The resources needed to run Halflife 2, and the resources required to run a Instant Messenger application, are on a quite different scale from one another. Clearly, therefore, you can afford more inefficiencies in an IM application, than you could in the latest 3D game. Are you claiming that this isn't the case?
Sure, as long as the IM is the only software running on your client's PC. However, most computers today are running multi-tasking OSes, and resources your inefficient software steals aren't available for other applications that might need them.
We just rejected a software upgrade at work, worth thousands to the vendor for our office alone, on the basis that while it ran fine in isolation, it wouldn't play nicely with other software on the machines under some indeterminate circumstances. That would stop us doing our jobs as well as we were before, so bye bye upgrade.
Tamiflu was never expected to be a completely effective counter to a mutated strain of bird flu. It might help some people for a short time, which is great of course, but we'll still need a tailored vaccine that currently takes a few months to produce if we're going to beat it on a wide scale. This is why the medical profession is so worried about it, and why so much effort is currently focussed on cutting the time from identifying the mutated strain to availability of a matching vaccine.
Fake arguments involving hello world apps should not be taken as a way of comparing languages.
True. But showing that a language requires unnecessary design elements like classes to model even simple behaviour, and requires cumbersome syntax to do even trivial tasks, is fair game. "Hello, world" is simply a concise illustration of the problems with Java's horribly bloated syntax and underpowered design tools.
I know we disagree about some things, but I'd like to wholeheartedly support your position here. The constant shifting of responsibility amongst retailers and suppliers is exactly what leads to a lower quality of product, and the lack of clear liability so that a consumer can seek compensation straightforwardly is exactly why they get away with it.
I also agree with some of the earlier posts that suggest the retailer should be responsible to the consumer. After all, they are happy to take the profit for being the middleman, so why should they not incur the risk as well? As you say, if they are genuinely innocent, they will presumably have grounds to sue their own supplier in turn, and so on up the chain until the true culprit is the one losing out. In the meantime, everyone's clear on where they stand, and there are no bizarre class action suits, third party agreements, yada yada.
FWIW, I'd buy at your store rather than a less conscientious competitor's every time, even if your prices are higher.
Ajax doesn't need rails. It flies, both defying the laws of physics and generating a thumping Queen soundtrack in the neighbourhood that makes your car stereo weep with envy.
My ISP package includes 3GB of downloads a month, or around 100MB a day on average. I can use more if I want to, but they charge a higher price for a higher threshold, and since I don't need it 99.99% of the time, I don't want to upgrade. It's a money thing, not a time thing.
I would rather put 99% of efforts to improve compatibility with MS Office.
I'd rather 99% of the effort went into anything but MS compatibility. It's a battle they can't win; OOo will never be a better MS Office than MS Office (unless Microsoft actually goes backwards in a future version, of course, which isn't beyond the bounds of possibility).
What I want isn't a clone of MS Office, it's a good quality word processor that does some things better than Word, or a good quality spreadsheet that helps me do more than I can do with the same effort in Excel. In past discussions, I've mentioned several areas that are important to significant numbers of users and where no current office suite is really doing a good job. Of all the office software in the world, something like OOo should be best placed to capitalise on this opportunity in the market, yet it doesn't. Why? Obsession with MS Office compatibility, I'm betting.
well, you could always download the source code and keep up to date yourself using CVS or whatever system they're using... the builds are just for the convenience of those who lack the ability/resources/knowledge to do it for themselves...
Such as about 99% of office suite users, you mean?:-)
lower standard of living (aparently Canada fell below Ireland recently.. yikes!)
Is that the same Ireland that is now one of the best places in Europe to live, looking relatively good on everything from economic stability to crime levels?
That's all fair enough, and I don't disagree that the approach you describe can work well. I think we're a little beyond what the original poster meant when he talked about cheap command-line editors here, though.
However, if we accept the idea of copyright, particularly as a social contract, what recourse do you suggest when one side breaks their part of the social contract?
I think it would have to depend on the way it was broken, and the damage to the other party.
For someone who's paying for the content, for example, there's a huge difference between burning a compilation CD of your favourite tracks and giving them to your SO, and putting the whole album on a high-bandwidth P2P link and advertising it. The penalties involved should be enough to compensate the copyright holder and to act as a deterrent, but should be proportionate to the real damage caused.
