Nevertheless, at work we are forced to use IE or miss out on functionality on the corporate intranet. One of my colleagues, also a Firefox fan, sent a mail to the admins asking them to tweak their site to support other browsers. They basically told him to get stuffed, IE is the corporate standard and that's all they care about.
Though it irritates me to say it, why shouldn't they say that? It is not the company's job to support personal web browsing preferences, and the use of company resources to browse the web at lunchtime or whatever is a perk, not a part of the job description. If IE/ActiveX/whatever is the corporate standard, and it works, then anyone else's browser had better be compatible with it or expect not to be adopted on the corporate desktop.
The same goes for using Thunderbird without Exchange connectivity, BTW.
Sorry, but yes it does, at least if you're a business user with a corporate intranet that uses ActiveX as many do. This stubborn attitude among the Moz community that ActiveX == bad, integration with Windows authentication == bad, etc. is exactly why Firefox has such low penetration on corporate desktops, which in turn is exactly why it's so rarely included with off-the-shelf PCs from big name vendors.
Seven deadly sins of successful software development, #5: Believing that what you think the users should have is more important than what the users actually want.
The BPI have sued some people in the UK for copyright infringement, it's at the bottom of the FA.
"BPI has taken legal action in 139 filesharing cases. The four that have gone to court have produced verdicts in BPI's favour, while 111 individuals have settled out of court."
Please read your comment again, noting the part I've emphasized. These people broke the law, and were found to have done so by a court, not by some sort of recording industry shady dealing and barratry.
Now, you can bitch about how copyright law is unreasonable, and so on, yada yada. But the fact remains, that is the law right now, and it's a good bet that all of these people knew it. No-one forced them to break that law, and the recording industry was asking for legal remedies in court, as is its right. Why is this a problem?
If the ISP gets paid by other networks to recieve data from the ISP then the ISP might think twice about closing accounts that create large amount of revenue for it.
As others have pointed out, the tiny number of customers in question probably aren't generating large amounts of revenue for the ISP.
Moreover, the fact that the ISP has been told about the infringing use of their network potentially lays them open to huge legal liability. We had Godfrey vs. Demon back in 1999, and ISPs in the UK have been shivering ever since.
IME, most large employers will do little more than confirming that Mr Jones did indeed work for them between the relevant dates. There's just no upside to giving any information they don't have to, and they could be screwed by either the former employee or his new employer if things go bad and the blame comes back to their reference.
In this case, I think the law should provide some sort of "good faith" safe harbour protection for those giving references (much as witnesses in court automatically get certain legal protections, as mentioned in this week's discussion about expert witnesses and professional regulatory bodies). Otherwise, there is simply no incentive to give a reference at all, and a lot of risk.
In the UK, even most of the "obvious" personal uses are infringing at present, though the majority of the population don't know this and do continue to do these things anyway. A review is underway that will hopefully result in fixing this particular legal daftness.
I agree with much of what you wrote, I'd take it even further: why do we fixate on the threads/tree model?
In extended discussions involving several people, I often see the same person send multiple mails in rapid succession, in reply to different mails by others, even if the separate discussion threads are actually talking about the same subject. I'd like to see a simple system for replying to and quoting from multiple messages in the same mail, so that you can bring together multiple discussion threads when the subjects converge again, and represent this in the discussion "thread" (which becomes a DAG rather than a tree, in data structure terms).
The idea you describe seems to be that if you've done a project before, then you can use the time that took as a guideline to help estimate future, similar projects. Sure, that's common sense, and a sensible thing to do. But what if most of your projects aren't related to what's gone before?
We recently hit a textbook example of what can go wrong: a new feature was estimated as taking six weeks for a single developer to implement, which was pretty accurate for the new design and code. Unfortunately, after more than a decade of incremental development, the underlying architecture was fundamentally flawed. For the most part, it worked well enough to support the existing features built on top of it (though the count of outstanding bugs at boundary cases was starting to mount up). However, the design had evolved without much control and oversight for a long time, and consequently it wasn't in good enough shape to extend straightforwardly to support our new feature.
