colleague, he expressed the opinion that copyright should last until at least the death of the artist involved. His reasoning was simply that since others had done nothing to contribute to the work, they should have no automatic right to benefit financially from it. Now, regardless of whether any of us agree with that particular view, as an ethical perspective, it's a perfectly valid and reasonable view to take.
Taking a broader view, a very significant proportion of our society is an artist in some form or another. A law more biased towards artists (which is not the same as more biased towards businessess/middlemen/distributors/PR hotshots/parasites) would therefore benefit a significant proportion of our society, and one could make an argument that the voice of someone who is contributing works should be heard louder than the voice of someone who is a mere consumer.
In other words, I don't think your blanket statement about one thing being the "only acceptable choice" is at all valid. It's only the only acceptable choice if we take as an axiom that the motivation for copyright law is to further the distribution of works at any price, and there are no other considerations, such as compensating artists.
It seems most of our millenium prayers have yet to be answered...
I think you prejudge too much.
For one thing, it is common for members of my team to ask for a quick second opinion on naming conventions if there's any doubt about what the most descriptive terminology would be or what others might understand. This takes all of ten seconds at the coffee machine, so it's hardly some huge burden. Things like code review (formal, informal, pair programming, however you do it) also help with this. So in fact, I'm pretty sure that the naming used by myself and my colleagues is generally descriptive.
I have no idea where you get that idea about long names. Descriptive does not imply long. On the contrary, IME many of the best variable/function/type names are remarkable more for their conciseness than their verbosity.
Finally, if your design docs don't reflect reality, then you have either the wrong information in them or the wrong procedures for maintaining them. Our design docs are integrated with the source code using tools like Doxygen, and reflect the high-level design for each area of our code. Someone new to an area could read the design doc and then use that as a starting point for browsing the code to explore the detailed design, which is described by the comments and conventions within the code itself. I agree 100% that huge, "print out all your class diagrams as they were three years ago" documents are an almost complete waste of time, but they are hardly the only way to do it.
But you don't need very many of them. If your code uses a clean design and descriptive names in the implementation, then what your code is doing (from a low level perspective) should be pretty obvious to anyone who already understands the high level design and the overall goals. The latter things are what comments (and design docs, etc.) are for.
Except Perl. It's much easier in Perl. :-)
In the long run, that's mostly true, though it's not as universal and absolute as you say. There are organisations running as businesses but with a not-for-profit approach, legal and regulatory considerations, short term planning vs. long term investment where money now may be swapped for advantages in the future, "ethical" businesses, etc.
In any case, I've seen studies like this come out of both the MS and the anti-MS camps, and most of them aren't really worth the paper they're printed on. The non-MS groups are just as guilty of presenting unreliable statistics to back dubious claims.
For what it's worth, I write software that builds on pretty much every major desktop OS around: Windows, MacOS, Linux, several Unices, etc. We therefore deal with kit that uses each of those operating systems on a regular basis at work. Moreover, the staff at my office are generally pretty smart, and have a variety of backgrounds using different platforms. If non-MS systems were ever going to flourish, it would be in an environment like this.
Looking at the problems we have and the systems that people choose to use (and, nearly always, it is a genuine choice and they could use another if they wanted to) we don't seem to have any particular bias one way or the other. We use tools on all the platforms. We have developers using both Windows and Linux as their preferred desktop OS. And we have problems with all of the platforms from time to time, too. I can't help thinking that if MS really were as bad as some in these Slashdot discussions make out, and the alternatives really were so much better for productivity, then most of the MS-using folks in my office would have switched to the alternatives a long time ago.
And that was moderated insightful?! Jeez, every single person moderating Slashdot today must be stupid or something. ;-)
Fortunately, us stoopid Brits do understand enough statistics to know that drawing conclusions about the whole population from a sample of one is unlikely to give reliable results. :-)
Please try to understand the following.
