False. With zen theme and drupal documentation, you have FULL CONTROL over every aspect of your website
Saying something like that demonstrates weak knowledge of fundamental software engineering principles. Every line of code and feature has a conceptual overhead to it. "Full Control" is just a marketing term. In reality you can always do anything you want, the underlying system merely encourages or discourages certain constructions.
Drupal chooses a content model, theming system, form system, and hook-based request processing that make a great deal of things extremely easy. But you don't get that for free. In order to generalize code to meet a wider variety of needs, the code itself must become more complex than any specific implementation of the functionality it is attempting to support in general. That's great if it does what you need, or if the customization you want fits easily into the existing model. However if it doesn't you have to deal with the complexity of an architecture that is not optimized towards your particular need at all.
but you'll be leaps and bounds further from the get-go than if you use a basic framework or build from scratch.
While that's true, additional development will be slower. Why? Because you can write very concrete code that does exactly what you need. For instance, I designed and developed a custom e-commerce store in about 30 hours in Rails. It imports 20,000 products from their inventory system database. Allows for wholesale sales to approved customers from a different database. Entire site is under 10 database tables. There is not one unnecessary feature in either the public or the admin interface. Further customizations would be quite easy as well as I have complete unit test coverage. If I want to completely change the order of the checkout process that would be the matter of a couple hours work.
I've had that exact requirement come up in a Drupal project and it was a nightmare. The e-commerce module is far too complex to go in and change any fundamental workflow. Sure, it was possible to set up a workflow that got the data into the database, but the user experience was horrible.
To be fair, frameworks also make choices that box you in... that is true of all code. However the philosophical difference is that pure frameworks in general tend towards solutions to more universal problems of web development, and those solutions tend to be smaller and scope and more independent of application code itself.
I'm aware of the optimal line length. It doesn't mean arbitrarily short though. It's easier to read something in a straight line, the reason long lines are a problem is because of visual tracking from one line to the next. It also enables speed reading because you can read in a whole line as a unit. One word per line makes speed reading impossible and requires just as much visual tracking as one super long horizontal line, but with slightly less efficient use of space.
Drupal is my favorite open source CMS. Despite legitimate critiques it is an amazingly engineered piece of software; the customizability is unparalleled for a such a capable out-of-the-box package. Drupal makes many projects possible which would otherwise not be possible at all. Unfortunately Drupal is no panacea because all of this costs in terms of complexity.
This is why you use drupal. No one should be building websites, ecommerce or not, from scratch anymore.
No, this is why you use a framework. A good framework enables best practices with minimal overhead. Even a framework may be overkill because there are tons of websites that are extremely simple in nature, and maybe only need a dab of PHP here or there to add the necessary dynamic elements.
You use Drupal when you need a ton of boiler-plate functionality, and no budget to build from scratch using a framework. If you do have a reasonable budget you better think hard for several reasons:
Drupal starts you off with huge overhead. You will be running tons of code you aren't using from the get-go. You're basically starting off with quite a low ceiling.
You will be sacrificing design for ease of development. As customizable as Drupal is, there are still very simple user interface concepts that just don't mesh well with the huge engine powering everything. In these cases you are faced with the uncomfortable position of knowingly creating an inferior UI not because of some inherit complexity in the problem, but because Drupal has painted you into a corner.
Drupal makes it hard to optimize your database usage. Sure there are work-arounds, but consider the fact that many developers these days are trying to ditch relational databases in general because there are fundamentally hard to scale. It's still a common opinion despite the fact that the relational model is about as perfect a mix of flexibility and performance as you can get, backed by a theoretical basis that applies to all data in all domains. People are willing to throw out a huge amount of flexibility in terms of ad-hoc querying and data integrity because for many applications managing the data via hastily written application code is much easier than scaling an RDBMS. Drupal itself imposes many constraints that makes the relational model even harder to scale, and fundamentally ties your site to those assumptions so you'd better hope caching will give you the performance you need.
