I guess my point is that I don't think the code monkeys should be making the key algorithmic decisions. That role falls to the "low-level expert" category in my scheme; the tool-builders should provide suitable tools, in consultation with the high-level experts co-ordinating the design. It is up to them to determine the appropriate key algorithms to use, and to build the dev team's tools and libraries around them. In this way, while you don't quite have standardised key pieces because some or all can be bespoke, what you do have is all the foundations written by the really smart guys. Then the average developers can all benefit from the really smart guys' expertise.
For example, suppose you've got a database application. You get the best database guy you've got to design the schema, and work out how to provide efficient answers to common queries, which the high-level design guys can help to identify. He wraps it all up in a safe, efficient API, and then the rest of the dev team can build the main application code around it, safe in the knowledge that the API is secure and fast. Scale to fit depending on the size of your application and the number of guys of each type you've got on your team.
Same goes for mathematical and scientific code: get a few guys who really know their stuff to write your fast, accurate computation algorithms, and then just make sure the main dev team aren't reinventing the wheel in a slower, slightly squarer form.
Same again for instrument control stuff: the control protocols get written by the best guys in the house, including all the safety checks, error recovery, etc. Then the mainstream guys get to drive the instrument, but only through the interface that won't let you crash the robot arm into the million dollar measurement device, and which is always immediately available to respond to an emergency stop no matter what else is happening.
IME, this approach could usefully and profitably be applied to just about any software development there is. I'm sure I can't be the first person to think of this, nor will I be the last, but what baffles me is why no-one seems to do it. Given that guys smart enough to fill the two key roles tend to be pretty expensive, and hiring teams full of code monkeys tends to be pretty expensive when the code doesn't work properly, I would have thought even penny-pinching PHBs would have caught on by now, but apparently not...
I agree with much of what you say as things stand today, but I think you're making an unstated assumption that this is the only way things can work.
A lot of programming is donkey work, and requires little more than joining the relevant library code together in the appropriate pattern. IME, the key to getting this right is that you usually need:
a small number of very good people at the top of this process, co-ordinating the design;
a small number of very good people at the bottom of this process, writing the tools and library code everyone else will use;
a large number of code monkeys in between, joining the libraries according to the design.
It is possible to get much better (faster, safer, whatever) results out of code monkeys by using monkey-friendly tools: look at the success of Java, which is less powerful than many other languages, but provides an effective tool for many average programmers to produce decent quality work, while helping to avoid making average programmer mistakes. However, such a tool is almost certainly the wrong choice for the specialist guys at either end of the plan, who will feel the lack of power and would be less likely to make those classes of programmer error.
I think the next wave of robust software development will come from realising that these three levels require very different skills and skill levels; very different tools with different balances of power, flexibility, safety, etc.; and in particular, very different proportions of the work force. Not all programmers are equal, and not all developers fall onto a simple scale from "crapware newbie" to "L337 hax0r".
You know that just because someone sticks the word "beta" next to a product, that doesn't actually remove any of the ethical or legal consequences for producing that product, right?
What you say may be true, but I don't think it's the use of prototypes and up-front planning that separate true engineering fields from software "engineering". Those are merely the processes that have been found to work effectively in other disciplines, and we know many processes that work and many that don't for software development, too.
I think what really separates engineering from most of today's software development is that in real engineering, you have an engineer. This is a highly trained, experienced, skilled and independently assessed professional, whose sign-off is required before a project can continue regardless of what the bean-counters say, and whose personal reputation is on the line if they sign something off inappropriately. In other words, it gives a veto to the guy who actually knows whether something's going to be crap or not, and that guy has a very strong motivation to use the veto when it's appropriate.
Now, suppose I were a software engineer in the real engineering sense. Let's say my signature was required before shipping a release from the software project I was supervising, to confirm that reasonable care had been taken to keep the bugs as few and as minor as possible. In all the professional projects I've ever worked on, I can't think of more than a couple I would have approved. How about you?
The bottom line is that in today's software development world, the business guys can come in and trump the development guys, and frequently do. That's cutting corners in the interests of making more money, pure and simple. It may be the way to run a more successful business in a competitive marketplace, but it's nothing to do with real engineering.
Because the market is ill-informed. Otherwise viruses capable of causing hundreds of millions of dollars of damage that spread through security flaws in software used by millions of businesses and home users who support a billion dollar market wouldn't exist. Your earthquake-prone apartment building analogy isn't far off, when it comes to key software like operating systems and networking/communications tools.
All we need to get perfect code is programmers of Don Knuth's caliber.
Perhaps. Then again, perhaps not. We all know that informed, skilled geeks are usually the last people who are turned to when it comes to software project management, which is notorious for prioritising deadlines ahead of working code, cutting corners on quality controls and testing, not adhering to recognised (by conscientious geeks) best practices, etc. Usually, the reason cited for this is cost: "But we can't be competitive if we do it properly and others don't!" Well, that's kinda the point of TFA: if everyone has to do it properly, that no longer matters.
Yes, I imagine that really will dramatically reduce the rate at which software is produced, at least at first. However, is that any great loss? Look at the financial damage that a single security flaw in a widely used piece of software can cause. Look at the cost in human life of a serious software bug in fields like medicine, transportation or energy services.