I think the other way around is more black and white, because copyright holders basically either supply an unencumbered version of their content in exchange for whatever compensation is agreed, or they do something that's going to limit long-term freedom or various fair uses for pretty much everyone getting the content. In the latter case, a simple court order to provide an unencumbered version should always suffice to fix any damage, as long as this is realistically accessible to the general public so that people don't feel that it's easier to just go out and spend more money on a new copy (profiting the copyright holder at the expense of the public). Of course, copyright holders might devise new ways to respect fair use while still distributing DRM'd content, and combined with some sort of escrow to guarantee that the content can't remain locked up once the copyright protection expires, that might present a mutually acceptably alternative.
Incidentally, I think it's worth saying here that I don't think copyright should be used to protect everything from being copied. I believe that some things should be protected by separate, more tightly targetted, and more restrictive provisions, partly because not everything is about money, and partly to avoid any arguments for increasing copyright universally because of these special cases. Some examples that come immediately to mind are:
"official secrets" type legislation, where for genuine security reasons it may be necessary to prevent copying the material for a long time or to avoid the usual safeguards about escrow;
private communications, where IMHO for ethical reasons, a private communication from one individual to another should never be disclosed without the consent of the author (at least for as long as the author remains within living memory);
the question of balancing the importance of freedom of speech with the need to protect the vulnerable, and whether it should ever be legal to copy some types of material by default -- I question whether there is any need to distribute kiddie porn other than for crime fighting or, just possibly, very restricted academic or journalistic purposes, for example.
In each of these cases, I see no compelling public interest in copying the information, and a good reason for keeping the material restricted effectively forever (where the meaning of "forever" depends on the nature of the information and the damage that might be done by its general circulation).
You seem to be suggesting that it'd be OK to circumvent DRM on works that would be out of copyright, but not those that are newer and should expect the protection of copyright. The original "now it's ON" poster is saying that he feels that it's acceptable, in light of big media's violation of the social contract, to retaliate. How do you feel about that idea? Is it ever OK to break your side of the social contract?
Well, there are several independent questions there, I think.
As to the DRM issue, my take on it is that if the DRM prevents any fair use, it shouldn't be allowed, or the law should compel the copyright holder to facilitate that fair use in some reasonable way. On the other hand, if the DRM stops someone illegally distributing the content on a wide scale but
OK, let me be clear, because I'm getting tired of people (not just you) reading things into my posts that aren't there.
I am no apologist for the big media industries. I think their lobbying to get copyright terms extended to almost geological timescales is both morally wrong and probably bad for business in the long run too. I think fair use provisions should be rights, and should explicitly include common things like making back-ups, format-shifting and making compilations, and moreover I think any attempt by a copyright holder to actively restrict the enjoyment of those rights by a legitimate holder of a copy of the material should be subject to legal blocks. As far as I'm concerned, they can take their ineffective-against-real-lawbreakers but annoying-to-genuine-customers DRM and shove it if that happens to conflict with the above (as it almost inevitably will). Finally, it's about time the whole industry was dealt with over its transparent price-fixing and other anti-competitive behaviour, as provided for in law.
There, now I've got that off my chest, I will also say that I belive the underlying principle of copyright is sound. Our economies work, and pretty well in comparison to many others, based on some basic capitalist principles. People who rip off copyright material are upsetting the economics at best, and screwing a genuinely needy content creator out of fair compensation for their work at worst. I have no sympathy for people who do this, get caught, and get punished in a proportionate manner. If you rip an album, put it on P2P, let thousands of people copy it illegally, and get caught, then I have no problem whatsoever with your being fined a few thousand times the current selling price of the album, and I don't for an instant buy the usual weasel words about people not necessarily buying the album otherwise, or about the guy who buys more music as a result of the illegal copying (whom I strangely have never met).
Now, to address the specific point you mentioned, sure, let's view copyright infringement as it applies today, and that DRM is designed to combat, in light of the extended copyright duration we agree is too long. How many of the works covered by DRM today would have been out of copyright under a more reasonable timespan of, say, 10 years? What proportion of material traded on obviously mostly illegal P2P nets is less than 5 years old, and still easily available at stores? What proportion is less than three months old, and probably still recovering genuine expenses that those responsible for creating the work incurred, never mind making a profit or covering the media groups' other expenses on acts that didn't work out? (Yes, I know the big media players are very good at passing this on -- which just means you're slamming the good guys who actually make new content if you dodge paying early on.)
