I'm not saying that it is useless to know how sort algorithms work, but suggesting that it's relevant in the day-to-day work of a typical software developer (which is what you seem to be implying) is very misguided, in my opinion.
On the contrary. In my experience, an awful lot of programmers, mostly those who are self-taught but don't realise what they're missing, frequently choose an incorrect data structure or algorithm even for simple things like sorting and searching. If you're working in a field where performance matters at all, that can be crippling.
I agree that hardly anyone should need to write the usual sorting or searching algorithms from scratch today. It's almost invariably easier and safer to use one from a library, though of course there are a few legitimate exceptions. But you do need to understand the basics of the algorithms you use, their performance characteristics and the limitations they have.
This is particularly important with the growing dependence on library code, because most libraries provide only a few "typically best" algorithms. Sometimes an introsort variation isn't the best, or even close, but only the programmer who knows about his own data and who understands the range of algorithms available is able to judge when an alternative is more appropriate.
Just out of curiosity, do you know how a transistor works? I'd wager that most folks around here don't, any more than they could write an implementation of QuickSort without having to look it up.
No, but I could tell you off the top of my head the algorithms for intro sort, quick sort, merge sort, radix sort and several others, and implement them for you in a procedural or functional language without a whole lot of reading. I work with performance-critical applications every day, and you'd expect nothing less from a professional in my position.
But who's to say who is a skilled and experienced driver? There are so many people who think they're the greatest driver ever, but when you're in the car with them, or see them on the road, their actual handling of the vehicle in traffic is terrible.
That's a fair point. However, there are so many obvious cases and so few police officers to challenge them that I doubt this would be a problem in practice. The guy doing 20mph more than everyone else and swerving between lanes in heavy traffic is dangerous. The guy doing 70mph on the motorway, so close to the car in front that if it braked sharply he wouldn't even have time to react before hitting it, is dangerous. The guy doing 50mph past a school just as all the kids are coming out in the afternoon is dangerous. The guy who overtakes causing an oncoming vehicle to slow down sharply or swerve to avoid him is dangerous. These types of thing are indisputable, and personally, I'd far rather the police were out there taking these people down than having to stop people who were doing 25% more than the speed limit, yet causing neither danger nor inconvenience to anyone.
Sure, set the speed limit correctly, but there'll still be those people who think they have to drive just that bit faster than the rest of the traffic... will they still have a grey area of speed to play in?
One interesting idea I saw was the idea of "advisory speed limits": road signs that warned of an approaching hazard such as a bend with restricted view or a concealed entrance, and which also recommended a maximum speed to pass the hazard based on the view available, road condition... the same criteria as should be used for all limits today anyway. If you had an accident while travelling past a hazard faster than an advisory speed limit, you would automatically be held at least partially responsible. It's the same sort of argument that some countries use for turning at a stop light when nothing's coming across your path, as I understand it.
But ISP's will normally just shut down your account if there is a legal issue. Now they would have to dig thru and edit someone else's spahgetti HMTL. Messier for generated content from a database or whatever because they have to figure out the code.
You just stick in the AUP that anyone must put up a legally required response and terminate any account that doesn't. How many databases are active on the Internet, with a paid up ISP subscription, but nobody maintaining them?
This is only going to be an issue for ISPs if the original content author is not available to add the response themselves, which is basically only going to happen on free hosting sites.
This simply is not a real problem with the proposal. It would be likely to occur in such a small number of cases that even a local ISP would be able to deal with it.
I didn't say they definitely had no legal weight, I suggested that it was doubtful they would hold up in court. However, to answer your question with another, can you find anybody -- ANYBODY -- who has been effectively prosecuted under an EULA in that same time period?
It is an excessive burden on ISP's and blog operators.
It is no more excessive than taking down a site violating an AUP, or any other maintenance ISPs do plenty of times every day. You are explicitly allowed just to link to a response, so a standard format "A response to this information is available (link) here" message should suffice.
These might be sticky questions, but the total lack of regulation on the internet has led to a situation where anybody can say anything about anybody with no redress.
Yes, this has been a problem for a while and is getting worse.
The responses to this article are, alas, all too predictable. "It violates my civil liberties!" they cry. "It's abusing freedom of speech!" "You couldn't enforce it anyway, because it would cost too much!" "How do I check someone is who they say they are?" Do they really believe that no-one's thought of this stuff before?
Well, guess what, kids. With freedom comes responsibility. We can agree that you have the right to say what you wish, but only if you accept the consequences of what you say. If I suffer harm, physical or mental, because you said something about me that wasn't fair, then you owe me fair compensation for that.
This sort of action was inevitable, and is a direct and proportionate response to many people abusing the privilege of free speech on the Internet. The "I should be able to say anything I like without fear of response!" advocates should consider themselves lucky that European governments aren't considering a scheme that removes anonymity on the Internet entirely and opens the online world to prosecution under existing libel laws.
(No, you couldn't get absolutely everyone, as a few people would know enough to remain truly anonymous. Technologically, you could easily get the vast majority, though.)