Thus, although the high-level code was in place and working correctly pretty much on schedule, the actual project took more like six months than six weeks, with the extra time spent reworking all those incremental developments back into a coherent overall design that was then fit to extend to support the new functionality required. No-one in management saw this coming; it was just the time that the inevitable consequences of allowing ad-hoc development for extended periods came back to haunt that particular project. The extra work brought other benefits too, including fixing pretty much all of those awkward boundary case bugs. But it still took way longer than the estimate, for reasons no-one involved in the planning saw coming.
Or if you want to encrypt all traffic at the application level you end up having to modify every protocol and then every implementation, and then waiting for people to adopt it...
We're going to have to rebuild some of the basic comms protocols of the Internet pretty soon anyway, to solve increasing problems of spam, DDoS, and others. Why not fix this one at the same time?
As for lawful interception, the US government's current record on operating legally in these matters is pretty much totally lacking in credibility at this stage. Thanks for the thought, but I'll happily encrypt all of my private communications to prevent US authorities spying on them just because they happen to pass through a US-based organisation (something about which, given the nature of the Internet, I have little control). If the authorities need to know what I'm sending to someone and why, they have only to request that the local authorities in my country ask me, and if they give me a sensible reason I'll tell them without any need to waste time and resources trying to crack any encryption I happen to be using.
A thing a lot of students don't like to hear is, they simply are not accorded the same status and rights as a majority-age citizen. I know a lot who find that autocratic and unfair, which is (ironically) their right.
Yes it is, but I disagree with them. The UK has some pretty serious problems right now, and IMNSHO an awful lot of them stem from politically correct initiatives that affect how children may be treated and the rights they have. On the one hand, no forms of corporal punishment are now allowed in our schools, and parents must be wary of even smacking their children for fear of being accused of child abuse. On the other hand, antisocial behaviour has become one of the biggest problems facing our society. I've seen one of my neighbours confronting kids who were about to key the side of his car, and heard one of them shout at him that he couldn't do anything, because the kid was under 10 and he couldn't commit a crime - and I live in a pretty good neighbourhood compared to many places. Similar stories abound, often with responsible adults (including parents and teachers) winding up in court or otherwise under suspicion, while Joe Angelic seems untouchable even if caught red-handed doing something he shouldn't be.
Now, it doesn't take a genius to spot the connection here. Children don't yet have an adult level of maturity and responsibility; that's why they're still children. Thus it is manifestly unreasonable to treat them the same way as adults and expect the same response. I refuse to support the NSPCC (the biggest child protection charity in the UK) while they maintain that an absolute ban on smacking children is appropriate and use the "you wouldn't smack an adult" argument. We can debate the relative merits of corporal and other forms of punishment, and there are always the "My parents smacked me and it did me no harm" and "Well, I raised a child just fine without ever smacking them" brigades. However, I think even their axiom here is wrong: we do use violence, if necessary, to enforce the law on adults. This is, ultimately, what police forces and the military do. It may be reserved for use as a last resort, but the threat is always there. By excluding this possibility on a far smaller scale, children are actually being given a higher status than adults!
It happens that in this case, I do disagree with the rule. I think it's absurd that older children should have no default right to privacy, which is what this boils down to. You don't suddenly turn 18 and become responsible, and you're not automatically a menace to society at 17 years and 364 days. If there is a good reason for the adults responsible for that child to think they need to see something on the phone, that's one thing, but there must be a good reason.
Ultimately, it all comes down to the rights, freedoms and responsibilities thing, as it usually does in these discussions. The two are, or at least should be, fundamentally tied together. As long as you have adults who are legally responsible for minors, they need to have some degree of authority, and the minors can't reasonably expect the same level of rights and freedoms as if they were adults completely responsible for their own behaviour. On the other hand, as children grow older and behave more responsibly, it is inappropriate to deny them any extension of their rights and freedoms to match. Getting the balance wrong, in either direction, will inevitably lead to problems either where children are undisciplined and irresponsible, or where adults take advantage of them inappropriately.
