No, the market determines what is profitable and popular, not what is best.
Do you know what the market has made the most popular television show in the world? Baywatch. Would you seriously suggest that it is therefore the best television program in the world?
Markets produce efficient solutions when buyers and sellers meet with full knowledge and equal power. By defintion, closed-source can't provide the buyer with full information, and by making repair of broken software impossible by anyone except the vendor is creates a power imbalance.
hehe, well looks like you are sick of the "process system".
I'm sick of this particular process, partly because I've worked under better ones (or perhaps, less bad ones; I've seen good bits and pieces here and there but they've all had serious flaws). It's not the major factor why I'm leaving in a few weeks (I'm partnering up with a friend who's starting a web development company) but it certainly helped.
It makes sense because if all staff in your organization feel the same way as you, the process will simply not exist...because no one would be implementing it!
Not all staff are equal - in any hierachy, each individual rises to his or her own level of incompetence and stays there. The managers who determine the process have the authority, and the rank-and-file coders are supposed to shut up and follow it.
The point is your organization has processes in place to ensure STANDARDS are met and the final product is fit for mission critical systems.
The goal is to ensure that the final product is fit. But when that is forgotten, the processes and standards that are actually practiced (whether or not they agree with those in the policies and procedures manual that no one ever reads) will not support software quality in an efficient manner.
What's needed is a "meta-process", a process to develop the software process and keep it directed towards the goal. I would suggest that a democratic meta-process, where developers themselves work together to evolve the procedures they will use, would work better than decrees from clueless management.
Religions have a process to you know. It calls for the 10 Commandments to be followed.
Well, that's one set of religions. Others - such as Zen Buddhism - would say that such rules, or "process", are things to ultimately be transcended. The enlightened person, the sage or bodhisattva, does not refrain from killing based on some religious law; he simply acts. The practice of these religions is designed to help lead ordinary people to that state of enlightenment.
Perhaps that should be the goal of software development practices, as well - to help lead ordinary programmers into that state where they are enlightened enough to be simply incapable of producing flawed software.
everything revolves around the 'process'. The result is determined by the process.
The problem is that often the process becomes primary, and the reasons behind it get lost.
I'm working on a large NASA project now. I have determined that the purpose of this project is not to produce a working software system, but rather to produce a wall full of loose-leaf binders of incomprehensible documentation that no one will ever refer to again.
The process says we must have code reviews - great! But instead of being an analysis of the logic of my code, it turns into a check against the local code formatting standards - "You can't declare two variables with one declaration, use int a; int b; instead of int a,b;" (yes, that's an actual standard around here) instead of "Hey, if foo is true and bar is negative, you're going to dereference a garbage pointer here!"
The forms are observed, but the meaning is forgotten, like Christians going to church on Sunday then cutting people off and flipping them the bird on the drive home.
"Process" won't save us. Which doesn't mean that a certain amount of it can't help, but there is no silver bullet.
I wish I could strip all FONT tags from HTML using the Junkbuster.
Sometimes turning off style sheets will help. (OTOH, if the designer's not smart enough to leave you fonts alone, hw might not be smart enough to make a page that works when style sheets are off.) Or if things get really bad, you can (at least on my Linux version of Netscape) set an "override document-specified font" option.
Until all browsers support standards, designers will be stuck using pixels or FONT SIZE tags. Or simply making no effort at all to control the appearance and size of type on the web page.
I think we'd be better off if folks would make less effort to control the size and font of type on the page.
I spend a significant amount of time configuring my browser to use a font style and size that, when combined with my monitor, video card, OS, and lighting environment, causes me the least eyestrain. My choice on my Mac at work is different than my choice on my Linux box at home. I'd appreciate it if you would respect that.
Sure, for headers and side notes and the like get fancy, but for the main body of text please leave my preferences intact.
(Yes, it took me a while to learn that lesson, and you may find a page on one of my sites that I haven't updated since I learned it; that's laziness, not hypocracy, on my part.)
Now, you may like the idea of government just replacing corporations as active players in the lives of people, but I'd rather hold off both.
Yes, I also would prefer to keep both "Big Business " and "Big Brother" at bay.
No more of this Deleware corporation crap, which steps on the rights of the real home state.
Interesting idea, but difficult in practice. "Headquartered" is a very vague notion, to define legally.
How so? Simply define the headquarters as where the most employees are engaged in business activities. (Or maybe the state where the majority of stock holders live. If that changes, make 'em re-charter in the new state. That might also help make stockholders behave like real owners of a company instead of like people trading baseball cards.)
If that makes for a rush on Delaware real estate as megacorps build large campuses there, Delaware might just change some of its laws when it finds that all these corporations it chartered are now showing up and affecting the people who live there, rather than leeching off their real home states.