This is not a play school. People on-line can and do get away with mass fraud, posing as doctors and offering poor medical advice, destroying rival businesses' reputations through posting completely untrue horror stories, and more. None of this is justifiable under the banner of "free speech", and nothing in the European proposal restricts your free speech. It simply means you'll be held accountable for what you say, and why the hell shouldn't you be?
Typically, here in the UK, articles criticising some person or company... appear on the front few pages probably in 16 point print with a 36 point or more headline and a photo to draw attention to it. After the PCC has ruled any correction will typically be printed on page 37 with a 10 point headline, body text 4-6 point...
The whole point of having the speed limit is to set the MAXIMUM speed you can go... you can't arbitarily decide that you know better and really 70 is just as safe as 60 on this piece of road.
Yes, you can. In fact, a skilled and experienced driver is far more qualified to judge a safe speed at a given location and under given conditions than any beaurocrat who doesn't drive the road himself. Emergency services drivers do this all the time, for example.
Moreover, the posted limits in some countries (including the US and UK) are way below the safety mark. It's well established by several carefully conducted surveys in a variety of countries that the optimum speed limit for safety is the one that about 85% of drivers stick to. This figure is remarkably consistent across different road types, nationalities and driving conditions in the surveys. And yet most posted limits are well under that, in spite of the evidence that setting such a speed limit (a) criminalises people needlessly, and (b) decreases road safety.
So exactly where do you draw the line? Why bother having a speed limit if you're going to say... well, it's kinda fuzzy really... up until about 20 over it doesn't matter...
That's a very good question. Whether we'd be better without speed limits at all, and diverting the money saved into better driver education so they can judge a safe speed for themselves, better signing to warn of real hazards, and better policing of motorists who are actually causing a danger to themselves or others, is an interesting debate.
Why don't we just have governers in cars that limit them to the speed limits of the area? that way nobody can go faster than the speed limit. What if you have to to avoid an accident? Collateral damage, you'd be breaking the law anyways!
Huh?! So you'd rather I had a crash with a driver behind me who was half asleep, or knocked a child off her bike as she rode into the road by mistake, than speed for a moment to avoid the hazard? These are two real examples where I broke the speed limit to avoid an accident this week. In each case, I judged that accelerating was less dangerous than braking sharply under the conditions at the time. It's not usual to have two incidents like that in a week, but I've acted similarly on numerous occasions during my decade or so of driving.
I have also broken the speed limit significantly, though always safely, in order to transport an injured patient to hospital as fast as possible. I have also broken the speed limit significantly, though always safely, on my way home to my girlfriend, who was alone in the house an hour after it had been broken into.
In each of these cases, although breaking the speed limit was illegal (possibly excepting the case of transporting the patient to hospital, when I'd have a good defence where I live) I think it was better than the alternative. Yet introducing a mandatory speed limiter would prevent me from doing this.
As one final example, consider that HGVs are routinely speed limited in this way, at least within the UK. As one former HGV driver pointed out to me, they used to vary their speed slightly between say 58 and 62mph on long journeys, to break the monotony and keep the attention focussed. Now everyone has to drive at 60mph to make their deliveries on time, and look what happened to the accident rate.:-(
There is a good argument for adding some sort of recording device to cars, so people who break the law seriously and without good reason can be held accountable for their actions. Perhaps then we could stop putting up highly expensive speed cameras that scare honest drivers who might slip up just over the limit while going past them (yes, I know the ACPO guidelines for prosecution in the UK but most drivers don't) and worry about the people who are really significantly reducing road safety by speeding. Who knows, we might even get speed limits based on safety and not profit. OK, who am I kidding? But it's a nice thought.
But when getting promotion in a corporation, or if your refusal to do something 'avove 48 hours' cost the team, then you could get a bad reference, a bad personal recommendation (not on paper, can't be audited), a bad rep, plain passed up.
Most places won't give any details beyond the bare minimum in a reference these days, paper or otherwise, for fear of legal repercussions if they express an opinion that turns out not to match up with the new employer's experience. Crying "It wasn't in writing!" isn't much going to help if you've just been stung by a pro and are now on the receiving end of a lawsuit.
If you get fired, passed over for promotion, or otherwise disadvantaged because of not meeting the regs, your employer can be subject to industrial tribunals, legal action, etc. Such actions frequently succeed and result in significant compensation.
Regulation is to satisfy unionised work or protect low skill low wage jobs with no chance of promotion. For the most of us here, it is irrelevant.
Bullshit. Regulation is to protect most of the market from weenies like you who won't stand up for themselves.
People in the city get paid such silly money that I have little sympathy for those who choose to work silly hours, but don't lump everyone else into the same category. Most people live for more than work, want to have a social life, support a family, or otherwise don't want to be subject to the kind of regime you're encouraging.
Even if you have a few toadies who'll suck up the company line, big business isn't immune from the same rules as the rest of us. They can go bust (if Enron or a big-name accountant can go, anyone can). They can be subjected to shareholder dissent over fat cat salaries (there have been a couple of major UK cases within the last few weeks). And sooner or later, someone's going to be smart enough to look after their employees better, and they're going to steal all the good ones, and they're going to outcompete their competition as a result.