Drupal requires an expert to really make it sing. Without being intimately familiar with it, many things that Drupal was designed to do easily will be time consuming, even for a skilled PHP developer. With web frameworks, the issues you have to deal with are basically well known even across languages and platforms. The solutions may be different, but they are easy to learn if you understand the web because they all solve the same fundamental problems. Drupal on the other hand introduces a ton of concepts to allow for rapid and flexible development, but are not intuitive in and of themselves for a web programmer.
SQL injection, XSS, etc are reason enough. Thats why Sony BMG, AOL, MTV, etc are starting to roll out web platforms based on drupal. Using the Ecommerce package in drupal will insure security, and for the most part, usability.
First of all SQL injection is trivial to prevent. XSS is a little trickier, but is pretty manageable without a lot of mental overhead for the sufficiently paranoid developer. Of course things get trickier with XSRF and such. But look at the reality, if a security vulnerability is discovered in Drupal, pretty soon the bots are going to be out in force, and you'll be forced to upgrade. But what if your modules aren't compatible or you have other difficult to migrate upgrades? With a local XSS exploit at least someone has to write a custom script to attack you. Bottom line is you choose your poison.
I've been a professional developer for 8 years and I've never spent significant time dealing with that bug. I'd rather have the code consistent than have it one way or the other. Developers have strong feelings about these things because of our attention to detail. But the sign of a good programmer is being able to say, "It's not worth my time to even think about this". If it was a clear win one way or the other then of course I'd get on board. But it's not. Being able to see more code on one screen has value.
Density is the opposite of readable and maintainable.
Bollocks. It's a tradeoff just like every other debate in the programming world. Sure, Perl gives you the ability to put way to much code on a single line. But the opposite problem of putting loads of white space all over the place is almost as bad.
The more you spread out the code, the more you have to scroll. White space is valuable when it means something, like to separate discrete tasks within a long function. But the whole
} else {
thing is just a waste of space. It's one line less of code I can see. I visually parse } else { instantaneously. Similarly, some compound expressions or chained method calls make perfect sense. The right place to break out multiple lines depends on the reader's own cognitive abilities and familiarity with the symbols being manipulated.
Otherwise writing like this would be much easier to read
Wow, if they hadn't ripped me off for nearly $1000 in various DSL equipment and service that never worked then this might have made me respect them enough to sign up again.
Very much my story. Of course when I was a kid I did some AppleSoft BASIC, HyperTalk, migrated to C and Pascal, studied a few different forms of assembler, C++, Java, and Scheme in college. I'd even say I managed to grok quite a bit despite never have done any really serious projects.
But at the same time I was learning web design, HTML, CSS, Javascript. Eventually that led to my first real programming job which was in PHP. The nice thing about PHP is if you have any potential at all as a real programmer it doesn't take long before you start to see how much pain you are really putting yourself through. In the process you learn the fundamental problems you are trying to solve. Then when you move to a better language you can appreciate certain design decisions. I think C serves much the same purpose in more traditional programming (though C is obviously a language with a vision behind it unlike PHP). If you start with something too high level like Ruby on Rails or Java it's way easy to take things for granted and not even realize what the benefits/tradeoffs really are.
Although I'm probably talking out my ass here. I'm sure plenty of people started with Java and took an entirely different path to enlightenment.
Master HTTP, HTML, CSS, and Javascript. PHP is an excellent place to start because it's very close to the metal (of the web). From there you can pick up other languages and toolkits quite easily because you will understand the problems they are attempting to solve. The more you learn the easier it will become to learn more.
I sympathize but it's never going to happen. It's statistically impossible to convince people of that. The system must be changed to have some kind of run-off voting.
If Obama tries to be different, he risks alienating long-time democrat supporters, if he tries to be the same he risks alienating all the people who want to vote for him for change.
he is "no doubt" a progressive, just one who now supports the scandalous FISA "compromise" and Antonin Scalia's views on gun rights and the death penalty, no longer plans to accept public campaign funding, and wants to make sure women aren't feigning mental distress to get a "partial-birth" abortion
The rest of those things don't bother me much at all. I don't expect to share that many viewpoints with anyone, to me those are all small potato personal value judgements that people can reasonably disagree about.