It's clear that left to the short-sighted bean-counters, fatal (literally) bugs are shipped in the name of profits. It's also clear that we can do much better: most software development places I've seen don't even have basic code reviews in place, yet research shows that simply getting a second pair of eyes on every single line of code you submit can remove around 5/6 of bugs before they're even checked into the source control system. Look at the amount of poorly-designed spaghetti code that gets written. This sort of bug-ridden mess happens on even pretty good projects today, and it's entirely unnecessary.
Don Knuth is not the only good programmer in the world. Perhaps if software vendors (not those who give it away - you get what you pay for) were legally responsible for their work, the rest of the good developers who are capable of running their projects to much higher standards would be valued as much as they should be, and the profits-over-safety culture that currently dominates software management could be wiped out in the interests of everyone. I doubt that would produce much perfect software, but it would certainly be a lot better than it is today, which is in the interests of everyone (except cheaposoft developers, but including developers who produce products of quality).
Slightly OT, but why do people put C and C++ in the same performance class ?
It probably is OT, but for general interest: because they are.
The evolution of C++ has followed the "zero overhead principle" pretty strictly, which basically means that if you don't use a feature, you shouldn't pay for it, and if you do, it should be at least as good as getting the same result "by hand".
For a while, C had an advantage because it was simpler to optimise and compilers had a few years' head start. That is rarely the case today. GCC sucks for performance, BTW -- it's portable, but not fast -- so forget using that as any kind of benchmarking tool.
These days, C++ should actually be faster than analogous C code for some things, mainly because templates allow more effective inlining and more aggressive optimisation (C's qsort vs. C++'s std::sort being the typical example) and because C++'s higher level tools allow the programmer to represent more of their design intent in the code, which in turn provides more information for the optimiser to take into consideration.
Yes, exactly. Java's performance hasn't suddenly found a silver bullet that enables it to beat well-written C or C++. However, for most applications, that doesn't matter.
In all languages I know of, you get some library functions ready-made, and you need to code some stuff yourself.
Most performance problems occur in the code you made yourself.
Unless, like me, you're the guy who's writing that library that everyone else depends on, in which case the two are the same thing for practical purposes. In that case, trust me, you still use something like C or C++.
Here are a few reasons why:
C(++) has value types. What TFA describes as if it's some sort of clever optimisation -- the detection of objects that can only be accessed within a single stack frame and can therefore be reduced to stack or register storage -- is the default in C(++).
Java uses "portable" floating point rules, which theoretically means 100% consistent results on all platforms (definitely a plus, unless you write naive floating point code like the example distance function in TFA and waste all the benefits anyway) but also unfortunately means that instructions often implemented as fast operations on a processor have to be effectively recoded by hand because those fast operations aren't precisely specified to match the Java spec.
No-one really uses malloc and free on a large scale in fast code. In fact, we strain to avoid using the C++ analogues, new and delete, and make extensive use of data structures and memory allocation algorithms we control ourselves to facilitate this. Java's performance is always going to be bounded relative to C++'s here, because I can always write an equivalent GC in the worst case, and usually I can do better. (There is a fair argument that most programmers will get this for free in Java, and will not invest the time and effort to produce equivalent code in C(++), but remember that I'm talking from the perspective of the guys who do, because we write the libraries everyone else uses.)
Any of those in isolation is game, set and match against the arguments in the article. Put together, you get the same picture most of us have painted all along: Java's performance is adequate for non-critical tasks, but it's nowhere near the top of the pile when it really matters.
BTW, in case anyone's wondering: yes, I do work on widely-used, performance-sensitive mathematical library for a living, and yes, as it happens I really have spent the last few weeks researching ways to increase the performance of that library even further.
Yes, either of those options would seem to be much better than the previous suggestions. My point was simply that expecting the studio to neglect 90-95% of their target audience for the benefit of the other 5-10% was rather unrealistic.
I think the fact that they're not real is more telling. And not just not real as in fiction, in some cases, but not real as in not real even in the not real fiction. Oh, never mind...
Do "better" formats like XVID or Quicktime play out of the box on around 90% of the target audience's computers? If not, that's your answer.
Re:Wrong argument - need a better solution
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That's a fun jump.
It certainly is, but it's one that surprisingly many people attempt around these parts. That's kinda my point.
Copyrights are government granted monopolies on commodity goods. That's hardly capitalistic.
It's not a completely free market, but that's not the same thing at all.
I was appealing to a rather more basic premise: a capitalist society works (for some values of "works"...) because everyone has finite resources, and they must prioritise how they allocate those resources according to what holds most value to them. Similarly, they may seek to gain further resources, and the amount they gain will generally reflect the value placed on their efforts by the rest of society. This whole system stops working when people are able to inflate their resources through means that don't bring the corresponding value to others.
The concept of a balance is a big mistake. There should be no balance. Copyright law should always favor the public.
I completely disagree. Copyright law must favour those who would create content enough that they are willing to share it. They hold all the aces, and frankly why shouldn't they, when they're the ones doing the work? The public has no default moral or legal right to any content created by others; they must offer up something as their side of the bargain in exchange for sharing in the benefits of others' work. It's been that way since the dawn of time, and probably always will be: share and share alike, as my father taught me.