The client is demanding that they meet deadline. What do you expect management to do?
They should decide whether or not it is viable to complete the project to the client's specifications with the resources available. ("Viable" needn't mean "profitable"; they could decide to run the project at an acceptable loss in order to keep the client sweet.)
If the project is viable, they should assign sufficient resources and have the project done. If the project is not viable, they should explain this politely to the client, and decline the business.
No smart client is going to withhold future business because you declined an infeasible project. If they do, you have failed to manage your clients' expectations effectively, which is another common but avoidable failure of management. And besides, you are in business to make a profit, not to keep happy potential clients who do not make you a profit.
I'm sorry but management has every right to ask it's employees to step up their work effort in order to keep the company afloat.
Sure, and the employees have every right to say no if unreasonable demands are made of them, particularly in the sort of unpleasant way that this seems to be done (telling not asking, no up-front offers of compensation, treat staff differently to contractors, etc).
Maybe you can shed light as to what you'd do if you were a manager and a client asked you to finish a porduct on a tight deadline.
I'd work out what resources would be needed. If necessary, this could include asking whether people would be prepared to do more than their usual amount of work to increase that, given mutually acceptable compensation. Then I'd work out if the project was viable. If it was, I'd take it. If not, I wouldn't.
This is not a new problem, nor even an uncommon one. Yet companies with bad management seem to run into it all the time, while companies with good management strangely seem to avoid it, even when working in a similar industry and with similar or identical clients. Go figure.
Let's be realistic here: this isn't a huge death march. It's 4-6 weeks of long hours.
That depends on your point of view. From another point of view, it's probably incompetent management trying to take advantage.
It doesn't matter that it's "only" 4-6 weeks. The employees will be straining to get through half that at 12/7 before they start doing more harm than good. If it's "only" a one-off and really necessary for the company, then management should have approached the employees and discussed the possibility with them before accepting the project and telling them what they "have to do".
This sounds like a simple failure of good management. The managers exist only to balance requirements with resources. If this project requires excessive work on the part of the staff, then management should have assigned more resources, or not taken on the project. They have no-one to blame but themselves if they treat salaried staff in a less favourable way than contractors, and those staff then feel aggrieved.
I agree with the other posters that you should look at the company and the nature of management overall before deciding how to act in a situation like this. But look with a very sceptical eye. Loyalty to a good employer is fair enough, but I've seen way too many people stick it out way too long because they assumed that "things will get better" or "the economy is just down", while others around them in a similar position were getting much better deals by actually going out and shopping around.
Absolutely: the more it changes...
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Ageism in IT?
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[Best Hugo Weaving voice] I'd like to share a revelation I've had during my time here...
Things don't move as fast as a lot of people make out. At the end of the day, software development still revolves around data structures and algorithms, then around a few common paradigms that express them (OO, procedural, FP, etc), then around languages that provide concrete tools based on those paradigms. There are lots of different applications now, each with a few idioms of their own, but they all come down to the same basic concerns: how do I store, manipulate and present the information that's important to me in this particular field?
Most of the "fast paced" development you hear about today isn't really that new at all. It only seems so if you've read the hype but haven't experienced it, and if you don't have a framework into which you can put it. To the 20-year-old studying a course at university and looking at going into the industry, your server-side scripted e-commerce application using CGI, PHP, ASP, J2EE, GEE WIZ and any other (D)(E)TLA you care to mention is the latest and greatest. To a 20-year veteran of the programming business, these tools are just different protocols for what is really a very simple data presentation exercise, the sort of thing you learn in a day.
I remember in my teens (early '90s) I used to think Windows programming was impossible. I could write a tool using a DOS-based library to make pretty graphics demos, but this GUI stuff was all too hard, and I avoided it for years. Inevitably, when I "turned pro" a few years later, I had to learn enough about it to write some front-end stuff. Do you know what? Once I actually sat down and read a book on Windows programming for a few hours, suddenly I could do prety much all the stuff the other guys could. I had to learn the message-driven architecture used by Windows, but that's quite natural. There were loads of APIs, but you just look them up when you need them. Sure, there was the office MFC specialist, who really did know a lot of stuff off the top of his head that the rest of us had to look up, but most people aren't at that level even in tools they use routinely. The point is, once I needed to do it and did my homework, it wasn't all that different to other things I'd done before.
I had a similar experience just a few weeks ago. As a long-time desktop apps programmer and occasional web page dabbler, I'd always been curious about how things like CGI scripted, database-backed web sites worked, but assumed it was some kind of black magic that would always be beyond me. Then I found it would be useful to write a bulletin board for a web site I help with, and did a bit of homework. Perhaps half a dozen articles later (basic CGI -- it's really just another very simple protocol; two or three to brush up on Perl; an introduction to MySQL; a well-written introduction to using the MySQL module for Perl) and hey presto, I've gone from a guy who understands procedural programming, relational databases and SQL to a guy who can write a whole bulletin board system for a web site, in less than a week.