The FISA bill is what is really disappointing. It's amazing how overnight it's completely destroyed my opinion of Obama. When is a politician going to have the courage to stand up and point out the simple absurdity of shredding our own constitution, trampling human rights, and sparing no legislation to cover our own asses to fight a threat that is statistically insignificant? The terrorists must just be laughing in their caves right now. Are we such pussies in America that we can't rely on real intelligence and police work to fight terrorists?
This isn't a partisan issue at all, it's the absolute insanity of our times. Obama really sounded like he understood that, then he turns around does the exact opposite. It's not about flip-flopping per se, it's about pretending to know what the biggest, scariest, most obvious problem is in this country, then turning around and pandering to bamboozled middle america huddled in fear thanks to 7 years of fear-mongering by an incompetent who was just trying to muddle through a job that was way wayyy beyond him. If Obama had stuck to his guns (if he even understood the point of what he was saying), he could have used the bully pulpit to bring rationality back to America ala "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Unfortunately now his rhetoric has become hollow. I still think he may redeem himself as president, but his most powerful tool, his voice, is now castrated.
That's like saying that Deep Blue isn't "unbeatable" because it still loses pieces during the match.
It's not at all like that. Chess is a positional game. The proper analogy would be that Deep Blue wasn't "unbeatable" because it's position was seen to be deteriorating during some stretch of the game.
Thank you for this! This is absolutely true. It seems you're taking a lot of heat from mods who think that open source and open formats are The One True Way. But history shows us otherwise:
Innovation is done primarily in the private sector. Why? Because to really innovate you have to be working full time on something. And who's going to pay you to work on it if they can't derive financial benefit from it?
However once an idea is implemented and out there, open source excels and copying it, perfecting it, stabilizing it, and standardizing it for future use. Why? Because the value of the idea implemented in an open fashion is orders of magnitude larger than the original idea.
It would be nice if open source and standards bodies could come up with great ideas on their own, but before an idea is proven in the marketplace it's too hard to get a critical mass of developers or any consensus on how the idea should work. Whereas in the private sector all you need is a vision and a checkbook.
That's the sound of silence. There is absolutely no reason that the web should be turned into an application deployment platform, and doing so completely undermines the purpose and nature of the web.
People need applications. Cross-platform application development is costly and slow. No one wants to download and install software. Everyone has a browser. The browser, while being a significantly weaker development platform than full fledged GUI frameworks, is ubiquitous and has network functionality baked in at the lowest level.
In short, it's good enough. It hits all the right sweet spots. Application deployment isn't subverting the web at all. In fact it's been the catalyst that made the web successful. The amount of plain HTML documents on the web is greater than ever (okay maybe they're being served up from a CMS, but that doubly highlights the value of web applications).
This argument comes up over and over again, and it strikes me as pointlessly regressive. You can't plan the development of something like the web. If you get a committee of people whether they be industry experts or engineers or visionaries, they will never be able to come up with a standardized application platform that's better than the web anyway. As the article states, the W3C hasn't delivered anything significant in years. They are good at solving known quantifiable problems by standardizing based on experience of what works and what doesn't work, but they will never be great innovators.
Now, where does Flash fit into that? Flash is an application runtime environment, and is really good for multimedia programs. Why would you ever want to embed an program in a document? An program is neither a document nor a part of a document. It doesn't make sense from the hypertext perspective, and that creates glaring problems. When a website is created using Flash, or Silverlight, or Java, or any other application runtime embedded in it, it becomes impossible to index, links stop making sense, sometimes the "back" button doesn't take you to the previous view of the application, sometimes it does, etc. It would make more sense if your Flash website had a hyperlink to a Flash program, which would be opened by the runtime in a separate window -- without a back button, a forward button, or an "up" button (as some browsers have), without the confusing and paradigm breaking nature of embedding applets.
This is a convenient over simplification. What's the most common use of Flash today? Video players. Why do we not just embed video directly? Because it's actually more unreliable (which systems support which formats/codecs?) and not possible to control the presentation of it at all. So in this sense, Flash is serving mainly as a formatting hook like CSS. Sure it would be nice if standards allowed for that, but they don't. Eventually they will catch up, and you can bet that the existence of the Flash solution will add tremendously to the discussion of how to do video via standards.