If you can show a serious level of correlation between the content widely swapped and increasingly distributed with some form of DRM attached, and the content that is now covered by extended copyright periods but wouldn't have been under the original duration, I'll read your comments with an open mind. Maybe you'll even convince me that my current position on this issue is wrong. However, right now I suspect that the vast, vast majority of illegal copying that DRM is aiming for would be well within even the original copyright durations, and the whole extended duration thing, while a valid concern in its own right, is nothing but more smoke and mirrors to try and justify an ethically dubious position to most illegal swappers.
'Selfish people' are the people who want a 'fair use' that the copyright holder don't believe in.
I suspect we all want to make fair use of the content we pay for. The difference is that before the song-swappers came along and took the piss, the rest of us could actually do it. Since the lawbreakers and the media industry lawyer escalated everything, we often can't. No-one won here: the lawbreakers who get picked on get their lives ruined by absurd penalties, the media industry isn't making any more money, and the rest of us can't do what we used to. The only people who are winning are those who rip off the media industry and don't get caught.
My problem is that if a minority of selfish people hadn't abused the system on a massive scale, then we'd probably have viable, reasonably-priced on-line distribution today, and that would have been a benefit to everyone. Instead, the lawbreakers are driving all the paranoid media industry bigwigs away from that model, and towards DRM-restricted crap that makes it hard and/or illegal for the rest of us to do otherwise reasonable things like we used to. People like you have started a shooting war with the media industry lawyers, which no-one will win in the long run, and which is catching the majority of people who just want to enjoy decent content at a fair price in the cross-fire.
We're talking about using DRM that restricts the user's access to content today, not the absurd increases in copyright durations legislated by several national governments recently. Please take your straw man outside the building to burn.
There used to be. It was called copyright law. Then large numbers of selfish people decided they were above the law, and it ceased to be as effective at fighting copyright infringement. You can't really blame the media industry for fighting back (though you certainly can challenge their methods and fight to defend your legitimate rights as a user of the content).
If you look at the original question of that guy, he says "I'd like those applications to be usable on the Linux and perhaps Mac OS X platforms." Looks to me as he does neither mentions Windows nor performance, but Unix and cross-architecture portability.
Sure, and in other posts that's what I've addressed. In this subthread, however, the claim was that command line tools could be counter-productive and frustrating (not "crap", despite what you attributed to the OP). Your particular question was when gcc wasn't up to the job, and I gave you some examples where it isn't.
AFAICT, Intel's compilers are still better than the MS ones.
Yes, they produce better code, at least on Intel boxes. However, their development suite as a whole sucks; we recently trialled several profilers at work, and Intel's VTune stuff was so convoluted, hard to install and hard to get even plausible results out of that we rejected it by the end of the first day of evaluation.
So, if I may ask, since when exactly is Emacs considered crap?
That depends on whether you find entering text is always the most efficient way of writing all your code. For many jobs, it clearly isn't.
Since when is gcc not up to the task?
That depends on, amongst other things, how much you value the performance of your output code, and how much you need to use a widely portable compiler. For example, if you're writing for Wintel, the Visual Studio suite has blown away anything the GNU tools had to offer in terms of development environment, usefulness of debugging tools, quality of generated code, and various other rather important metrics. (This isn't to say it will necessarily continue to do so, nor that using GNU tools doesn't have advantages in other areas.)
I suspect we agree on much more than we disagree on here, but perhaps I'm not making my point clearly enough.
I'm not saying that people should program without knowing what the underlying model is, or what the code generated by their whizzy GUI designer does. On the contrary, I think these are valuable things that will serve any programmer well eventually. What I am saying is that just because it's helpful in the long run to understand these things, you don't have to learn all the little details first. Remember we're talking about someone getting back into programming after a pretty long gap here. There will be plenty of time to understand the deep issues later, but first you have to have some context and get into the subject a little, at least IMHO and IME as someone who's taught several skills at several levels to different kinds of people.