Most of the "new stuff" that you "must keep up with" really isn't complicated if you know the basics. It might seem so to young and enthusiastic guys who have limited experience and thus don't yet appreciate the big picture. To someone who's been around a while, it's just another variation on a familiar theme. Sure, there are genuinely new developments from time to time, but most of the "new stuff" really isn't. It's kinda sad that so many people employing software developers don't get that, but at the end of the day, it's their loss...
Don't you think it would be better if Europe said no to software patents and tried to convince the US of abolishing theirs as well?
At the risk of taking a cheap shot, most of Europe just tried to convince the US not to go to war with a country, and with much sounder arguments, yet still they went. What makes you think the US government would listen to Europe and get rid of a patent policy, particularly one that is deeply entrenched in their legal framework and benefits the big US companies that finance their political campaigns?
We're staying out of Europe partly because of the multitude of languages, but mainly because (I'm told) it's a morass of different regulations; I have no doubt patent law is one of them.
I have direct personal experience with multiple UK-based software companies whose products are sold to multiple foreign countries, including most of Europe, Japan and several more in the region, the US, and others.
I call bull on whoever told you about the regs. Sure, there are a few differences here and there, but mostly within Europe things are fairly straightfoward. I doubt you'd think twice about shipping from one state to another within the US, so why you don't investigate European regs properly before ruling out shipping to a total marketplace several times the size of your own is beyond me...
Since when was "Just Plain Wrong" the same as "Insightful"?!
Her argument isn't even slightly that the patent system hasn't got problems. On the contrary, she argues that it needs change to keep Europe competitive in the worldwide software industry, and if you bother to do your homework into where her views come from, she makes a lot of good points, and has obviously tried to balance the opposing viewpoints in forming her policies.
RMS, on the other hand, has a very simple argument, which in the previous article also mentioned by the original story was pretty much expressed as "Patents suck, because". Granted that if you do your homework he, too, has rather more sensible arguments than that, but they sure as hell weren't written into the first article that I saw, and that's what the MEP is defending against here.
She said "Patents for software inventions will not go away.", so she basically said that my opinion and that of most of the other European people (the vast majority of public comments on software patents opposed it) is irrelevant, yet she claims to represent us.
Was that disagreeing with you "just because", or simply accepting the reality of the situation? Software patents do exist elsewhere in the world, notably in the US. This effectively disadvantages European software writers compared to American ones; we can use our ideas here but not there if they got in first, whereas they can use their ideas in both places without penalty.
If you could provide a link to those public comments, it would be good to see. Until then, I'm rather suspicious of whether (a) the sample is at all representative, or simply a self-selecting sample of a vocal minority, and (b) she is therefore not representing the people properly.
Besides that, she lied with her arguments.
How so? Most of that article seemed to be well reasoned, quite well informed, and a generally balanced and realistic viewpoint. Given yet another rant by RMS to which she was replying, I find your statement above rather unfair.
How could I still be polite to her? She should be thrown out of pariament.
You could be polite because it's simple courtesy and there's no reason not to be. The way to get your way on issues like this is by making clear, rational and informed arguments in a level-headed and well-presented way. It is not to rant (/me copies to RMS) or to be rude and offensive (/me replies to parent post). I'd far rather have the author of that article in a position of government than a "my way or the wrong way" narrow mind like RMS'.
I don't care if its abusive or non-abusive (a curious term anyway, since, at least in my understanding, all monopolies are abusive--it's just whether or not they've been granted the rights (say, by the feds) to be so).
How is is that all monopolies are necessarily abusive? If I make fantastic product, much better than everything else in its area, who am I abusing? If I continue to maintain it to an excellent standard even in the absence of any competition, how is that abusive?
How this can be said to be, in substance, similar or identical to the licenses used by closed-source companies is beyond me, and that's why I am saying her statement does not hold.
Take a step back, and consider the GPL as just another licence, and a GPL'd product as just another competitor in the marketplace. Leave aside your bias and preconceptions, and try to look at the big picture. Her arguments make a lot more sense than the hype and hyperbole of the article by RMS and Nick Hill, to which she was responding.
With respect to the public domain being totally free, I'd agree, with the exception that there is nothing about the public domain that ensures the continuance of that total freedom. Something in the public domain is totally free until someone uses that total freedom to copyright it.
That just doesn't make sense. If it's totally free, I can take it and do as I wish with it, without making any promises about what I will do with the result. The GPL does quite explicitly restrict my freedom in using the code in question; that's its whole raison d'Ãtre.
And how exactly is someone going to copyright a piece of totally free code in the public domain? No copyright law in the world allows that, as far as I'm aware. You could copyright something based on it, but only as far as the changes you'd made, and since it was you who made the changes, that seems only fair.
The former doesn't coerce because you never physically need to use an open source product.
Unless, of course, the open source product kills off the closed source alternatives for some reason, presumably because at the time it's a better (or better marketed) product. The fact that it may then fall to lower standards in the absence of competition is slim comfort to the developers of the closed source product that failed.