Flash is a rich set of capabilities, not just an application platform. It allows for vector graphics, custom interface elements, animation, sound, etc. These can all be utilized extremely well as extensions to the document-centric web. Despite the fact that the Flash development world is rife with abuse, that doesn't change the fact that Flash can do things far above and beyond what the regular web can do. You can argue those things have no value, but other people disagree (and not just in a shiny-happy-distracted-clueless-manager kind of way) and your opinion is no more valid than theirs.
Now the bigger problem that concerns the/. set is "Should we not use Flash since its proprietary?" I can respect RMS' decision not to, and I'm glad there are developers out there who feel that way because it does maintain a sort of balance, but I rue the day when innovation is prevented for ideological purposes.
Copyright and patent are mercantile privileges, thus unnatural and unethical.
You are taking an awful lot for granted. Natural is not just whatever you deem it to mean. Ethics are codes of conduct established by societies usually without specific realms of activity. Saying mercantile privileges are unethical per se is ridiculous. We as a society determine what is ethical or not. Do you have an argument or not?
In any case, copyright is about protecting a commercial reproduction monopoly, not about preventing plagiarism.
So you are totally okay with a company publishing a manuscript against an author's wishes and keeping all the proceeds as long as the author's name is published?
No-one has a right to publish someone else's work as their own.
And how pray tell do we enforce this without a law?
I didn't say "human rights", which, by the way, is also a human construct just as legal rights are, so if you're going to be a pedant please use accepted definitions instead of redefining them according to your own sociopolitical dogma. I imagine you frown upon the RIAA's use of the term "theft" to describe illegal music downloading... hmmm.
Anyway, you're being blinded by the abuse of copyright.
Do you really not see the public benefit of intellectual property? Do you not see how in the absence of those "privileges" creatives would be even more at the mercy of businessmen then they are now? Why would someone write a book if the minute they submitted a transcript to a publisher, the publisher could simply publish the book under their own name? Why would someone sink the time and creativity into pushing the envelope of web design with something incredibly unique if the first person that likes it can co-opt the whole thing for their own use?
Even though you seem to think that these exist solely for the benefit of corporations, they are actually the only thing guaranteeing any kind of reward for the creator. Sure corporations wield these laws more effectively and have twisted them around over the years, but that's what businesses do. They'll exploit creativity for profit no matter what the law is, but if we abolish copyright they won't have to pay for it at all. Eventually more and more creatives will get the picture that it's a sucker's game to create anything. You can argue that the situation has gotten so bad that we'd be better off without copyright, but that is an unnecessarily extremist position. Abolishing intellectual property rights can do nothing but reduce the amount of creativity and research and development going on.
The fact that copyright and patent are greatly abused does not mean they should be abolished. That would be cutting off our nose to spite our face. The need to provide some legal rights to creatives should be economically obvious to anyone.
Personally I think good software is a result of re-using what works in the form of libraries or design patterns, keeping things as simple as possible, and utilizing developer experience and judgement.
Not sure what your point is exactly. People who are skeptical of science because they fear it may destroy their faith-held views are definitely worthy of ridicule.
On the other hand, a belief that science can tell you all you need to know about the world is also a sad and shallow view of reality. A healthy spiritual life (maybe you've never met a person with one) allows a person to be more centered and psychologically stable. The mechanism by which this happens, whether it's all an artifact of brain chemistry, or something else going on is completely irrelevant. Science is great when based in genuine curiosity, but some people use it as a crutch to avoid difficult questions just as surely as religious fundamentalists do.
Slashdot Mirror
Saying something like that demonstrates weak knowledge of fundamental software engineering principles. Every line of code and feature has a conceptual overhead to it. "Full Control" is just a marketing term. In reality you can always do anything you want, the underlying system merely encourages or discourages certain constructions.
Drupal chooses a content model, theming system, form system, and hook-based request processing that make a great deal of things extremely easy. But you don't get that for free. In order to generalize code to meet a wider variety of needs, the code itself must become more complex than any specific implementation of the functionality it is attempting to support in general. That's great if it does what you need, or if the customization you want fits easily into the existing model. However if it doesn't you have to deal with the complexity of an architecture that is not optimized towards your particular need at all.