Also, you don't have to do everything the hard way all the time in order to understand it. Would you calculate the ratio of two large integers by long division? I wouldn't, I'd use a calculator of some sort. Does that mean I don't understand long division, or that I couldn't do it if I had to? No. It just means that I find it more productive and less error-prone to get a machine to do it for me.
Finally, on the issue of CLIs vs. GUIs, I think your implicit assumptions are a little unfair. In neither of the examples I gave will a half-decent GUI generator produce worse code than hand-coded, or obscure the real meaning behind pages of macro-driven baloney. Programming with a text editor that helps correct mistakes on-the-fly will make you a lot nearer to practically perfect than programming with a text editor that doesn't, and if it comes with more natural, more powerful tools for generating some of the code to boot, it will do it much faster, too. Do you really think it's still necessary to hand-code a makefile in today's programming world? I can't remember the last time I needed to do it, or even to worry about it, other than when porting to inferior development platforms that don't have tools to do it all for me with a couple of quick instructions. (Typically, one of my first actions on such platforms is to port/write suitable tools that do do this.)
At the end of the day, I think programming is difficult enough with good tools and good languages. One developer's world just isn't big enough to fit in all the cruft as well, and life's too short to waste it on inefficient tools just because. Learning anything more fundamental/lower level is usually useful only as a route to greater understanding, and even then it's only as useful as the greater understanding it brings.
Did it ever occur to you that an interview is a two-way process? If my credentials have impressed you enough that I'm worth your time to interview and you're considering employing me, why wouldn't you want to impress me in return so I'd consider taking the job? I can and do judge prospective employers from the moment I arrive at the premises for a first interview. Many of the questions I'll ask silently, but I'll be asking them all the same.
For example, the first thing I check for as I walk up to the building is the nature of the cars in the car park. I'm not saying everyone with money likes to spend it on flashy wheels, or that I'd be suspicious of a company with nothing but 10-year-old bangers outside. Something I would find suspicious would be all the directors having reserved parking filled with executivemobiles, but everyone else having 10-year-old bangers.
Then we go inside. Am I greeted properly or made to wait around for a long time? Am I offered a drink while I wait for the interviewer to arrive? How is the office laid out? What's the level of conversation like: silent, mild friendly chatter, focussed technical discussion? Do the guys making a coffee in the kitchen look like they're enjoying a short break or like they're under pressure to be right back at their desks ASAP? How does the interviewer introduce him/herself when he/she arrives? Do they pronounce my name properly, or politely check the correct pronunciation if they aren't sure? Depending on the nature of the job/company, have they made an effort to be presentable?
I've taken all of that in before I even sit down with you at the table. Then comes one of the acid tests. If, as you suggest, the interview is treated as essentially a grilling and I, the interviewee, am treated as some sort of expendable cannon fodder, then I will not be impressed. We'll never have that other discussion you mentioned, because I will rate your company as not worth working for for any amount of money.
If, on the other hand, I'm immediately invited to ask questions as we go through the interview, and when I do so I'm given honest and straightforward answers, I will think much more highly of the prospective employer. I will, quite deliberately, ask polite but honest questions about things like working conditions and remuneration at some appropriate moment. One of my acid tests, though I usually leave this until the contract stage, is IP: does my employer expect to own any rights to anything I do outside of work (in which case, they will never be my employer)?
If any employer won't discuss these things honestly with someone they're interviewing, particularly straightforward and objective things like typical working hours in a week, then either they have something to hide (probably) or they have some overly rigid policy about how interviews are to be conducted that doesn't place sufficient value on me. In either case, it's unlikely either of us would be happy with me working there, and I will not regret asking the questions. No employer worth working for really thinks you're there purely to help they're company, so I just dispense with the bull up-front.
So far, I have never yet worked for an employer I wasn't happy with, and I've never been short of job offers when I've been looking. Equally, assuming I can take colleagues' comments and my formal performance reviews at face value, my employers have always been happy with me, too. So apparently my interview policy works for both sides. I wonder how many good people you lose because of yours.
Sorry, but since when is expressing an honest opinion a troll? I know a lot of people who would agree that relying on CLI voodoo really is needlessly inefficient for many programming tasks. Use the right tool for the job, or write the right tool first if it doesn't exist yet and then use it.