This was a bad thing when it led to Microsoft gaining effective monopolies in the desktop OS and office suite markets, and open source advocates spend all day bitching about that. It's no better thing if a particular GPL'd or otherwise open source application does the same thing.
I feel that there's scope for yet another 'methodology', alongside OO and XP and all that - it might be called 'code as conversation', whereby the quality of a piece of code is judged by how readily it communicates intent to other programmers.
I would have said that writing readable/maintainable code had always been a goal of good developers. I see it as orthogonal to both OOP and XP, and independent of any particular language or paradigm, though.
Some people (Knuth, for example) advocate taking this to extremes in the same sort of way that XP advocates taking things like unit testing to extremes. IMHO, you can go too far with all of these things, but it's quite hard to do so, and most people don't go nearly far enough.
When businesses go down, new businesses hire more workers, those problems you mention are only temp problems. Look, if Microsoft went under right now, it would do more for the tech industry in creating jobs than any single action or tax cut.
If Microsoft went under right now, it would probably throw several major Western economies, including yours and mine, into deep recession. Unemployment would take a hit, pension funds would take a hit, it's all bad news.
Next, the business world would panic about what it should do with its IT strategy. Chances are everyone would stick with Windows and Office for the near future, as they'd be the only standards in town, and without Microsoft to drive software or hardware upgrades, no-one would dare move. If you think everyone would suddenly drop Windows/Office and go to Linux, you're dreaming.
Microsoft is a monopoly, they hold a vast amount of capital and this company never innovates.
All generalisations are unfounded.
Microsoft based on proper economics should be going out of business now
You don't know much about economics either, do you? Economics should reflect reality, not the other way around. Otherwise your economics are worthless. And the reality is that marketing matters, and Microsoft are good at it. Market share also matters, and Microsoft have most of it. To enter a market and take control, you're going to need to be ten times cheaper or ten times better, and things like Linux or OpenOffice are nowhere near either.
Slashdot Mirror
Bet you can't write that in functional, OOP and declarative forms. ;-)
On the contrary. In my experience, an awful lot of programmers, mostly those who are self-taught but don't realise what they're missing, frequently choose an incorrect data structure or algorithm even for simple things like sorting and searching. If you're working in a field where performance matters at all, that can be crippling.
I agree that hardly anyone should need to write the usual sorting or searching algorithms from scratch today. It's almost invariably easier and safer to use one from a library, though of course there are a few legitimate exceptions. But you do need to understand the basics of the algorithms you use, their performance characteristics and the limitations they have.
This is particularly important with the growing dependence on library code, because most libraries provide only a few "typically best" algorithms. Sometimes an introsort variation isn't the best, or even close, but only the programmer who knows about his own data and who understands the range of algorithms available is able to judge when an alternative is more appropriate.
No, but I could tell you off the top of my head the algorithms for intro sort, quick sort, merge sort, radix sort and several others, and implement them for you in a procedural or functional language without a whole lot of reading. I work with performance-critical applications every day, and you'd expect nothing less from a professional in my position.
That's a fair point. However, there are so many obvious cases and so few police officers to challenge them that I doubt this would be a problem in practice. The guy doing 20mph more than everyone else and swerving between lanes in heavy traffic is dangerous. The guy doing 70mph on the motorway, so close to the car in front that if it braked sharply he wouldn't even have time to react before hitting it, is dangerous. The guy doing 50mph past a school just as all the kids are coming out in the afternoon is dangerous. The guy who overtakes causing an oncoming vehicle to slow down sharply or swerve to avoid him is dangerous. These types of thing are indisputable, and personally, I'd far rather the police were out there taking these people down than having to stop people who were doing 25% more than the speed limit, yet causing neither danger nor inconvenience to anyone.
One interesting idea I saw was the idea of "advisory speed limits": road signs that warned of an approaching hazard such as a bend with restricted view or a concealed entrance, and which also recommended a maximum speed to pass the hazard based on the view available, road condition... the same criteria as should be used for all limits today anyway. If you had an accident while travelling past a hazard faster than an advisory speed limit, you would automatically be held at least partially responsible. It's the same sort of argument that some countries use for turning at a stop light when nothing's coming across your path, as I understand it.
You just stick in the AUP that anyone must put up a legally required response and terminate any account that doesn't. How many databases are active on the Internet, with a paid up ISP subscription, but nobody maintaining them?
This is only going to be an issue for ISPs if the original content author is not available to add the response themselves, which is basically only going to happen on free hosting sites.
This simply is not a real problem with the proposal. It would be likely to occur in such a small number of cases that even a local ISP would be able to deal with it.
I didn't say they definitely had no legal weight, I suggested that it was doubtful they would hold up in court. However, to answer your question with another, can you find anybody -- ANYBODY -- who has been effectively prosecuted under an EULA in that same time period?
It is no more excessive than taking down a site violating an AUP, or any other maintenance ISPs do plenty of times every day. You are explicitly allowed just to link to a response, so a standard format "A response to this information is available (link) here" message should suffice.
Yes, this has been a problem for a while and is getting worse.