FWIW, the safeguards I was proposing were not really about the obviously unfair, as would hopefully be covered by the sort of general consumer protection legislation you mentioned. Rather, I was highlighting cases where the industry "pulls a fast one", such as by selling the original software with one licence agreement, but then attaching further conditions to an upgrade that is necessary to continue using the software effectively. For example, this would apply to a security patch for a music player that also incorporated new DRM technologies, or to an anti-cheating patch for an on-line game required by the servers before you can play that also scanned your system and sent information back to the game company. I think it is unethical for a software company to accept your money in exchange for using their software, only to force you to accept other terms or see the software rendered unusable; IMHO, this is analogous to a unilateral variation of contract terms.
Well, we do have fair dealing provisions, so your generalisation to "any copying" isn't quite true. But you're right, the system isn't nearly as liberal as under the fair use provisions in the US, and I can't see why installing software would in general constitute fair dealing.
Of course, the Gowers review team is processing the reportedly rather large volume of submissions it received, and MPs have already been minuted as thinking certain copyright provisions are daft today (and not having much sympathy with the we-want-copyright-to-pay-our-pensions crowd supported by Cliff Richard recently). Methinks changes are afoot, and the music industry may just be smart enough here to realise that they're going to happen anyway, so it might as well play along and look for further business opportunities as a result.
I can't speak for anyone else, but in my own response to Gowers, I indicated that I thought the legal status of EULAs should be clarified explicitly, and proposed various safeguards that might reasonably be imposed to protect the public from abusive conditions if EULAs and similar agreements are legally enforceable. Here's hoping someone in government agrees with me!:-)
Unfortunately, he did exactly the opposite. From TFA:
The judge rejected the argument. "The fallacy in the argument is that if the bank does not accept the EULA [licence] terms [by operating the software and agreeing the terms], it receives no licence.
I'm not a lawyer, but it sounds disturbingly as though a High Court judge just ruled EULAs legally binding in the UK without even having the case go to court.
You are out of reality. I have never seen such close relations between developer and customer companies.
That's odd. I've been doing software development full-time for nearly a decade, with plenty of relevant experience before that too. I've rarely seen a successful project that didn't operate with such a relationship, and rarely seen a failing project that did. Perhaps that's why the companies I've worked for have generally been successful.
It's just impossible to make such a flexible contract which would guaranty fair conditions for both developer and customer. Impossible.
What can be fairer than paying someone at a fair rate based on the amount of work they've actually done to meet your needs?
Oh, and BTW.. in the U.S. if you break into my home, I'm allowed to shoot you.. even if you are just taking a look around. I think that is reasonable (I have no idea why you're there anyway.. why the hell are you on my property?)
Laws like this are very dangerous things.
I am in favour of giving the benefit of the doubt to someone acting to defend their own home or those within it, where their actions are likely to have seemed reasonable to them at the time. However, IMHO this is one of the standard examples of why blanket laws are not a good idea.
The unknown person could have been unaware that they were somewhere they shouldn't be. They could have a mental illness, or be drunk or drugged, possibly as a result of the actions of others and without realising it. They could be in serious trouble, and trying to find help. Maybe they just made an honest mistake; have you never been in an appartment block/hotel/whatever and almost walked through the wrong identical-looking door? Perhaps the unknown person is even there deliberately for a good reason. Someone might have called in a medical emergency, and the ambulance crew is trying to find the casualty.
Of course you'd think someone with a sensible reason to be there - the girl running from the men who tried to grab her, or the paramedics looking for a casualty, say - would announce themselves and try to attract the attention of anyone whose home it might be. Maybe they did, and you just didn't hear them because of the shoot-out on TV when they knocked.
My point is simply that just because someone is on your property, they haven't automatically committed a crime serious enough to merit shooting them dead. If you're woken in the middle of the night by the sound of someone breaking your window and climbing into your home, and you have no reasonable opportunity to challenge them without endangering yourself or others, then giving you the benefit might be reasonable. If emergency services responding to call bang on your door, you don't answer because you don't hear them, and they then break the door down to try to reach a casualty, then seeing who they are and shooting them anyway is not reasonable.