Sure, you can design dialog boxes by writing scripts in an editor, but why bother when you can use an interactive GUI to do it in 1/10th the time? Sure, you can write, debug and test your Perl CGI script using nothing but the command line tool and a live web server that's firewalled off the outside world, but why bother if you've got a test environment that's designed to simulate CGI requests from a web page and has testing tools to make that easy?
Personally, I don't think anything has yet beaten a sufficient powerful text editor for doing web work (HTML, CSS, that sort of thing). All the web design applications I've encountered are just too limiting and under-powered. For programming anything from a moderately long script to a full-scale application, though, I concur with the grandparent post: there are plenty of tools to make common programming tasks easier. Someone like the submitter will probably have plenty to learn at first, without trying to do it with one hand behind his back and spoiling the enjoyment by learning to write pages of boilerplate rather than using the right tool for the job.
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Sure, as long as the IM is the only software running on your client's PC. However, most computers today are running multi-tasking OSes, and resources your inefficient software steals aren't available for other applications that might need them.
We just rejected a software upgrade at work, worth thousands to the vendor for our office alone, on the basis that while it ran fine in isolation, it wouldn't play nicely with other software on the machines under some indeterminate circumstances. That would stop us doing our jobs as well as we were before, so bye bye upgrade.
Tamiflu was never expected to be a completely effective counter to a mutated strain of bird flu. It might help some people for a short time, which is great of course, but we'll still need a tailored vaccine that currently takes a few months to produce if we're going to beat it on a wide scale. This is why the medical profession is so worried about it, and why so much effort is currently focussed on cutting the time from identifying the mutated strain to availability of a matching vaccine.
True. But showing that a language requires unnecessary design elements like classes to model even simple behaviour, and requires cumbersome syntax to do even trivial tasks, is fair game. "Hello, world" is simply a concise illustration of the problems with Java's horribly bloated syntax and underpowered design tools.
I know we disagree about some things, but I'd like to wholeheartedly support your position here. The constant shifting of responsibility amongst retailers and suppliers is exactly what leads to a lower quality of product, and the lack of clear liability so that a consumer can seek compensation straightforwardly is exactly why they get away with it.
I also agree with some of the earlier posts that suggest the retailer should be responsible to the consumer. After all, they are happy to take the profit for being the middleman, so why should they not incur the risk as well? As you say, if they are genuinely innocent, they will presumably have grounds to sue their own supplier in turn, and so on up the chain until the true culprit is the one losing out. In the meantime, everyone's clear on where they stand, and there are no bizarre class action suits, third party agreements, yada yada.
FWIW, I'd buy at your store rather than a less conscientious competitor's every time, even if your prices are higher.
Ajax doesn't need rails. It flies, both defying the laws of physics and generating a thumping Queen soundtrack in the neighbourhood that makes your car stereo weep with envy.
My ISP package includes 3GB of downloads a month, or around 100MB a day on average. I can use more if I want to, but they charge a higher price for a higher threshold, and since I don't need it 99.99% of the time, I don't want to upgrade. It's a money thing, not a time thing.
Perhaps, but it's my entire broadband download quota for the day, and I'm not willing to spend that on a .0.1 upgrade when I've already got the .0.0.
Sounds more like the use of Shift-F5 for an almost identical purpose in Microsoft Word.
I'd rather 99% of the effort went into anything but MS compatibility. It's a battle they can't win; OOo will never be a better MS Office than MS Office (unless Microsoft actually goes backwards in a future version, of course, which isn't beyond the bounds of possibility).
What I want isn't a clone of MS Office, it's a good quality word processor that does some things better than Word, or a good quality spreadsheet that helps me do more than I can do with the same effort in Excel. In past discussions, I've mentioned several areas that are important to significant numbers of users and where no current office suite is really doing a good job. Of all the office software in the world, something like OOo should be best placed to capitalise on this opportunity in the market, yet it doesn't. Why? Obsession with MS Office compatibility, I'm betting.
Such as about 99% of office suite users, you mean? :-)
Is that the same Ireland that is now one of the best places in Europe to live, looking relatively good on everything from economic stability to crime levels?
We're working on it.
Merry Christmas!