When you start to think of the world in less absolute, universal terms, you'll realise why a lot of businesses do make decisions for the sorts of reasons I mentioned before. More importantly, you'll realise why such decisions can be right for those businesses under their own particular circumstances at the time the decision is made.
I don't know. Maybe I'll ask a forum full of Linux fans for their unbiased opinion. ;-)
Ironically, I suspect your comment actually demonstrates why, in real terms, a lot of businesses find MS cheaper.
You may get more horsepower and flexibility out of a non-MS environment. That's great, and makes non-MS the way to go if a business is employing people like you.
Now, would you describe yourself (being honest) as a smarter-than-average sysadmin, a Linux/Mac/whatever specialist, an experienced geek...? In other words, are you a typical sysadmin that a typical company will hire, with typical experience on the various platforms, or would such a person require more experience/training/skill to get the same good results out of non-MS systems that you do?
On the flip side, do you (being honest) have less than average experience/skill with MS systems, perhaps as a result of specialising elsewhere, and would you therefore require more training and expertise to get the same quality of results others do out of MS server software?
Obviously, I can't read your mind, and I'm not going to put words into your fingertips by guessing your answers. But I can make an educated guess that there are a lot more people around who know how to get OKish results out of MS stuff than there are who know how to get much better results out of non-MS stuff, and that the MS-using folks therefore tend to be easier to find and cheaper to hire. That has a major effect on the bottom line of a business, and is why (for many places) MS is going to look like the safer bet on TCO grounds for at least a while yet.
There's a pretty obvious implicit assumption in the article that private offices (I don't know what Aeron chairs have to do with anything) are better than open plan offices. There's plenty of research that suggests otherwise, at least in some lines of work.
In response to others posting in this subthread, yes, I work in an open plan office with around 25 other people on this floor, and yes, we have a couple of guys who work in other one-man offices and effectively telecommute. The extra impromptu conversations, which are the main advantage of being open plan, are very helpful. For the rest, there's not much that can't be addressed with some simple courtesy to fellow workers, providing enough properly-equipped meeting rooms and using them sensibly, occasional on-site visits by teleworkers, etc.
Watch carefully now, children. We're about to see a fine example of natural selection at work...
Sure I do, but your picture is a very narrow view of the idea of natural selection.
Consider that humans are the dominant species on the planet today for essentially two reasons: we form communities, and we develop tools to overcome our weaknesses. Neither of these has anything in particular to do with any individual's physical strengths or weaknesses.
Continuing this argument, there is no particular reason that a physically imperfect individual can't make a more significant contribution to a community or develop better tools than a physically superior specimen. Would you say someone with an unfortunate genetic flaw that prevents them having children is worthless in terms of the survival of the species? What if that person spent half their life developing the device that would save humanity from the next global-killing natural disaster, and the rest of their life co-ordinating its manufacture and training people to use it?
And of course, this is only talking about the survival of the species. What the species could achieve in terms of science, or art, or any other development you consider important is a whole separate subject.
Sorry, there's prior art on that joke right at the top of the thread... :-)
Only if IBM win.
There is a big difference between initiating legal action against someone and successfully arguing your case in court, perhaps more so in the US business world than anywhere else.
There is also a world of difference between attempting to use your huge patent portfolio to put pressure on a single target with a limited portfolio of its own, and attempting to use your huge patent portfolio against half the business world (and their own collective portfolio and ability to counter-sue you) all at once.
Besides, it looks like the relevant patents will expire fairly soon, so I'm pretty sure on-line commerce will survive, even if there are a few short term casualties in the worst case.
Perhaps it is, but surely that applies only if another party has entered into that contract. AFAICS, there is nothing to stop anyone from just observing what Microsoft applications do, and coding a user interface that works similarly without the help of MS's guidelines.
Ironically, it is exactly the kind of study you talk about that led Microsoft to produce this new UI. There will inevitably be resistance to change, but after a while I suspect the usability guys will win, because they have solid research behind them and users are fickle creatures.