Of course this system is created precisely because it should benefit society by promoting the creation and distribution of works, so in a sense such a system is indirectly favouring the public. But I get the feeling that wasn't quite what you meant.
This doesn't mean abolishing it, necessarily, as some limits on the public can in fact be beneficial to them, but it does mean that the interests of rightsholders should never be considered save as a means to serving the infinitely more important interests of the public.
Sure, but I think a lot of people greatly underestimate the weight of consideration to the rightsholder required by that sentence. (To be fair, I'd be happy to see "rightsholder" replaced with something that implies an immediate contributor such as an author or musician, since almost all of the problems I have with copyright today stem from the fact that it can be assigned to others who do not themselves create works, and various industries have more-or-less forced this to be the default action by those who do.)
Re:Wrong argument - need a better solution
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Stop right there, its a copyright violation, it is a *bad* thing, its just not *theft* which is a different, more serious, bad thing. So Equating it to 'doing no harm' then talking at length about how it is bad, isn't a valid argument.
I'm pretty sure the "no harm, no foul" theory is exactly the argument made frequently in these parts, including several times by several posters in this very thread. They then rely on posts like your previous contribution (which didn't say that -- and I didn't say it did -- but does sound like it supports the argument) to justify their position.
Wrong argument - need a better solution
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*Potential* income, and I would potentially own a Ferrari, if it wasn't for these meddling kids.
This argument always goes the same way. Someone who is infringing copyright says it's not theft because the copyright holder still has the original material so they are doing no harm because they have deprived no-one of anything. Someone who disapproves says they are depriving the copyright holder of their rightful income. Someone who is infringing copyright starts using weasel words to argue that it's not guaranteed they would have had that income anyway.
OK, reality check. First of all, could everyone using this argument please go and read a book on elementary economics. Note particularly the balance required in a capitalist economy, and the implications of terms like "opportunity cost" to this behaviour. If you don't understand the basics of this subject -- and clearly the vast majority of people on Slashdot who rely on this argument don't -- then you are in no position to assess whether your actions are doing any real damage or not.
Now, please consider that the "no harm, no foul" argument by the infringers here amounts to saying that no-one who illegally downloads music would ever have paid for any of it anyway if they couldn't just download it and get away with it. That is clearly, obviously, and blatantly untrue. Sure, there may be a few people who actually do buy other stuff as a result of their illegal downloads, but IME they're an insignificant minority of those who rip illegally. What next, claims that Bittorrent is only used to download legit open source distributions, and no-one would dream of using it as an expensive-to-break international movie-ripping scheme?
The whole position of the copyright infringers in this argument is untenable. They are violating the basic principles of capitalist economics for selfish personal gain, which puts anyone who doesn't violate those rules at a disadvantage. (If it's legitimate for them to rip without paying, why can't everyone, even those who currently pay? Because the system wouldn't work any more if everyone did it, that's why.) This is not a case of "no harm, no foul", it's a case of using weasel words and technicalities to try and abdicate blame for knowingly breaking the law.
There is no moral high ground here, no justification, no case that personal ethics are greater than the law of the land and it's just "civil disobediance". If you truly find the current law so objectionable that you feel you must resort to civil disobediance to make your point, then you should walk up to the front door of RIAA headquarters with all your illegally ripped CDs in your hand, publicly and openly confess to your crime, and publicly and openly accept the consequences.
It's true that in many places, the law today is badly broken in this area. Much of that breakage was a result of the legal system over-reacting to the mass law-breaking caused by illegal ripping, so frankly I've little sympathy for anyone who does commit those acts and get screwed royally for it. However, it's important to prevent things like barratry and to ensure that those who didn't actually do anything wrong are adequately protected against being caught in the cross-fire here. That doesn't just mean providing solid legal defence to people wrongfully sued, it means protecting concepts like the ones called "fair use" in the US, that maintain a reasonable balance between rightsholders and the public. I believe it is vital for society that this balance is restored, and that means both reversing draconian laws introduced as knee-jerk reactions to widescale infringement and also the stamping out of that infringement. (If those people who rip music illegally really wouldn't have bought the records otherwise, and the music they download ilegally really is all rubbish that they'd never listen to again anyway, then taking steps to eradicate illegal downloading won't do any harm to anyone, will it?)
That wasn't (+1, Interesting), it was (-1, Blatant Troll).
For the benefit of those who can't be bothered with facts when moderating, the three month proposal is one of Blair and co's worst efforts to date, and has been pretty solidly smashed from all sides (including some of his own). It's not currently law, nor ever likely to become so. Even the current 14 day rule has been heavily criticised.
Even under the super-draconian three month proposal, judicial supervision would be required, and the authorities would have to continue making their case every few days in order to keep someone in custody for an extended period.
Trials in this country, by and large, are very fair. (I've been in court as a third party witness and seen our justice system in action; I found it to be reassuringly unbiased and professionally conducted.) I strongly disagree, as do many others, with a few parts of our legislation and the continued use of the over-hyped terror threat by the government as the justification for giving up the basic principles of our justice system, and I look forward to seeing many of these measures dismantled again in the near future after Blair is kicked out.