The responses to this article are, alas, all too predictable. "It violates my civil liberties!" they cry. "It's abusing freedom of speech!" "You couldn't enforce it anyway, because it would cost too much!" "How do I check someone is who they say they are?" Do they really believe that no-one's thought of this stuff before?
Well, guess what, kids. With freedom comes responsibility. We can agree that you have the right to say what you wish, but only if you accept the consequences of what you say. If I suffer harm, physical or mental, because you said something about me that wasn't fair, then you owe me fair compensation for that.
This sort of action was inevitable, and is a direct and proportionate response to many people abusing the privilege of free speech on the Internet. The "I should be able to say anything I like without fear of response!" advocates should consider themselves lucky that European governments aren't considering a scheme that removes anonymity on the Internet entirely and opens the online world to prosecution under existing libel laws.
(No, you couldn't get absolutely everyone, as a few people would know enough to remain truly anonymous. Technologically, you could easily get the vast majority, though.)
This is not a play school. People on-line can and do get away with mass fraud, posing as doctors and offering poor medical advice, destroying rival businesses' reputations through posting completely untrue horror stories, and more. None of this is justifiable under the banner of "free speech", and nothing in the European proposal restricts your free speech. It simply means you'll be held accountable for what you say, and why the hell shouldn't you be?
Although some people would like to change this, and rightly so.
Do you have any evidence for that?
Or that?
Yes, you can. In fact, a skilled and experienced driver is far more qualified to judge a safe speed at a given location and under given conditions than any beaurocrat who doesn't drive the road himself. Emergency services drivers do this all the time, for example.
Moreover, the posted limits in some countries (including the US and UK) are way below the safety mark. It's well established by several carefully conducted surveys in a variety of countries that the optimum speed limit for safety is the one that about 85% of drivers stick to. This figure is remarkably consistent across different road types, nationalities and driving conditions in the surveys. And yet most posted limits are well under that, in spite of the evidence that setting such a speed limit (a) criminalises people needlessly, and (b) decreases road safety.
That's a very good question. Whether we'd be better without speed limits at all, and diverting the money saved into better driver education so they can judge a safe speed for themselves, better signing to warn of real hazards, and better policing of motorists who are actually causing a danger to themselves or others, is an interesting debate.
Huh?! So you'd rather I had a crash with a driver behind me who was half asleep, or knocked a child off her bike as she rode into the road by mistake, than speed for a moment to avoid the hazard? These are two real examples where I broke the speed limit to avoid an accident this week. In each case, I judged that accelerating was less dangerous than braking sharply under the conditions at the time. It's not usual to have two incidents like that in a week, but I've acted similarly on numerous occasions during my decade or so of driving.
I have also broken the speed limit significantly, though always safely, in order to transport an injured patient to hospital as fast as possible. I have also broken the speed limit significantly, though always safely, on my way home to my girlfriend, who was alone in the house an hour after it had been broken into.
In each of these cases, although breaking the speed limit was illegal (possibly excepting the case of transporting the patient to hospital, when I'd have a good defence where I live) I think it was better than the alternative. Yet introducing a mandatory speed limiter would prevent me from doing this.
As one final example, consider that HGVs are routinely speed limited in this way, at least within the UK. As one former HGV driver pointed out to me, they used to vary their speed slightly between say 58 and 62mph on long journeys, to break the monotony and keep the attention focussed. Now everyone has to drive at 60mph to make their deliveries on time, and look what happened to the accident rate. :-(
There is a good argument for adding some sort of recording device to cars, so people who break the law seriously and without good reason can be held accountable for their actions. Perhaps then we could stop putting up highly expensive speed cameras that scare honest drivers who might slip up just over the limit while going past them (yes, I know the ACPO guidelines for prosecution in the UK but most drivers don't) and worry about the people who are really significantly reducing road safety by speeding. Who knows, we might even get speed limits based on safety and not profit. OK, who am I kidding? But it's a nice thought.
Most places won't give any details beyond the bare minimum in a reference these days, paper or otherwise, for fear of legal repercussions if they express an opinion that turns out not to match up with the new employer's experience. Crying "It wasn't in writing!" isn't much going to help if you've just been stung by a pro and are now on the receiving end of a lawsuit.
If you get fired, passed over for promotion, or otherwise disadvantaged because of not meeting the regs, your employer can be subject to industrial tribunals, legal action, etc. Such actions frequently succeed and result in significant compensation.
Bullshit. Regulation is to protect most of the market from weenies like you who won't stand up for themselves.
People in the city get paid such silly money that I have little sympathy for those who choose to work silly hours, but don't lump everyone else into the same category. Most people live for more than work, want to have a social life, support a family, or otherwise don't want to be subject to the kind of regime you're encouraging.
Even if you have a few toadies who'll suck up the company line, big business isn't immune from the same rules as the rest of us. They can go bust (if Enron or a big-name accountant can go, anyone can). They can be subjected to shareholder dissent over fat cat salaries (there have been a couple of major UK cases within the last few weeks). And sooner or later, someone's going to be smart enough to look after their employees better, and they're going to steal all the good ones, and they're going to outcompete their competition as a result.