That doesn't negate your main point about free software alternatives not just cloning MS UI, of course. Look at Firefox: innovative UI features not present in the established MS product, in an overall clean and usable interface, makes a product that is eating MS market share at a rate that must have them taking notice. Compare and contrast with OpenOffice.org, where the UI is basically a poor quality clone of the equivalent MS Office applications, and pretty much no-one uses it outside of a few geeks. Firefox's method is better.
I think perhaps it's you who doesn't understand. Most people don't pay $400 for MS Office. Businesses typically have volume licensing agreements that work out far cheaper. Those home users who have legal copies generally get one of the cut-down versions (possibly just Word) thrown in as part of a bundle with a new PC, just like Windows, and don't notice the cost because it's a relatively small part of a much larger number. Of the small number of home users who do buy it separately, most are smart enough to buy an upgrade rather than a new product, having established a chain of previously licensed software back to the dawn of time. Seriously, I don't know anyone who has ever paid anything like full price for the whole MS Office suite off-the-shelf.
You're absolutely right about the advanced features, though. It annoys the **** out of me that even though we use Word documents all the time at work, almost no-one understands basic concepts like style sheets for formatting. I sat in a video-enabled conference call with about a dozen senior members of staff the other day, and watched as the consultant leading the discussion spent literally minutes (out of a one-hour meeting) trying to get the extra bullet point we'd decided to add to a list to look the same as all the others. I shudder to think how much money that simple exercise cost due to the wasted time of all those other staff.
That's interesting legal advice. I'm pretty sure the courts in every major jurisdiction where this has come up have clearly disagreed.
What was it Goering said to the intelligence officer during the Nuremberg trials? Oh, yes:
And on your other point:
What are you afraid of, citizen? It's not like there's a new story about police corruption every day, is it?
And we have far greater problems still with our current government's obsession with the perceived terrorist threat. Last week there was a big thing made of the head of one of our security services, stating that they had x groups and y individual terrorist suspects under surveillance, and knew of at least z active plans to hurt us. A lot of our media was hyping how terrible things really are, and now we really know how bad the real terrorist threat really is.
Me, I thought "Is that all?" and figured we'd do better if we spent the gazillions of pounds we throw at "anti-terror" activities on cutting KSI figures for road traffic accidents, researching promising medical treatments, and raising education standards. This is not to belittle those who belong to the security services. Indeed, I've no doubt that they do some valuable work and protect us from some genuine threats, and I'm grateful to them for it. But sometimes, the price of a little extra security (you can never have 100%, nor anywhere close) is just too high. Tony Blair has talked a lot during his time in office about taking tough decisions. The tough decision on terrorism is not to take all those headline-grabbing steps that ultimately reduce overall quality of life, in a futile attempt to make the country Safe And Secure(TM).
This camera thing is just another gimmick. It used to be that children would naturally respect a police officer and the local constable would stop and say hello to them in the park while walking his beat, yet today the police feel the need to cover their backsides with all kinds of video footage. Why have the police lost the implicit moral authority they used to have? Why is antisocial behaviour one of the biggest dirty marks on today's society? What happened to policing by consent? It is left as an exercise for the reader to decide whether the answers involve the threat of terrorism, or whether they're more to do with the government stripping parents and teachers of any legal right to effectively discipline children, misunderstanding human rights to mean treating convicted criminals like the second coming, adopting the nanny state view of legislation over education, enacting an extensive series of laws that are more about ease of enforcement than outlawing genuinely harmful behaviour, and eschewing all sense of personal responsibility from senior ministers on down in favour of a litigous, CYA, spin-laden society.
Well, the season of miracles is fast approaching...
I've been wondering about this for a while. Anyone want to take bets on how much legal cover Microsoft's EULA gives them the first time a virus shuts down the entire US Federal Government? :-)
Why don't you read the fine article, which is replete with examples of relevant case law (at least from the US perspective), and find out?