The British Government
That's all fair enough, and I don't disagree that the approach you describe can work well. I think we're a little beyond what the original poster meant when he talked about cheap command-line editors here, though.
I think it would have to depend on the way it was broken, and the damage to the other party.
For someone who's paying for the content, for example, there's a huge difference between burning a compilation CD of your favourite tracks and giving them to your SO, and putting the whole album on a high-bandwidth P2P link and advertising it. The penalties involved should be enough to compensate the copyright holder and to act as a deterrent, but should be proportionate to the real damage caused.
I think the other way around is more black and white, because copyright holders basically either supply an unencumbered version of their content in exchange for whatever compensation is agreed, or they do something that's going to limit long-term freedom or various fair uses for pretty much everyone getting the content. In the latter case, a simple court order to provide an unencumbered version should always suffice to fix any damage, as long as this is realistically accessible to the general public so that people don't feel that it's easier to just go out and spend more money on a new copy (profiting the copyright holder at the expense of the public). Of course, copyright holders might devise new ways to respect fair use while still distributing DRM'd content, and combined with some sort of escrow to guarantee that the content can't remain locked up once the copyright protection expires, that might present a mutually acceptably alternative.
Incidentally, I think it's worth saying here that I don't think copyright should be used to protect everything from being copied. I believe that some things should be protected by separate, more tightly targetted, and more restrictive provisions, partly because not everything is about money, and partly to avoid any arguments for increasing copyright universally because of these special cases. Some examples that come immediately to mind are:
In each of these cases, I see no compelling public interest in copying the information, and a good reason for keeping the material restricted effectively forever (where the meaning of "forever" depends on the nature of the information and the damage that might be done by its general circulation).
Well, there are several independent questions there, I think.
As to the DRM issue, my take on it is that if the DRM prevents any fair use, it shouldn't be allowed, or the law should compel the copyright holder to facilitate that fair use in some reasonable way. On the other hand, if the DRM stops someone illegally distributing the content on a wide scale but
OK, let me be clear, because I'm getting tired of people (not just you) reading things into my posts that aren't there.
I am no apologist for the big media industries. I think their lobbying to get copyright terms extended to almost geological timescales is both morally wrong and probably bad for business in the long run too. I think fair use provisions should be rights, and should explicitly include common things like making back-ups, format-shifting and making compilations, and moreover I think any attempt by a copyright holder to actively restrict the enjoyment of those rights by a legitimate holder of a copy of the material should be subject to legal blocks. As far as I'm concerned, they can take their ineffective-against-real-lawbreakers but annoying-to-genuine-customers DRM and shove it if that happens to conflict with the above (as it almost inevitably will). Finally, it's about time the whole industry was dealt with over its transparent price-fixing and other anti-competitive behaviour, as provided for in law.
There, now I've got that off my chest, I will also say that I belive the underlying principle of copyright is sound. Our economies work, and pretty well in comparison to many others, based on some basic capitalist principles. People who rip off copyright material are upsetting the economics at best, and screwing a genuinely needy content creator out of fair compensation for their work at worst. I have no sympathy for people who do this, get caught, and get punished in a proportionate manner. If you rip an album, put it on P2P, let thousands of people copy it illegally, and get caught, then I have no problem whatsoever with your being fined a few thousand times the current selling price of the album, and I don't for an instant buy the usual weasel words about people not necessarily buying the album otherwise, or about the guy who buys more music as a result of the illegal copying (whom I strangely have never met).
Now, to address the specific point you mentioned, sure, let's view copyright infringement as it applies today, and that DRM is designed to combat, in light of the extended copyright duration we agree is too long. How many of the works covered by DRM today would have been out of copyright under a more reasonable timespan of, say, 10 years? What proportion of material traded on obviously mostly illegal P2P nets is less than 5 years old, and still easily available at stores? What proportion is less than three months old, and probably still recovering genuine expenses that those responsible for creating the work incurred, never mind making a profit or covering the media groups' other expenses on acts that didn't work out? (Yes, I know the big media players are very good at passing this on -- which just means you're slamming the good guys who actually make new content if you dodge paying early on.)