Fortunately, the ruling Labour party have kindly sealed their own tomb just recently. Firstly, they admitted that their flagship ID card proposals wouldn't have prevented the terrorist attacks in London - nothing has been said by anyone in government about that plan since, AFAIK, and I suspect the whole idea has been quickly shelved for the foreseeable future since the opposition now have an obvious and emotionally strong sound-bite to kill it with. Then, the government's over-powerful anti-terror legislation was invoked by police officers outside their own party conference, in order to hold an 82-year-old party member who'd already been physically removed from the building after heckling the Foreign Secretary when he claimed that we were only in Iraq for noble reasons. Presumably this 57-year veteran member of the party who escaped Nazi Germany is considered a potential terrorist by the government, then?
I predict with some confidence that the next government -- which will almost certainly be under either Gordon Brown or the leader of a different political party -- will seek to gain early credibility with the electorate by sorting out the hash that New Labour have made of our anti-terror laws. Until then, we will have to content ourselves that even now, it's nowhere near as bad as the parent post claims.
The police, by and large, don't have an us-and-them mentality. In fact, I've met a fair few over the years (not because I was being investigated/arrested myself, usually via other shared interests) and they were pretty much all thoroughly nice people, the sort you'd actually want to be policing your country.
In fact, the police often do get hit harder than an average citizen if they're found guilty of committing a crime, starting with the fact that in addition to the court proceedings and resulting sentence, they'll typically be up for an internal review that is quite likely to end their career. All accidents involving a police driver automatically have to be investigated by a traffic officer. Firearms incidents have pretty strict rules about investigation. And so it goes.
Your comment about the innocent Brazilian shot in London seems rather premature. If it's clear that someone has lost it and killed a man, then yes, of course they should be sent down like any other murderer. Something clearly went badly wrong that day, a proper investigation should be carried out, and there should be consequences for anyone who truly did the wrong thing. But I don't think we have that information yet; there are still too many conflicting reports, and it's gone all quiet on the official investigation after the PCA (I think) strongly criticised an early leak.
On the other hand, we the Joe Citizens rely on the protection of armed officers against some of the nastiest people around, and you have to remember that they are in a position where you don't always have 100% of the information, you don't always have the luxury of time to consider your action, and making a mistake is very likely to cost someone their life. The best trained, most talented guys with the best integrity in the world couldn't score full marks in that position. People who say, with the luxury of hindsight and (if they've bothered to find out the full facts rather than just jumping to a knee-jerk conclusion) information, that all the cops involved in a bad shooting should be sent down are the reason that all the firearms cops threaten to refuse to carry their weapons en masse, resulting in reduced protection for everyone.
Your position is poorly informed, poorly thought-out, and untenable.
Under UK law they can arrest you for no reason, they can forcibly take blood, DNA and bodily fluid samples, that can hold you in a cell for several days (Blair is trying to make this weeks under the "terrorism" banner). All this was put into law in the 80s under the "criminal justice bill".
I challenge almost everything you just wrote. Chapter and verse, please.
To be blunt, IME almost all printed software development magazines suck these days, at least in all the fields I work in (C, C++, OOP-related things, various scripting languages, various web-related things, general interest). The articles are frequently poorly written, poorly reviewed, inaccurate, misleading, and/or just plain obvious to anyone who read a good book or worked in the business for about five minutes.
I guess I'm like the original poster, but a few years further down the line now: I'm always looking for useful sources of information and insight to broaden my horizons and develop my software skills. These days, I find that for depth, little beats a good book, while for keeping up with recent ideas, the web is a much better resource than print magazines or journals. It's hard to give useful links without knowing more specifically which subjects the asker is interested in, but I've found that in most fields, there are a handful of useful e-zines, blogs by key industry players or just people with interesting thoughts, Usenet newsgroups, and electronic versions of the better printed articles. I'd recommend spending a few hours looking into these before shelling out any hard-earned cash on print magazines.
As starting points for research, I'd recommend two things:
Check whether there's a relevant newsgroup, probably comp.something, and if so, see if it has a FAQ. Many of these contain lots of useful references to books, web sites, etc., and some also warn you off well-known but generally naff sources. Many of these groups are also full of helpful people with common interests, some of them very experienced and/or well-connected, and as such they can be excellent sources of information and insight themselves.
Search for the subject in on-line encyclopedias such as Wikipedia. Again, the articles in these places tend to provide a decent outline for many techie subjects these days, and in particular they tend to have an effectively peer-reviewed collection of references to further information.
It's worse than that, [fair use is] an affirmative defense against copyright violation. Fair use is not a defense against violating the copy protection, from what I've gathered.
That seems to be the case under the DMCA, which is presumably why the proposed DMCRA is intended to explicitly close any loophole there, amongst other things.
Really? I used to go to Blockbuster all the time when all I had was a VHS player. I bought a DVD player fairly late on, probably only 2-3 years ago, but I'm pretty sure I haven't been to the rental store since. It always looks pretty quiet these days, and about half the shop is full of "pre-viewed DVDs" for sale (not rental), while the other half only has about 200 copies of the the top 20 movies this week and not much else.
Assuming the article is based in the UK from the currency, it's rather misleading: my fairly extensive DVD collection is 100% legal, yet I don't think I've ever paid £15 for a new DVD, other than box sets. You can get most major films (legally) for half that price within a few weeks of them coming out, or practically on release day if you buy on-line or as part of a special offer.