While that's true, additional development will be slower. Why? Because you can write very concrete code that does exactly what you need. For instance, I designed and developed a custom e-commerce store in about 30 hours in Rails. It imports 20,000 products from their inventory system database. Allows for wholesale sales to approved customers from a different database. Entire site is under 10 database tables. There is not one unnecessary feature in either the public or the admin interface. Further customizations would be quite easy as well as I have complete unit test coverage. If I want to completely change the order of the checkout process that would be the matter of a couple hours work.
I've had that exact requirement come up in a Drupal project and it was a nightmare. The e-commerce module is far too complex to go in and change any fundamental workflow. Sure, it was possible to set up a workflow that got the data into the database, but the user experience was horrible.
To be fair, frameworks also make choices that box you in... that is true of all code. However the philosophical difference is that pure frameworks in general tend towards solutions to more universal problems of web development, and those solutions tend to be smaller and scope and more independent of application code itself.
I'm aware of the optimal line length. It doesn't mean arbitrarily short though. It's easier to read something in a straight line, the reason long lines are a problem is because of visual tracking from one line to the next. It also enables speed reading because you can read in a whole line as a unit. One word per line makes speed reading impossible and requires just as much visual tracking as one super long horizontal line, but with slightly less efficient use of space.
agreed!
Drupal is my favorite open source CMS. Despite legitimate critiques it is an amazingly engineered piece of software; the customizability is unparalleled for a such a capable out-of-the-box package. Drupal makes many projects possible which would otherwise not be possible at all. Unfortunately Drupal is no panacea because all of this costs in terms of complexity.
No, this is why you use a framework. A good framework enables best practices with minimal overhead. Even a framework may be overkill because there are tons of websites that are extremely simple in nature, and maybe only need a dab of PHP here or there to add the necessary dynamic elements.
You use Drupal when you need a ton of boiler-plate functionality, and no budget to build from scratch using a framework. If you do have a reasonable budget you better think hard for several reasons:
First of all SQL injection is trivial to prevent. XSS is a little trickier, but is pretty manageable without a lot of mental overhead for the sufficiently paranoid developer. Of course things get trickier with XSRF and such. But look at the reality, if a security vulnerability is discovered in Drupal, pretty soon the bots are going to be out in force, and you'll be forced to upgrade. But what if your modules aren't compatible or you have other difficult to migrate upgrades? With a local XSS exploit at least someone has to write a custom script to attack you. Bottom line is you choose your poison.
Since 2005 I have been wo
I've been a professional developer for 8 years and I've never spent significant time dealing with that bug. I'd rather have the code consistent than have it one way or the other. Developers have strong feelings about these things because of our attention to detail. But the sign of a good programmer is being able to say, "It's not worth my time to even think about this". If it was a clear win one way or the other then of course I'd get on board. But it's not. Being able to see more code on one screen has value.
Bollocks. It's a tradeoff just like every other debate in the programming world. Sure, Perl gives you the ability to put way to much code on a single line. But the opposite problem of putting loads of white space all over the place is almost as bad.
The more you spread out the code, the more you have to scroll. White space is valuable when it means something, like to separate discrete tasks within a long function. But the whole
}
else {
thing is just a waste of space. It's one line less of code I can see. I visually parse } else { instantaneously. Similarly, some compound expressions or chained method calls make perfect sense. The right place to break out multiple lines depends on the reader's own cognitive abilities and familiarity with the symbols being manipulated.
Otherwise
writing
like
this
would
be
much
easier
to
read
Apple's bread and butter has been designers and other creative professionals. These people are just as much geeks as are pure computer geeks.
Wow, if they hadn't ripped me off for nearly $1000 in various DSL equipment and service that never worked then this might have made me respect them enough to sign up again.
Very much my story. Of course when I was a kid I did some AppleSoft BASIC, HyperTalk, migrated to C and Pascal, studied a few different forms of assembler, C++, Java, and Scheme in college. I'd even say I managed to grok quite a bit despite never have done any really serious projects.