At the risk of stretching an analogy too far, the case at hand here is closer to the case where someone breaks into your home, you noticing them as they leave and making a citizen's arrest at gunpoint, and them immediately surrendering. Do you think it's reasonable to shoot someone at that point, or would that just be the prejudice of someone who's been had and wants revenge? Which is more in the interests of justice?
We would take the estimates, double them and add 30%, that is how I bid out all work.
It's interesting to look down this thread and see how many different rules of thumb are employed, apparently by quite experienced developers/managers.
It seems to me that we can make two reasonable assumptions based on this:
Development usually takes longer than most engineers estimate up-front.
No-one has yet found a reliable way to assess how much longer up-front.
One might hypothesise, based on these assumptions, that any project plan that quotes hard figures up-front will be inaccurate most of the time, and without allowing a huge defensive overhead that inaccuracy will often be in the wrong direction.
Now, working from unreliable estimates is in no-one's interests. If a company overestimates by too much on a fixed-price contract, it risks being undercut by a more realistic competitor. If it underestimates, it will look bad when things over-run, its profits will fall, and its reputation will suffer as well.
So what conclusions can we draw from this?
Firstly, if we're looking for realistic management, the way to go is almost always some sort of time and materials contract, with floating deadlines based on when features are actually ready. This allows good developers to do their job properly, which in the long run will be more efficient, and it means that other groups such as sales, marketing and customer support can be kept informed and given realistic expectations.
Secondly, fixed-price contracts are only a good bet for a software development firm if it can include enough slack to be safe, without including so much that it can be undercut by more realistic competitors. The corollary, of course, is that if you're a client, you're almost inevitably going to be screwed by agreeing to a fixed-price contract, even without considering the lack of flexibility it entails.
It is a rare project indeed that truly requires hard deadlines. Smart clients and smart development shops will reach a more flexible arrangement, and come to respect each other for having realistic expectations and providing realistic updates as time goes on.
There's a lot of truth in Brooks, but you have to take it in context. Adding manpower to a late project may indeed make it later, but adding more manpower up-front and managing it well can increase the capacity of your team to deliver a project, and therefore get the work done sooner. You get diminishing returns to an extent, of course.
I'm honestly not having a dig at you personally here, but I never understand the attitude exemplified by your post:
One last note would be that, when it comes down to it and you just have to kill yourself to get something out the door, you shouldn't expect any huge pats on the back for it. If you grind hard, you generally won't be the last guy holding up the show. Do this for a few revisions, and people will come to think of you as a closer. I don't know if this really helps in any way. I think it generally just means that you get more work to do...
Why would you ever "kill yourself" (I know what you meant) to get something out the door? Unless perhaps you're talking about something that is safety-critical, where having your code sooner (even if it's not perfect) may literally save lives, I can't imagine the motivation.
As you say, if you grind harder, unethical employers will just give you more work to do. Heroes are short-term assets for a bad business: you can take advantage of their generosity, burn them out, and then just dump them and get a new one. Being a hero is rarely a personal benefit, because the kind of company that takes advantage of it rarely rewards it, while the kind of company that appreciates good work usually understands the need not to overwork its staff (and, not coincidentally, rarely needs deathmarches and heroes, because their timescales and management generally don't get into that sort of mess in the first place).
If you have the kind of work ethic that allows you to pull all-nighters or whatever, and you're a good enough developer to produce useful code even under those conditions, then why not move to a better employer? They won't expect you to work absurd hours, and will value the quality of code you produce anyway. Your life will be better for it, and you'll be supporting a good employer rather than propping up a lousy one.
It's not ideal, but at least seems an improvement
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Aussies Brace for DMCA
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Yes, I did think that particular example was daft. (I read several of the responses the AG's issues paper and the AG's subsequent comments while preparing a submission of my own for the UK's Gowers review.)
That said, it's a lot less daft than selling VCRs but saying that all time-shifting is illegal, which seemed to be the case before. It might not be ideal, but at least things are going in the right direction.:-)
I thought some of the other provisions, such as the format-shifting I mentioned before, sounded a lot more reasonable.