Now, since renting a DVD for one or two nights costs £3 to £4 anyway, it's hard to see why anyone who wasn't really (a) strapped for cash, and (b) desperate to see some new movie the moment it was released would bother. I don't see why someone would bother with disposable DVDs as in this article for the same reason - how would I have lent my disposable Firefly box set to a friend who'd never seen the series before we go to see Serenity in a few days?
A standard compact disc is an audio CD, and the red book standard defines exactly what that means. The other stuff is derivative technology, and just being of the same dimensions is not sufficient to make it a compact disc. Please Google for, e.g., "compact disc trademark phillips", and note the pretty much universal acknowledgement of this, including several articles citing Phillips themselves.
They're already reaching that point with HDTV, and they're already losing a lot of early adopters as a result of changing standards to render old (as in, over six months, maybe), multi-thousand-costing, wide-screen TV sets incapable of viewing the HDTV signal.
Here's a lesson in basic market forces for naive media companies everywhere:
First you design the new kit.
Then the keen guys look at it, and if it's any good, they become early adopters.
Then the early adopters tell their family/friends/colleagues about it, and if they say it's good and not too difficult/expensive, the new people become late adopters and form the rest of your customer base.
Now, there are two catches in there, which I've cunningly labelled with the word "if". After considering those, guess which part of the market you don't want to upset?
Ooooops.
At current rates of progress, that will be an expensive mistake for a whole industry any time now. Let's hope it's soon enough for the record industry to notice it and decide not to accept the same fate.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess my point is that I don't think the code monkeys should be making the key algorithmic decisions. That role falls to the "low-level expert" category in my scheme; the tool-builders should provide suitable tools, in consultation with the high-level experts co-ordinating the design. It is up to them to determine the appropriate key algorithms to use, and to build the dev team's tools and libraries around them. In this way, while you don't quite have standardised key pieces because some or all can be bespoke, what you do have is all the foundations written by the really smart guys. Then the average developers can all benefit from the really smart guys' expertise.
For example, suppose you've got a database application. You get the best database guy you've got to design the schema, and work out how to provide efficient answers to common queries, which the high-level design guys can help to identify. He wraps it all up in a safe, efficient API, and then the rest of the dev team can build the main application code around it, safe in the knowledge that the API is secure and fast. Scale to fit depending on the size of your application and the number of guys of each type you've got on your team.
Same goes for mathematical and scientific code: get a few guys who really know their stuff to write your fast, accurate computation algorithms, and then just make sure the main dev team aren't reinventing the wheel in a slower, slightly squarer form.
Same again for instrument control stuff: the control protocols get written by the best guys in the house, including all the safety checks, error recovery, etc. Then the mainstream guys get to drive the instrument, but only through the interface that won't let you crash the robot arm into the million dollar measurement device, and which is always immediately available to respond to an emergency stop no matter what else is happening.
IME, this approach could usefully and profitably be applied to just about any software development there is. I'm sure I can't be the first person to think of this, nor will I be the last, but what baffles me is why no-one seems to do it. Given that guys smart enough to fill the two key roles tend to be pretty expensive, and hiring teams full of code monkeys tends to be pretty expensive when the code doesn't work properly, I would have thought even penny-pinching PHBs would have caught on by now, but apparently not...
I agree with much of what you say as things stand today, but I think you're making an unstated assumption that this is the only way things can work.
A lot of programming is donkey work, and requires little more than joining the relevant library code together in the appropriate pattern. IME, the key to getting this right is that you usually need:
It is possible to get much better (faster, safer, whatever) results out of code monkeys by using monkey-friendly tools: look at the success of Java, which is less powerful than many other languages, but provides an effective tool for many average programmers to produce decent quality work, while helping to avoid making average programmer mistakes. However, such a tool is almost certainly the wrong choice for the specialist guys at either end of the plan, who will feel the lack of power and would be less likely to make those classes of programmer error.
I think the next wave of robust software development will come from realising that these three levels require very different skills and skill levels; very different tools with different balances of power, flexibility, safety, etc.; and in particular, very different proportions of the work force. Not all programmers are equal, and not all developers fall onto a simple scale from "crapware newbie" to "L337 hax0r".
You know that just because someone sticks the word "beta" next to a product, that doesn't actually remove any of the ethical or legal consequences for producing that product, right?
What you say may be true, but I don't think it's the use of prototypes and up-front planning that separate true engineering fields from software "engineering". Those are merely the processes that have been found to work effectively in other disciplines, and we know many processes that work and many that don't for software development, too.
I think what really separates engineering from most of today's software development is that in real engineering, you have an engineer. This is a highly trained, experienced, skilled and independently assessed professional, whose sign-off is required before a project can continue regardless of what the bean-counters say, and whose personal reputation is on the line if they sign something off inappropriately. In other words, it gives a veto to the guy who actually knows whether something's going to be crap or not, and that guy has a very strong motivation to use the veto when it's appropriate.
Now, suppose I were a software engineer in the real engineering sense. Let's say my signature was required before shipping a release from the software project I was supervising, to confirm that reasonable care had been taken to keep the bugs as few and as minor as possible. In all the professional projects I've ever worked on, I can't think of more than a couple I would have approved. How about you?