If you can show a serious level of correlation between the content widely swapped and increasingly distributed with some form of DRM attached, and the content that is now covered by extended copyright periods but wouldn't have been under the original duration, I'll read your comments with an open mind. Maybe you'll even convince me that my current position on this issue is wrong. However, right now I suspect that the vast, vast majority of illegal copying that DRM is aiming for would be well within even the original copyright durations, and the whole extended duration thing, while a valid concern in its own right, is nothing but more smoke and mirrors to try and justify an ethically dubious position to most illegal swappers.
I suspect we all want to make fair use of the content we pay for. The difference is that before the song-swappers came along and took the piss, the rest of us could actually do it. Since the lawbreakers and the media industry lawyer escalated everything, we often can't. No-one won here: the lawbreakers who get picked on get their lives ruined by absurd penalties, the media industry isn't making any more money, and the rest of us can't do what we used to. The only people who are winning are those who rip off the media industry and don't get caught.
My problem is that if a minority of selfish people hadn't abused the system on a massive scale, then we'd probably have viable, reasonably-priced on-line distribution today, and that would have been a benefit to everyone. Instead, the lawbreakers are driving all the paranoid media industry bigwigs away from that model, and towards DRM-restricted crap that makes it hard and/or illegal for the rest of us to do otherwise reasonable things like we used to. People like you have started a shooting war with the media industry lawyers, which no-one will win in the long run, and which is catching the majority of people who just want to enjoy decent content at a fair price in the cross-fire.
We're talking about using DRM that restricts the user's access to content today, not the absurd increases in copyright durations legislated by several national governments recently. Please take your straw man outside the building to burn.
There used to be. It was called copyright law. Then large numbers of selfish people decided they were above the law, and it ceased to be as effective at fighting copyright infringement. You can't really blame the media industry for fighting back (though you certainly can challenge their methods and fight to defend your legitimate rights as a user of the content).
Sure, and in other posts that's what I've addressed. In this subthread, however, the claim was that command line tools could be counter-productive and frustrating (not "crap", despite what you attributed to the OP). Your particular question was when gcc wasn't up to the job, and I gave you some examples where it isn't.
Yes, they produce better code, at least on Intel boxes. However, their development suite as a whole sucks; we recently trialled several profilers at work, and Intel's VTune stuff was so convoluted, hard to install and hard to get even plausible results out of that we rejected it by the end of the first day of evaluation.
That depends on whether you find entering text is always the most efficient way of writing all your code. For many jobs, it clearly isn't.
That depends on, amongst other things, how much you value the performance of your output code, and how much you need to use a widely portable compiler. For example, if you're writing for Wintel, the Visual Studio suite has blown away anything the GNU tools had to offer in terms of development environment, usefulness of debugging tools, quality of generated code, and various other rather important metrics. (This isn't to say it will necessarily continue to do so, nor that using GNU tools doesn't have advantages in other areas.)
I suspect we agree on much more than we disagree on here, but perhaps I'm not making my point clearly enough.
I'm not saying that people should program without knowing what the underlying model is, or what the code generated by their whizzy GUI designer does. On the contrary, I think these are valuable things that will serve any programmer well eventually. What I am saying is that just because it's helpful in the long run to understand these things, you don't have to learn all the little details first. Remember we're talking about someone getting back into programming after a pretty long gap here. There will be plenty of time to understand the deep issues later, but first you have to have some context and get into the subject a little, at least IMHO and IME as someone who's taught several skills at several levels to different kinds of people.
Also, you don't have to do everything the hard way all the time in order to understand it. Would you calculate the ratio of two large integers by long division? I wouldn't, I'd use a calculator of some sort. Does that mean I don't understand long division, or that I couldn't do it if I had to? No. It just means that I find it more productive and less error-prone to get a machine to do it for me.
Finally, on the issue of CLIs vs. GUIs, I think your implicit assumptions are a little unfair. In neither of the examples I gave will a half-decent GUI generator produce worse code than hand-coded, or obscure the real meaning behind pages of macro-driven baloney. Programming with a text editor that helps correct mistakes on-the-fly will make you a lot nearer to practically perfect than programming with a text editor that doesn't, and if it comes with more natural, more powerful tools for generating some of the code to boot, it will do it much faster, too. Do you really think it's still necessary to hand-code a makefile in today's programming world? I can't remember the last time I needed to do it, or even to worry about it, other than when porting to inferior development platforms that don't have tools to do it all for me with a couple of quick instructions. (Typically, one of my first actions on such platforms is to port/write suitable tools that do do this.)