Do you know what the article here is talking about? Both links were Slashdotted (despite apparently being cache links... go figure) and unless I'm missing something there's nothing mentioned by name to go and look up. What is this new legislation, and how does it fit in with the AG's issues paper and the review of the ACA?
What "US-FTA-required DMCA legislation"? The Australian AG's office only recently published revised copyright information that seemed to be fixing some of the silliness: time-shifting using VCRs, format-shifting of music, etc.
Freedom of speech is not the same as freedom of responsibility for what you say.
In some cases, truly anonymous speech has value. In other cases, truly anonymous speech creates victims of its own and leaves them with no means of redress. This issue is not black and white, and never will be.
Slashdot Mirror
I like Firefox too, and use it at home.
Nevertheless, at work we are forced to use IE or miss out on functionality on the corporate intranet. One of my colleagues, also a Firefox fan, sent a mail to the admins asking them to tweak their site to support other browsers. They basically told him to get stuffed, IE is the corporate standard and that's all they care about.
Though it irritates me to say it, why shouldn't they say that? It is not the company's job to support personal web browsing preferences, and the use of company resources to browse the web at lunchtime or whatever is a perk, not a part of the job description. If IE/ActiveX/whatever is the corporate standard, and it works, then anyone else's browser had better be compatible with it or expect not to be adopted on the corporate desktop.
The same goes for using Thunderbird without Exchange connectivity, BTW.
Sorry, but yes it does, at least if you're a business user with a corporate intranet that uses ActiveX as many do. This stubborn attitude among the Moz community that ActiveX == bad, integration with Windows authentication == bad, etc. is exactly why Firefox has such low penetration on corporate desktops, which in turn is exactly why it's so rarely included with off-the-shelf PCs from big name vendors.
Seven deadly sins of successful software development, #5: Believing that what you think the users should have is more important than what the users actually want.
You laugh. I laugh. The vast majority of users don't give a damn...
So expect it around 2007Q2 then? ;-)
Please read your comment again, noting the part I've emphasized. These people broke the law, and were found to have done so by a court, not by some sort of recording industry shady dealing and barratry.
Now, you can bitch about how copyright law is unreasonable, and so on, yada yada. But the fact remains, that is the law right now, and it's a good bet that all of these people knew it. No-one forced them to break that law, and the recording industry was asking for legal remedies in court, as is its right. Why is this a problem?
As others have pointed out, the tiny number of customers in question probably aren't generating large amounts of revenue for the ISP.
Moreover, the fact that the ISP has been told about the infringing use of their network potentially lays them open to huge legal liability. We had Godfrey vs. Demon back in 1999, and ISPs in the UK have been shivering ever since.
IME, most large employers will do little more than confirming that Mr Jones did indeed work for them between the relevant dates. There's just no upside to giving any information they don't have to, and they could be screwed by either the former employee or his new employer if things go bad and the blame comes back to their reference.
In this case, I think the law should provide some sort of "good faith" safe harbour protection for those giving references (much as witnesses in court automatically get certain legal protections, as mentioned in this week's discussion about expert witnesses and professional regulatory bodies). Otherwise, there is simply no incentive to give a reference at all, and a lot of risk.
In the UK, even most of the "obvious" personal uses are infringing at present, though the majority of the population don't know this and do continue to do these things anyway. A review is underway that will hopefully result in fixing this particular legal daftness.
I agree with much of what you wrote, I'd take it even further: why do we fixate on the threads/tree model?
In extended discussions involving several people, I often see the same person send multiple mails in rapid succession, in reply to different mails by others, even if the separate discussion threads are actually talking about the same subject. I'd like to see a simple system for replying to and quoting from multiple messages in the same mail, so that you can bring together multiple discussion threads when the subjects converge again, and represent this in the discussion "thread" (which becomes a DAG rather than a tree, in data structure terms).
The idea you describe seems to be that if you've done a project before, then you can use the time that took as a guideline to help estimate future, similar projects. Sure, that's common sense, and a sensible thing to do. But what if most of your projects aren't related to what's gone before?