The bottom line is that in today's software development world, the business guys can come in and trump the development guys, and frequently do. That's cutting corners in the interests of making more money, pure and simple. It may be the way to run a more successful business in a competitive marketplace, but it's nothing to do with real engineering.
Because the market is ill-informed. Otherwise viruses capable of causing hundreds of millions of dollars of damage that spread through security flaws in software used by millions of businesses and home users who support a billion dollar market wouldn't exist. Your earthquake-prone apartment building analogy isn't far off, when it comes to key software like operating systems and networking/communications tools.
Perhaps. Then again, perhaps not. We all know that informed, skilled geeks are usually the last people who are turned to when it comes to software project management, which is notorious for prioritising deadlines ahead of working code, cutting corners on quality controls and testing, not adhering to recognised (by conscientious geeks) best practices, etc. Usually, the reason cited for this is cost: "But we can't be competitive if we do it properly and others don't!" Well, that's kinda the point of TFA: if everyone has to do it properly, that no longer matters.
Yes, I imagine that really will dramatically reduce the rate at which software is produced, at least at first. However, is that any great loss? Look at the financial damage that a single security flaw in a widely used piece of software can cause. Look at the cost in human life of a serious software bug in fields like medicine, transportation or energy services.
It's clear that left to the short-sighted bean-counters, fatal (literally) bugs are shipped in the name of profits. It's also clear that we can do much better: most software development places I've seen don't even have basic code reviews in place, yet research shows that simply getting a second pair of eyes on every single line of code you submit can remove around 5/6 of bugs before they're even checked into the source control system. Look at the amount of poorly-designed spaghetti code that gets written. This sort of bug-ridden mess happens on even pretty good projects today, and it's entirely unnecessary.
Don Knuth is not the only good programmer in the world. Perhaps if software vendors (not those who give it away - you get what you pay for) were legally responsible for their work, the rest of the good developers who are capable of running their projects to much higher standards would be valued as much as they should be, and the profits-over-safety culture that currently dominates software management could be wiped out in the interests of everyone. I doubt that would produce much perfect software, but it would certainly be a lot better than it is today, which is in the interests of everyone (except cheaposoft developers, but including developers who produce products of quality).
It probably is OT, but for general interest: because they are.
The evolution of C++ has followed the "zero overhead principle" pretty strictly, which basically means that if you don't use a feature, you shouldn't pay for it, and if you do, it should be at least as good as getting the same result "by hand".
For a while, C had an advantage because it was simpler to optimise and compilers had a few years' head start. That is rarely the case today. GCC sucks for performance, BTW -- it's portable, but not fast -- so forget using that as any kind of benchmarking tool.
These days, C++ should actually be faster than analogous C code for some things, mainly because templates allow more effective inlining and more aggressive optimisation (C's qsort vs. C++'s std::sort being the typical example) and because C++'s higher level tools allow the programmer to represent more of their design intent in the code, which in turn provides more information for the optimiser to take into consideration.
Yes, exactly. Java's performance hasn't suddenly found a silver bullet that enables it to beat well-written C or C++. However, for most applications, that doesn't matter.
Unless, like me, you're the guy who's writing that library that everyone else depends on, in which case the two are the same thing for practical purposes. In that case, trust me, you still use something like C or C++.
Here are a few reasons why:
Any of those in isolation is game, set and match against the arguments in the article. Put together, you get the same picture most of us have painted all along: Java's performance is adequate for non-critical tasks, but it's nowhere near the top of the pile when it really matters.
BTW, in case anyone's wondering: yes, I do work on widely-used, performance-sensitive mathematical library for a living, and yes, as it happens I really have spent the last few weeks researching ways to increase the performance of that library even further.
Yes, either of those options would seem to be much better than the previous suggestions. My point was simply that expecting the studio to neglect 90-95% of their target audience for the benefit of the other 5-10% was rather unrealistic.
I think the fact that they're not real is more telling. And not just not real as in fiction, in some cases, but not real as in not real even in the not real fiction. Oh, never mind...
Do "better" formats like XVID or Quicktime play out of the box on around 90% of the target audience's computers? If not, that's your answer.
It certainly is, but it's one that surprisingly many people attempt around these parts. That's kinda my point.
It's not a completely free market, but that's not the same thing at all.
I was appealing to a rather more basic premise: a capitalist society works (for some values of "works"...) because everyone has finite resources, and they must prioritise how they allocate those resources according to what holds most value to them. Similarly, they may seek to gain further resources, and the amount they gain will generally reflect the value placed on their efforts by the rest of society. This whole system stops working when people are able to inflate their resources through means that don't bring the corresponding value to others.
I completely disagree. Copyright law must favour those who would create content enough that they are willing to share it. They hold all the aces, and frankly why shouldn't they, when they're the ones doing the work? The public has no default moral or legal right to any content created by others; they must offer up something as their side of the bargain in exchange for sharing in the benefits of others' work. It's been that way since the dawn of time, and probably always will be: share and share alike, as my father taught me.