But at the same time I was learning web design, HTML, CSS, Javascript. Eventually that led to my first real programming job which was in PHP. The nice thing about PHP is if you have any potential at all as a real programmer it doesn't take long before you start to see how much pain you are really putting yourself through. In the process you learn the fundamental problems you are trying to solve. Then when you move to a better language you can appreciate certain design decisions. I think C serves much the same purpose in more traditional programming (though C is obviously a language with a vision behind it unlike PHP). If you start with something too high level like Ruby on Rails or Java it's way easy to take things for granted and not even realize what the benefits/tradeoffs really are.
Although I'm probably talking out my ass here. I'm sure plenty of people started with Java and took an entirely different path to enlightenment.
Master HTTP, HTML, CSS, and Javascript. PHP is an excellent place to start because it's very close to the metal (of the web). From there you can pick up other languages and toolkits quite easily because you will understand the problems they are attempting to solve. The more you learn the easier it will become to learn more.
It will if you're Obama facing McCain.
I sympathize but it's never going to happen. It's statistically impossible to convince people of that. The system must be changed to have some kind of run-off voting.
Starts and ends...
Maybe he should try to do the right thing.
The rest of those things don't bother me much at all. I don't expect to share that many viewpoints with anyone, to me those are all small potato personal value judgements that people can reasonably disagree about.
The FISA bill is what is really disappointing. It's amazing how overnight it's completely destroyed my opinion of Obama. When is a politician going to have the courage to stand up and point out the simple absurdity of shredding our own constitution, trampling human rights, and sparing no legislation to cover our own asses to fight a threat that is statistically insignificant? The terrorists must just be laughing in their caves right now. Are we such pussies in America that we can't rely on real intelligence and police work to fight terrorists?
This isn't a partisan issue at all, it's the absolute insanity of our times. Obama really sounded like he understood that, then he turns around does the exact opposite. It's not about flip-flopping per se, it's about pretending to know what the biggest, scariest, most obvious problem is in this country, then turning around and pandering to bamboozled middle america huddled in fear thanks to 7 years of fear-mongering by an incompetent who was just trying to muddle through a job that was way wayyy beyond him. If Obama had stuck to his guns (if he even understood the point of what he was saying), he could have used the bully pulpit to bring rationality back to America ala "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Unfortunately now his rhetoric has become hollow. I still think he may redeem himself as president, but his most powerful tool, his voice, is now castrated.
It's not at all like that. Chess is a positional game. The proper analogy would be that Deep Blue wasn't "unbeatable" because it's position was seen to be deteriorating during some stretch of the game.
Thank you for this! This is absolutely true. It seems you're taking a lot of heat from mods who think that open source and open formats are The One True Way. But history shows us otherwise:
Innovation is done primarily in the private sector. Why? Because to really innovate you have to be working full time on something. And who's going to pay you to work on it if they can't derive financial benefit from it?
However once an idea is implemented and out there, open source excels and copying it, perfecting it, stabilizing it, and standardizing it for future use. Why? Because the value of the idea implemented in an open fashion is orders of magnitude larger than the original idea.
It would be nice if open source and standards bodies could come up with great ideas on their own, but before an idea is proven in the marketplace it's too hard to get a critical mass of developers or any consensus on how the idea should work. Whereas in the private sector all you need is a vision and a checkbook.
People need applications. Cross-platform application development is costly and slow. No one wants to download and install software. Everyone has a browser. The browser, while being a significantly weaker development platform than full fledged GUI frameworks, is ubiquitous and has network functionality baked in at the lowest level.
In short, it's good enough. It hits all the right sweet spots. Application deployment isn't subverting the web at all. In fact it's been the catalyst that made the web successful. The amount of plain HTML documents on the web is greater than ever (okay maybe they're being served up from a CMS, but that doubly highlights the value of web applications).
This argument comes up over and over again, and it strikes me as pointlessly regressive. You can't plan the development of something like the web. If you get a committee of people whether they be industry experts or engineers or visionaries, they will never be able to come up with a standardized application platform that's better than the web anyway. As the article states, the W3C hasn't delivered anything significant in years. They are good at solving known quantifiable problems by standardizing based on experience of what works and what doesn't work, but they will never be great innovators.