At the end of the day, I think programming is difficult enough with good tools and good languages. One developer's world just isn't big enough to fit in all the cruft as well, and life's too short to waste it on inefficient tools just because. Learning anything more fundamental/lower level is usually useful only as a route to greater understanding, and even then it's only as useful as the greater understanding it brings.
You don't think he might be just slightly biased on that one? :-)
Did it ever occur to you that an interview is a two-way process? If my credentials have impressed you enough that I'm worth your time to interview and you're considering employing me, why wouldn't you want to impress me in return so I'd consider taking the job? I can and do judge prospective employers from the moment I arrive at the premises for a first interview. Many of the questions I'll ask silently, but I'll be asking them all the same.
For example, the first thing I check for as I walk up to the building is the nature of the cars in the car park. I'm not saying everyone with money likes to spend it on flashy wheels, or that I'd be suspicious of a company with nothing but 10-year-old bangers outside. Something I would find suspicious would be all the directors having reserved parking filled with executivemobiles, but everyone else having 10-year-old bangers.
Then we go inside. Am I greeted properly or made to wait around for a long time? Am I offered a drink while I wait for the interviewer to arrive? How is the office laid out? What's the level of conversation like: silent, mild friendly chatter, focussed technical discussion? Do the guys making a coffee in the kitchen look like they're enjoying a short break or like they're under pressure to be right back at their desks ASAP? How does the interviewer introduce him/herself when he/she arrives? Do they pronounce my name properly, or politely check the correct pronunciation if they aren't sure? Depending on the nature of the job/company, have they made an effort to be presentable?
I've taken all of that in before I even sit down with you at the table. Then comes one of the acid tests. If, as you suggest, the interview is treated as essentially a grilling and I, the interviewee, am treated as some sort of expendable cannon fodder, then I will not be impressed. We'll never have that other discussion you mentioned, because I will rate your company as not worth working for for any amount of money.
If, on the other hand, I'm immediately invited to ask questions as we go through the interview, and when I do so I'm given honest and straightforward answers, I will think much more highly of the prospective employer. I will, quite deliberately, ask polite but honest questions about things like working conditions and remuneration at some appropriate moment. One of my acid tests, though I usually leave this until the contract stage, is IP: does my employer expect to own any rights to anything I do outside of work (in which case, they will never be my employer)?
If any employer won't discuss these things honestly with someone they're interviewing, particularly straightforward and objective things like typical working hours in a week, then either they have something to hide (probably) or they have some overly rigid policy about how interviews are to be conducted that doesn't place sufficient value on me. In either case, it's unlikely either of us would be happy with me working there, and I will not regret asking the questions. No employer worth working for really thinks you're there purely to help they're company, so I just dispense with the bull up-front.
So far, I have never yet worked for an employer I wasn't happy with, and I've never been short of job offers when I've been looking. Equally, assuming I can take colleagues' comments and my formal performance reviews at face value, my employers have always been happy with me, too. So apparently my interview policy works for both sides. I wonder how many good people you lose because of yours.
Sorry, but since when is expressing an honest opinion a troll? I know a lot of people who would agree that relying on CLI voodoo really is needlessly inefficient for many programming tasks. Use the right tool for the job, or write the right tool first if it doesn't exist yet and then use it.
Sure, you can design dialog boxes by writing scripts in an editor, but why bother when you can use an interactive GUI to do it in 1/10th the time? Sure, you can write, debug and test your Perl CGI script using nothing but the command line tool and a live web server that's firewalled off the outside world, but why bother if you've got a test environment that's designed to simulate CGI requests from a web page and has testing tools to make that easy?
Personally, I don't think anything has yet beaten a sufficient powerful text editor for doing web work (HTML, CSS, that sort of thing). All the web design applications I've encountered are just too limiting and under-powered. For programming anything from a moderately long script to a full-scale application, though, I concur with the grandparent post: there are plenty of tools to make common programming tasks easier. Someone like the submitter will probably have plenty to learn at first, without trying to do it with one hand behind his back and spoiling the enjoyment by learning to write pages of boilerplate rather than using the right tool for the job.