Of course this system is created precisely because it should benefit society by promoting the creation and distribution of works, so in a sense such a system is indirectly favouring the public. But I get the feeling that wasn't quite what you meant.
Sure, but I think a lot of people greatly underestimate the weight of consideration to the rightsholder required by that sentence. (To be fair, I'd be happy to see "rightsholder" replaced with something that implies an immediate contributor such as an author or musician, since almost all of the problems I have with copyright today stem from the fact that it can be assigned to others who do not themselves create works, and various industries have more-or-less forced this to be the default action by those who do.)
I'm pretty sure the "no harm, no foul" theory is exactly the argument made frequently in these parts, including several times by several posters in this very thread. They then rely on posts like your previous contribution (which didn't say that -- and I didn't say it did -- but does sound like it supports the argument) to justify their position.
This argument always goes the same way. Someone who is infringing copyright says it's not theft because the copyright holder still has the original material so they are doing no harm because they have deprived no-one of anything. Someone who disapproves says they are depriving the copyright holder of their rightful income. Someone who is infringing copyright starts using weasel words to argue that it's not guaranteed they would have had that income anyway.
OK, reality check. First of all, could everyone using this argument please go and read a book on elementary economics. Note particularly the balance required in a capitalist economy, and the implications of terms like "opportunity cost" to this behaviour. If you don't understand the basics of this subject -- and clearly the vast majority of people on Slashdot who rely on this argument don't -- then you are in no position to assess whether your actions are doing any real damage or not.
Now, please consider that the "no harm, no foul" argument by the infringers here amounts to saying that no-one who illegally downloads music would ever have paid for any of it anyway if they couldn't just download it and get away with it. That is clearly, obviously, and blatantly untrue. Sure, there may be a few people who actually do buy other stuff as a result of their illegal downloads, but IME they're an insignificant minority of those who rip illegally. What next, claims that Bittorrent is only used to download legit open source distributions, and no-one would dream of using it as an expensive-to-break international movie-ripping scheme?
The whole position of the copyright infringers in this argument is untenable. They are violating the basic principles of capitalist economics for selfish personal gain, which puts anyone who doesn't violate those rules at a disadvantage. (If it's legitimate for them to rip without paying, why can't everyone, even those who currently pay? Because the system wouldn't work any more if everyone did it, that's why.) This is not a case of "no harm, no foul", it's a case of using weasel words and technicalities to try and abdicate blame for knowingly breaking the law.
There is no moral high ground here, no justification, no case that personal ethics are greater than the law of the land and it's just "civil disobediance". If you truly find the current law so objectionable that you feel you must resort to civil disobediance to make your point, then you should walk up to the front door of RIAA headquarters with all your illegally ripped CDs in your hand, publicly and openly confess to your crime, and publicly and openly accept the consequences.
It's true that in many places, the law today is badly broken in this area. Much of that breakage was a result of the legal system over-reacting to the mass law-breaking caused by illegal ripping, so frankly I've little sympathy for anyone who does commit those acts and get screwed royally for it. However, it's important to prevent things like barratry and to ensure that those who didn't actually do anything wrong are adequately protected against being caught in the cross-fire here. That doesn't just mean providing solid legal defence to people wrongfully sued, it means protecting concepts like the ones called "fair use" in the US, that maintain a reasonable balance between rightsholders and the public. I believe it is vital for society that this balance is restored, and that means both reversing draconian laws introduced as knee-jerk reactions to widescale infringement and also the stamping out of that infringement. (If those people who rip music illegally really wouldn't have bought the records otherwise, and the music they download ilegally really is all rubbish that they'd never listen to again anyway, then taking steps to eradicate illegal downloading won't do any harm to anyone, will it?)
So yes, it is important for t
That wasn't (+1, Interesting), it was (-1, Blatant Troll).
For the benefit of those who can't be bothered with facts when moderating, the three month proposal is one of Blair and co's worst efforts to date, and has been pretty solidly smashed from all sides (including some of his own). It's not currently law, nor ever likely to become so. Even the current 14 day rule has been heavily criticised.
Even under the super-draconian three month proposal, judicial supervision would be required, and the authorities would have to continue making their case every few days in order to keep someone in custody for an extended period.
Trials in this country, by and large, are very fair. (I've been in court as a third party witness and seen our justice system in action; I found it to be reassuringly unbiased and professionally conducted.) I strongly disagree, as do many others, with a few parts of our legislation and the continued use of the over-hyped terror threat by the government as the justification for giving up the basic principles of our justice system, and I look forward to seeing many of these measures dismantled again in the near future after Blair is kicked out.
Fortunately, the ruling Labour party have kindly sealed their own tomb just recently. Firstly, they admitted that their flagship ID card proposals wouldn't have prevented the terrorist attacks in London - nothing has been said by anyone in government about that plan since, AFAIK, and I suspect the whole idea has been quickly shelved for the foreseeable future since the opposition now have an obvious and emotionally strong sound-bite to kill it with. Then, the government's over-powerful anti-terror legislation was invoked by police officers outside their own party conference, in order to hold an 82-year-old party member who'd already been physically removed from the building after heckling the Foreign Secretary when he claimed that we were only in Iraq for noble reasons. Presumably this 57-year veteran member of the party who escaped Nazi Germany is considered a potential terrorist by the government, then?