We recently hit a textbook example of what can go wrong: a new feature was estimated as taking six weeks for a single developer to implement, which was pretty accurate for the new design and code. Unfortunately, after more than a decade of incremental development, the underlying architecture was fundamentally flawed. For the most part, it worked well enough to support the existing features built on top of it (though the count of outstanding bugs at boundary cases was starting to mount up). However, the design had evolved without much control and oversight for a long time, and consequently it wasn't in good enough shape to extend straightforwardly to support our new feature.
Thus, although the high-level code was in place and working correctly pretty much on schedule, the actual project took more like six months than six weeks, with the extra time spent reworking all those incremental developments back into a coherent overall design that was then fit to extend to support the new functionality required. No-one in management saw this coming; it was just the time that the inevitable consequences of allowing ad-hoc development for extended periods came back to haunt that particular project. The extra work brought other benefits too, including fixing pretty much all of those awkward boundary case bugs. But it still took way longer than the estimate, for reasons no-one involved in the planning saw coming.
We're going to have to rebuild some of the basic comms protocols of the Internet pretty soon anyway, to solve increasing problems of spam, DDoS, and others. Why not fix this one at the same time?
As for lawful interception, the US government's current record on operating legally in these matters is pretty much totally lacking in credibility at this stage. Thanks for the thought, but I'll happily encrypt all of my private communications to prevent US authorities spying on them just because they happen to pass through a US-based organisation (something about which, given the nature of the Internet, I have little control). If the authorities need to know what I'm sending to someone and why, they have only to request that the local authorities in my country ask me, and if they give me a sensible reason I'll tell them without any need to waste time and resources trying to crack any encryption I happen to be using.
Yes it is, but I disagree with them. The UK has some pretty serious problems right now, and IMNSHO an awful lot of them stem from politically correct initiatives that affect how children may be treated and the rights they have. On the one hand, no forms of corporal punishment are now allowed in our schools, and parents must be wary of even smacking their children for fear of being accused of child abuse. On the other hand, antisocial behaviour has become one of the biggest problems facing our society. I've seen one of my neighbours confronting kids who were about to key the side of his car, and heard one of them shout at him that he couldn't do anything, because the kid was under 10 and he couldn't commit a crime - and I live in a pretty good neighbourhood compared to many places. Similar stories abound, often with responsible adults (including parents and teachers) winding up in court or otherwise under suspicion, while Joe Angelic seems untouchable even if caught red-handed doing something he shouldn't be.
Now, it doesn't take a genius to spot the connection here. Children don't yet have an adult level of maturity and responsibility; that's why they're still children. Thus it is manifestly unreasonable to treat them the same way as adults and expect the same response. I refuse to support the NSPCC (the biggest child protection charity in the UK) while they maintain that an absolute ban on smacking children is appropriate and use the "you wouldn't smack an adult" argument. We can debate the relative merits of corporal and other forms of punishment, and there are always the "My parents smacked me and it did me no harm" and "Well, I raised a child just fine without ever smacking them" brigades. However, I think even their axiom here is wrong: we do use violence, if necessary, to enforce the law on adults. This is, ultimately, what police forces and the military do. It may be reserved for use as a last resort, but the threat is always there. By excluding this possibility on a far smaller scale, children are actually being given a higher status than adults!
It happens that in this case, I do disagree with the rule. I think it's absurd that older children should have no default right to privacy, which is what this boils down to. You don't suddenly turn 18 and become responsible, and you're not automatically a menace to society at 17 years and 364 days. If there is a good reason for the adults responsible for that child to think they need to see something on the phone, that's one thing, but there must be a good reason.
Ultimately, it all comes down to the rights, freedoms and responsibilities thing, as it usually does in these discussions. The two are, or at least should be, fundamentally tied together. As long as you have adults who are legally responsible for minors, they need to have some degree of authority, and the minors can't reasonably expect the same level of rights and freedoms as if they were adults completely responsible for their own behaviour. On the other hand, as children grow older and behave more responsibly, it is inappropriate to deny them any extension of their rights and freedoms to match. Getting the balance wrong, in either direction, will inevitably lead to problems either where children are undisciplined and irresponsible, or where adults take advantage of them inappropriately.