This is a convenient over simplification. What's the most common use of Flash today? Video players. Why do we not just embed video directly? Because it's actually more unreliable (which systems support which formats/codecs?) and not possible to control the presentation of it at all. So in this sense, Flash is serving mainly as a formatting hook like CSS. Sure it would be nice if standards allowed for that, but they don't. Eventually they will catch up, and you can bet that the existence of the Flash solution will add tremendously to the discussion of how to do video via standards.
Flash is a rich set of capabilities, not just an application platform. It allows for vector graphics, custom interface elements, animation, sound, etc. These can all be utilized extremely well as extensions to the document-centric web. Despite the fact that the Flash development world is rife with abuse, that doesn't change the fact that Flash can do things far above and beyond what the regular web can do. You can argue those things have no value, but other people disagree (and not just in a shiny-happy-distracted-clueless-manager kind of way) and your opinion is no more valid than theirs.
Now the bigger problem that concerns the /. set is "Should we not use Flash since its proprietary?" I can respect RMS' decision not to, and I'm glad there are developers out there who feel that way because it does maintain a sort of balance, but I rue the day when innovation is prevented for ideological purposes.
If you start from the pr
Interesting choice of order, as I'm brazilian-norwegian.
You are taking an awful lot for granted. Natural is not just whatever you deem it to mean. Ethics are codes of conduct established by societies usually without specific realms of activity. Saying mercantile privileges are unethical per se is ridiculous. We as a society determine what is ethical or not. Do you have an argument or not?
So you are totally okay with a company publishing a manuscript against an author's wishes and keeping all the proceeds as long as the author's name is published?
And how pray tell do we enforce this without a law?
I didn't say "human rights", which, by the way, is also a human construct just as legal rights are, so if you're going to be a pedant please use accepted definitions instead of redefining them according to your own sociopolitical dogma. I imagine you frown upon the RIAA's use of the term "theft" to describe illegal music downloading... hmmm.
Anyway, you're being blinded by the abuse of copyright.
Do you really not see the public benefit of intellectual property? Do you not see how in the absence of those "privileges" creatives would be even more at the mercy of businessmen then they are now? Why would someone write a book if the minute they submitted a transcript to a publisher, the publisher could simply publish the book under their own name? Why would someone sink the time and creativity into pushing the envelope of web design with something incredibly unique if the first person that likes it can co-opt the whole thing for their own use?
Even though you seem to think that these exist solely for the benefit of corporations, they are actually the only thing guaranteeing any kind of reward for the creator. Sure corporations wield these laws more effectively and have twisted them around over the years, but that's what businesses do. They'll exploit creativity for profit no matter what the law is, but if we abolish copyright they won't have to pay for it at all. Eventually more and more creatives will get the picture that it's a sucker's game to create anything. You can argue that the situation has gotten so bad that we'd be better off without copyright, but that is an unnecessarily extremist position. Abolishing intellectual property rights can do nothing but reduce the amount of creativity and research and development going on.
The fact that copyright and patent are greatly abused does not mean they should be abolished. That would be cutting off our nose to spite our face. The need to provide some legal rights to creatives should be economically obvious to anyone.
Agreed. Now remind me never to ever work in such an environment again.
Here's one idea:
http://michaelfeathers.typepad.com/michael_feathers_blog/2008/06/the-flawed-theo.html
Personally I think good software is a result of re-using what works in the form of libraries or design patterns, keeping things as simple as possible, and utilizing developer experience and judgement.
Not sure what your point is exactly. People who are skeptical of science because they fear it may destroy their faith-held views are definitely worthy of ridicule.
On the other hand, a belief that science can tell you all you need to know about the world is also a sad and shallow view of reality. A healthy spiritual life (maybe you've never met a person with one) allows a person to be more centered and psychologically stable. The mechanism by which this happens, whether it's all an artifact of brain chemistry, or something else going on is completely irrelevant. Science is great when based in genuine curiosity, but some people use it as a crutch to avoid difficult questions just as surely as religious fundamentalists do.