They should decide whether or not it is viable to complete the project to the client's specifications with the resources available. ("Viable" needn't mean "profitable"; they could decide to run the project at an acceptable loss in order to keep the client sweet.)
If the project is viable, they should assign sufficient resources and have the project done. If the project is not viable, they should explain this politely to the client, and decline the business.
No smart client is going to withhold future business because you declined an infeasible project. If they do, you have failed to manage your clients' expectations effectively, which is another common but avoidable failure of management. And besides, you are in business to make a profit, not to keep happy potential clients who do not make you a profit.
Sure, and the employees have every right to say no if unreasonable demands are made of them, particularly in the sort of unpleasant way that this seems to be done (telling not asking, no up-front offers of compensation, treat staff differently to contractors, etc).
I'd work out what resources would be needed. If necessary, this could include asking whether people would be prepared to do more than their usual amount of work to increase that, given mutually acceptable compensation. Then I'd work out if the project was viable. If it was, I'd take it. If not, I wouldn't.
This is not a new problem, nor even an uncommon one. Yet companies with bad management seem to run into it all the time, while companies with good management strangely seem to avoid it, even when working in a similar industry and with similar or identical clients. Go figure.
That depends on your point of view. From another point of view, it's probably incompetent management trying to take advantage.
It doesn't matter that it's "only" 4-6 weeks. The employees will be straining to get through half that at 12/7 before they start doing more harm than good. If it's "only" a one-off and really necessary for the company, then management should have approached the employees and discussed the possibility with them before accepting the project and telling them what they "have to do".
This sounds like a simple failure of good management. The managers exist only to balance requirements with resources. If this project requires excessive work on the part of the staff, then management should have assigned more resources, or not taken on the project. They have no-one to blame but themselves if they treat salaried staff in a less favourable way than contractors, and those staff then feel aggrieved.
I agree with the other posters that you should look at the company and the nature of management overall before deciding how to act in a situation like this. But look with a very sceptical eye. Loyalty to a good employer is fair enough, but I've seen way too many people stick it out way too long because they assumed that "things will get better" or "the economy is just down", while others around them in a similar position were getting much better deals by actually going out and shopping around.
[Best Hugo Weaving voice] I'd like to share a revelation I've had during my time here...
Things don't move as fast as a lot of people make out. At the end of the day, software development still revolves around data structures and algorithms, then around a few common paradigms that express them (OO, procedural, FP, etc), then around languages that provide concrete tools based on those paradigms. There are lots of different applications now, each with a few idioms of their own, but they all come down to the same basic concerns: how do I store, manipulate and present the information that's important to me in this particular field?
Most of the "fast paced" development you hear about today isn't really that new at all. It only seems so if you've read the hype but haven't experienced it, and if you don't have a framework into which you can put it. To the 20-year-old studying a course at university and looking at going into the industry, your server-side scripted e-commerce application using CGI, PHP, ASP, J2EE, GEE WIZ and any other (D)(E)TLA you care to mention is the latest and greatest. To a 20-year veteran of the programming business, these tools are just different protocols for what is really a very simple data presentation exercise, the sort of thing you learn in a day.
I remember in my teens (early '90s) I used to think Windows programming was impossible. I could write a tool using a DOS-based library to make pretty graphics demos, but this GUI stuff was all too hard, and I avoided it for years. Inevitably, when I "turned pro" a few years later, I had to learn enough about it to write some front-end stuff. Do you know what? Once I actually sat down and read a book on Windows programming for a few hours, suddenly I could do prety much all the stuff the other guys could. I had to learn the message-driven architecture used by Windows, but that's quite natural. There were loads of APIs, but you just look them up when you need them. Sure, there was the office MFC specialist, who really did know a lot of stuff off the top of his head that the rest of us had to look up, but most people aren't at that level even in tools they use routinely. The point is, once I needed to do it and did my homework, it wasn't all that different to other things I'd done before.
I had a similar experience just a few weeks ago. As a long-time desktop apps programmer and occasional web page dabbler, I'd always been curious about how things like CGI scripted, database-backed web sites worked, but assumed it was some kind of black magic that would always be beyond me. Then I found it would be useful to write a bulletin board for a web site I help with, and did a bit of homework. Perhaps half a dozen articles later (basic CGI -- it's really just another very simple protocol; two or three to brush up on Perl; an introduction to MySQL; a well-written introduction to using the MySQL module for Perl) and hey presto, I've gone from a guy who understands procedural programming, relational databases and SQL to a guy who can write a whole bulletin board system for a web site, in less than a week.
Most of the "new stuff" that you "must keep up with" really isn't complicated if you know the basics. It might seem so to young and enthusiastic guys who have limited experience and thus don't yet appreciate the big picture. To someone who's been around a while, it's just another variation on a familiar theme. Sure, there are genuinely new developments from time to time, but most of the "new stuff" really isn't. It's kinda sad that so many people employing software developers don't get that, but at the end of the day, it's their loss...