FWIW, the safeguards I was proposing were not really about the obviously unfair, as would hopefully be covered by the sort of general consumer protection legislation you mentioned. Rather, I was highlighting cases where the industry "pulls a fast one", such as by selling the original software with one licence agreement, but then attaching further conditions to an upgrade that is necessary to continue using the software effectively. For example, this would apply to a security patch for a music player that also incorporated new DRM technologies, or to an anti-cheating patch for an on-line game required by the servers before you can play that also scanned your system and sent information back to the game company. I think it is unethical for a software company to accept your money in exchange for using their software, only to force you to accept other terms or see the software rendered unusable; IMHO, this is analogous to a unilateral variation of contract terms.
Well, we do have fair dealing provisions, so your generalisation to "any copying" isn't quite true. But you're right, the system isn't nearly as liberal as under the fair use provisions in the US, and I can't see why installing software would in general constitute fair dealing.
Of course, the Gowers review team is processing the reportedly rather large volume of submissions it received, and MPs have already been minuted as thinking certain copyright provisions are daft today (and not having much sympathy with the we-want-copyright-to-pay-our-pensions crowd supported by Cliff Richard recently). Methinks changes are afoot, and the music industry may just be smart enough here to realise that they're going to happen anyway, so it might as well play along and look for further business opportunities as a result.
I can't speak for anyone else, but in my own response to Gowers, I indicated that I thought the legal status of EULAs should be clarified explicitly, and proposed various safeguards that might reasonably be imposed to protect the public from abusive conditions if EULAs and similar agreements are legally enforceable. Here's hoping someone in government agrees with me! :-)
Unfortunately, he did exactly the opposite. From TFA:
I'm not a lawyer, but it sounds disturbingly as though a High Court judge just ruled EULAs legally binding in the UK without even having the case go to court.
That's odd. I've been doing software development full-time for nearly a decade, with plenty of relevant experience before that too. I've rarely seen a successful project that didn't operate with such a relationship, and rarely seen a failing project that did. Perhaps that's why the companies I've worked for have generally been successful.
What can be fairer than paying someone at a fair rate based on the amount of work they've actually done to meet your needs?
Laws like this are very dangerous things.
I am in favour of giving the benefit of the doubt to someone acting to defend their own home or those within it, where their actions are likely to have seemed reasonable to them at the time. However, IMHO this is one of the standard examples of why blanket laws are not a good idea.
The unknown person could have been unaware that they were somewhere they shouldn't be. They could have a mental illness, or be drunk or drugged, possibly as a result of the actions of others and without realising it. They could be in serious trouble, and trying to find help. Maybe they just made an honest mistake; have you never been in an appartment block/hotel/whatever and almost walked through the wrong identical-looking door? Perhaps the unknown person is even there deliberately for a good reason. Someone might have called in a medical emergency, and the ambulance crew is trying to find the casualty.
Of course you'd think someone with a sensible reason to be there - the girl running from the men who tried to grab her, or the paramedics looking for a casualty, say - would announce themselves and try to attract the attention of anyone whose home it might be. Maybe they did, and you just didn't hear them because of the shoot-out on TV when they knocked.
My point is simply that just because someone is on your property, they haven't automatically committed a crime serious enough to merit shooting them dead. If you're woken in the middle of the night by the sound of someone breaking your window and climbing into your home, and you have no reasonable opportunity to challenge them without endangering yourself or others, then giving you the benefit might be reasonable. If emergency services responding to call bang on your door, you don't answer because you don't hear them, and they then break the door down to try to reach a casualty, then seeing who they are and shooting them anyway is not reasonable.
At the risk of stretching an analogy too far, the case at hand here is closer to the case where someone breaks into your home, you noticing them as they leave and making a citizen's arrest at gunpoint, and them immediately surrendering. Do you think it's reasonable to shoot someone at that point, or would that just be the prejudice of someone who's been had and wants revenge? Which is more in the interests of justice?
It's interesting to look down this thread and see how many different rules of thumb are employed, apparently by quite experienced developers/managers.