I predict with some confidence that the next government -- which will almost certainly be under either Gordon Brown or the leader of a different political party -- will seek to gain early credibility with the electorate by sorting out the hash that New Labour have made of our anti-terror laws. Until then, we will have to content ourselves that even now, it's nowhere near as bad as the parent post claims.
Wow. You must have a real anti-authority complex.
The police, by and large, don't have an us-and-them mentality. In fact, I've met a fair few over the years (not because I was being investigated/arrested myself, usually via other shared interests) and they were pretty much all thoroughly nice people, the sort you'd actually want to be policing your country.
In fact, the police often do get hit harder than an average citizen if they're found guilty of committing a crime, starting with the fact that in addition to the court proceedings and resulting sentence, they'll typically be up for an internal review that is quite likely to end their career. All accidents involving a police driver automatically have to be investigated by a traffic officer. Firearms incidents have pretty strict rules about investigation. And so it goes.
Your comment about the innocent Brazilian shot in London seems rather premature. If it's clear that someone has lost it and killed a man, then yes, of course they should be sent down like any other murderer. Something clearly went badly wrong that day, a proper investigation should be carried out, and there should be consequences for anyone who truly did the wrong thing. But I don't think we have that information yet; there are still too many conflicting reports, and it's gone all quiet on the official investigation after the PCA (I think) strongly criticised an early leak.
On the other hand, we the Joe Citizens rely on the protection of armed officers against some of the nastiest people around, and you have to remember that they are in a position where you don't always have 100% of the information, you don't always have the luxury of time to consider your action, and making a mistake is very likely to cost someone their life. The best trained, most talented guys with the best integrity in the world couldn't score full marks in that position. People who say, with the luxury of hindsight and (if they've bothered to find out the full facts rather than just jumping to a knee-jerk conclusion) information, that all the cops involved in a bad shooting should be sent down are the reason that all the firearms cops threaten to refuse to carry their weapons en masse, resulting in reduced protection for everyone.
Your position is poorly informed, poorly thought-out, and untenable.
I challenge almost everything you just wrote. Chapter and verse, please.
To be blunt, IME almost all printed software development magazines suck these days, at least in all the fields I work in (C, C++, OOP-related things, various scripting languages, various web-related things, general interest). The articles are frequently poorly written, poorly reviewed, inaccurate, misleading, and/or just plain obvious to anyone who read a good book or worked in the business for about five minutes.
I guess I'm like the original poster, but a few years further down the line now: I'm always looking for useful sources of information and insight to broaden my horizons and develop my software skills. These days, I find that for depth, little beats a good book, while for keeping up with recent ideas, the web is a much better resource than print magazines or journals. It's hard to give useful links without knowing more specifically which subjects the asker is interested in, but I've found that in most fields, there are a handful of useful e-zines, blogs by key industry players or just people with interesting thoughts, Usenet newsgroups, and electronic versions of the better printed articles. I'd recommend spending a few hours looking into these before shelling out any hard-earned cash on print magazines.
As starting points for research, I'd recommend two things:
So does this mean I can get modded up to +5 just for citing another pertinent Wikipedia link? :-)
That seems to be the case under the DMCA, which is presumably why the proposed DMCRA is intended to explicitly close any loophole there, amongst other things.
Really? I used to go to Blockbuster all the time when all I had was a VHS player. I bought a DVD player fairly late on, probably only 2-3 years ago, but I'm pretty sure I haven't been to the rental store since. It always looks pretty quiet these days, and about half the shop is full of "pre-viewed DVDs" for sale (not rental), while the other half only has about 200 copies of the the top 20 movies this week and not much else.
Assuming the article is based in the UK from the currency, it's rather misleading: my fairly extensive DVD collection is 100% legal, yet I don't think I've ever paid £15 for a new DVD, other than box sets. You can get most major films (legally) for half that price within a few weeks of them coming out, or practically on release day if you buy on-line or as part of a special offer.
Now, since renting a DVD for one or two nights costs £3 to £4 anyway, it's hard to see why anyone who wasn't really (a) strapped for cash, and (b) desperate to see some new movie the moment it was released would bother. I don't see why someone would bother with disposable DVDs as in this article for the same reason - how would I have lent my disposable Firefly box set to a friend who'd never seen the series before we go to see Serenity in a few days?
A standard compact disc is an audio CD, and the red book standard defines exactly what that means. The other stuff is derivative technology, and just being of the same dimensions is not sufficient to make it a compact disc. Please Google for, e.g., "compact disc trademark phillips", and note the pretty much universal acknowledgement of this, including several articles citing Phillips themselves.
Apparently you're pretty unfamiliar with economics, too.
They're already reaching that point with HDTV, and they're already losing a lot of early adopters as a result of changing standards to render old (as in, over six months, maybe), multi-thousand-costing, wide-screen TV sets incapable of viewing the HDTV signal.
Here's a lesson in basic market forces for naive media companies everywhere:
Now, there are two catches in there, which I've cunningly labelled with the word "if". After considering those, guess which part of the market you don't want to upset?
Ooooops.
At current rates of progress, that will be an expensive mistake for a whole industry any time now. Let's hope it's soon enough for the record industry to notice it and decide not to accept the same fate.