At the risk of taking a cheap shot, most of Europe just tried to convince the US not to go to war with a country, and with much sounder arguments, yet still they went. What makes you think the US government would listen to Europe and get rid of a patent policy, particularly one that is deeply entrenched in their legal framework and benefits the big US companies that finance their political campaigns?
English, for example? :-)
I have direct personal experience with multiple UK-based software companies whose products are sold to multiple foreign countries, including most of Europe, Japan and several more in the region, the US, and others.
I call bull on whoever told you about the regs. Sure, there are a few differences here and there, but mostly within Europe things are fairly straightfoward. I doubt you'd think twice about shipping from one state to another within the US, so why you don't investigate European regs properly before ruling out shipping to a total marketplace several times the size of your own is beyond me...
Since when was "Just Plain Wrong" the same as "Insightful"?!
Her argument isn't even slightly that the patent system hasn't got problems. On the contrary, she argues that it needs change to keep Europe competitive in the worldwide software industry, and if you bother to do your homework into where her views come from, she makes a lot of good points, and has obviously tried to balance the opposing viewpoints in forming her policies.
RMS, on the other hand, has a very simple argument, which in the previous article also mentioned by the original story was pretty much expressed as "Patents suck, because". Granted that if you do your homework he, too, has rather more sensible arguments than that, but they sure as hell weren't written into the first article that I saw, and that's what the MEP is defending against here.
Was that disagreeing with you "just because", or simply accepting the reality of the situation? Software patents do exist elsewhere in the world, notably in the US. This effectively disadvantages European software writers compared to American ones; we can use our ideas here but not there if they got in first, whereas they can use their ideas in both places without penalty.
If you could provide a link to those public comments, it would be good to see. Until then, I'm rather suspicious of whether (a) the sample is at all representative, or simply a self-selecting sample of a vocal minority, and (b) she is therefore not representing the people properly.
How so? Most of that article seemed to be well reasoned, quite well informed, and a generally balanced and realistic viewpoint. Given yet another rant by RMS to which she was replying, I find your statement above rather unfair.
You could be polite because it's simple courtesy and there's no reason not to be. The way to get your way on issues like this is by making clear, rational and informed arguments in a level-headed and well-presented way. It is not to rant (/me copies to RMS) or to be rude and offensive (/me replies to parent post). I'd far rather have the author of that article in a position of government than a "my way or the wrong way" narrow mind like RMS'.
How is is that all monopolies are necessarily abusive? If I make fantastic product, much better than everything else in its area, who am I abusing? If I continue to maintain it to an excellent standard even in the absence of any competition, how is that abusive?
Take a step back, and consider the GPL as just another licence, and a GPL'd product as just another competitor in the marketplace. Leave aside your bias and preconceptions, and try to look at the big picture. Her arguments make a lot more sense than the hype and hyperbole of the article by RMS and Nick Hill, to which she was responding.
That just doesn't make sense. If it's totally free, I can take it and do as I wish with it, without making any promises about what I will do with the result. The GPL does quite explicitly restrict my freedom in using the code in question; that's its whole raison d'Ãtre.
And how exactly is someone going to copyright a piece of totally free code in the public domain? No copyright law in the world allows that, as far as I'm aware. You could copyright something based on it, but only as far as the changes you'd made, and since it was you who made the changes, that seems only fair.
Unless, of course, the open source product kills off the closed source alternatives for some reason, presumably because at the time it's a better (or better marketed) product. The fact that it may then fall to lower standards in the absence of competition is slim comfort to the developers of the closed source product that failed.
This was a bad thing when it led to Microsoft gaining effective monopolies in the desktop OS and office suite markets, and open source advocates spend all day bitching about that. It's no better thing if a particular GPL'd or otherwise open source application does the same thing.
I would have said that writing readable/maintainable code had always been a goal of good developers. I see it as orthogonal to both OOP and XP, and independent of any particular language or paradigm, though.
Some people (Knuth, for example) advocate taking this to extremes in the same sort of way that XP advocates taking things like unit testing to extremes. IMHO, you can go too far with all of these things, but it's quite hard to do so, and most people don't go nearly far enough.
If Microsoft went under right now, it would probably throw several major Western economies, including yours and mine, into deep recession. Unemployment would take a hit, pension funds would take a hit, it's all bad news.
Next, the business world would panic about what it should do with its IT strategy. Chances are everyone would stick with Windows and Office for the near future, as they'd be the only standards in town, and without Microsoft to drive software or hardware upgrades, no-one would dare move. If you think everyone would suddenly drop Windows/Office and go to Linux, you're dreaming.
All generalisations are unfounded.
You don't know much about economics either, do you? Economics should reflect reality, not the other way around. Otherwise your economics are worthless. And the reality is that marketing matters, and Microsoft are good at it. Market share also matters, and Microsoft have most of it. To enter a market and take control, you're going to need to be ten times cheaper or ten times better, and things like Linux or OpenOffice are nowhere near either.
You haven't been reading your PDA properly, have you? You forgot to add the words "...or else!" :-)