It seems to me that we can make two reasonable assumptions based on this:
One might hypothesise, based on these assumptions, that any project plan that quotes hard figures up-front will be inaccurate most of the time, and without allowing a huge defensive overhead that inaccuracy will often be in the wrong direction.
Now, working from unreliable estimates is in no-one's interests. If a company overestimates by too much on a fixed-price contract, it risks being undercut by a more realistic competitor. If it underestimates, it will look bad when things over-run, its profits will fall, and its reputation will suffer as well.
So what conclusions can we draw from this?
Firstly, if we're looking for realistic management, the way to go is almost always some sort of time and materials contract, with floating deadlines based on when features are actually ready. This allows good developers to do their job properly, which in the long run will be more efficient, and it means that other groups such as sales, marketing and customer support can be kept informed and given realistic expectations.
Secondly, fixed-price contracts are only a good bet for a software development firm if it can include enough slack to be safe, without including so much that it can be undercut by more realistic competitors. The corollary, of course, is that if you're a client, you're almost inevitably going to be screwed by agreeing to a fixed-price contract, even without considering the lack of flexibility it entails.
It is a rare project indeed that truly requires hard deadlines. Smart clients and smart development shops will reach a more flexible arrangement, and come to respect each other for having realistic expectations and providing realistic updates as time goes on.
There's a lot of truth in Brooks, but you have to take it in context. Adding manpower to a late project may indeed make it later, but adding more manpower up-front and managing it well can increase the capacity of your team to deliver a project, and therefore get the work done sooner. You get diminishing returns to an extent, of course.
I'm honestly not having a dig at you personally here, but I never understand the attitude exemplified by your post:
Why would you ever "kill yourself" (I know what you meant) to get something out the door? Unless perhaps you're talking about something that is safety-critical, where having your code sooner (even if it's not perfect) may literally save lives, I can't imagine the motivation.
As you say, if you grind harder, unethical employers will just give you more work to do. Heroes are short-term assets for a bad business: you can take advantage of their generosity, burn them out, and then just dump them and get a new one. Being a hero is rarely a personal benefit, because the kind of company that takes advantage of it rarely rewards it, while the kind of company that appreciates good work usually understands the need not to overwork its staff (and, not coincidentally, rarely needs deathmarches and heroes, because their timescales and management generally don't get into that sort of mess in the first place).
If you have the kind of work ethic that allows you to pull all-nighters or whatever, and you're a good enough developer to produce useful code even under those conditions, then why not move to a better employer? They won't expect you to work absurd hours, and will value the quality of code you produce anyway. Your life will be better for it, and you'll be supporting a good employer rather than propping up a lousy one.
Yes, I did think that particular example was daft. (I read several of the responses the AG's issues paper and the AG's subsequent comments while preparing a submission of my own for the UK's Gowers review.)
That said, it's a lot less daft than selling VCRs but saying that all time-shifting is illegal, which seemed to be the case before. It might not be ideal, but at least things are going in the right direction. :-)
I thought some of the other provisions, such as the format-shifting I mentioned before, sounded a lot more reasonable.
Do you know what the article here is talking about? Both links were Slashdotted (despite apparently being cache links... go figure) and unless I'm missing something there's nothing mentioned by name to go and look up. What is this new legislation, and how does it fit in with the AG's issues paper and the review of the ACA?
What "US-FTA-required DMCA legislation"? The Australian AG's office only recently published revised copyright information that seemed to be fixing some of the silliness: time-shifting using VCRs, format-shifting of music, etc.
The tool of choice for discriminating wannabe L337 Hax0rz?
Sorry, couldn't resist. :o)
Surely the scary thing is that they had all this spying going on and still didn't see the biggest terrorist attack in recent history coming?
That kinda makes the whole "we need all these draconian powers to keep our country safe" argument a bit thin.
Freedom of speech is not the same as freedom of responsibility for what you say.
In some cases, truly anonymous speech has value. In other cases, truly anonymous speech creates victims of its own and leaves them with no means of redress. This issue is not black and white, and never will be.