Congress has the power to *regulate* interstate trade; to say that Congress could *forbid* it would be a questionable extension of power.
I would think that regulating an activity includes determining conditions for taking part in it at all.
Certainly banning a misbehaving corporation from selling across state lines is a hell of a lot less questionable application of the interstate commerce clause than, say, recent attempts to make violence against women a federal crime on the basis that it affects the economy.
(Lest I be misunderstood: violence against any innocent person is a bad thing. People who perpitrate domestic violence need to be removed from polite society. However, if a state fails to do so, the proper remedy is to use the federal courts to make the state respect the civil rights of women, not to expand the powers of the federal government on a half-assed pretext.)
Let me guess; you're a big fan of Franklin Roosevelt's legacy?
Not really. His policies helped save capitalism, at the price of more regulation, but I don't desire a regulated capitalism so much as a libertarian socialism.
(Briefly: it is a fallacy to think that the political left necessarily wants bigger government and the right wants smaller government. The attributes of government include not just its size and power, but also the direction in which it applies that power - think of it as a vector quantity. Like the libertarian capitalists, I wish to keep the magnitude of that vector small. However, I want it pointed in a different direction; one supporting personal freedom and a free economy, but based on labor (leftist) rather than property (rightist). Which doesn't mean the abolition of private property, just recognizing that it is a human creation meant as a means to an end - human freedom and contentment - not an end in itself; and that concentrating control of resources into the hands of a few is destructive of that end.)
Our legal system has transformed from a mechanism for justice (if it ever was this way) to something that people with money use to get their way.
I'm not sure that is was ever anything else...
A few month back I read T.H. White's The Once and Future King, a wonderful version of the King Arthur story (and the basis for the musical Camelot). In it, after Arthur has gotten rid of trial by combat and replaced it with trial by jury, he finds that nothing has really changed - the only difference is that instead of the victor being the side who can get the better fighter as its champion, the victor is the side who can get the better lawyer.
Maybe a loser-pays system would help.
"Loser pays" would make it very, very difficult for the "little guy" to sue corporate behemoths. Would you bring suit against Microsoft, knowing that if you lost you'd have to pay their legal fees?
When I speak german... I think german in my head... but like... Do skript kiddes see a w40l3 8uncha 1's and 0's and 3's and 4's and 7's in their h34d'5 w43n t43y R +a1k1n6 ?
Priceless! This one's going in my fortunes file right now. Somebody mod that up.
Am I confused? Do slashdot readers like it when "rights" are protected (rights of the consumer vs. a "monopoly"), or are they opposed to the protection of "rights" (rights of the corporation/copyright holder vs. consumer)?
Corporations don't have rights. Their very existence is a privilege, contingent upon good behavior and revokable at any time by the people. Unfortunately, the mechanism for this is badly broken at the moment.
In the case of Microsoft, rather than trust-busting I'd rather that the state had not empowered them to build a trust in the first place. Without the legal structure of the modern corporation, and bogus legal theories that loading a program into memory constitutes making a copy - not to mention copyright laws themselves, especially with a corporation as copyright holder - Microsoft would be no problem at all.
In another post:
Don't go loading power up into a government, to fight the corporations,
Governments don't need more power to fight the corporations. All we need are a few applications of existing powers:
Congress should use its interstate commerce powers to force corporations to be chartered in the state where they are really headquartered. No more of this Deleware corporation crap, which steps on the rights of the real home state.
Congress should use that same power to simply ban misbehaving corporations from engaging in interstate trade.
So, if Microsoft doesn't be good, it can sell Windows to the fine folks in Washington, but not bother the rest of us.
This would return power to the states, away from the federal government, and so should be appealing to conservatives, even if it does help liberal ends.
The courts should make it clear that corporations are not citizens or natural persons, that the mid-1800's Supreme Court decision that said so was as bogus as Dred Scott - that the state cannot create, via charter, new legal persons.
The courts should also make it clear that Congress's copyright and patent powers extend only to the original authors or creators - real natural people - of a work. (Yes, that might mean a collaborative copyright held by dozens of individuals. We can deal with that.) No 100-year copyrights held by corporations.
Both of these are reductions, not increases, in state power.
State governments should start revoking some fscking charters of corporations that can't seem to learn to behave.
This would just about put corporations back in their place.
Of course, we know what the odds of this ever happening are.
Name me a NEED (shelter, food, etc) that the DMCA affects in an adverse manner.
All of them, because you need information to meet those basic needs.
How can I fix that leaky pipe in my house? "Insert $5 to view the plumbing chapter on your `Home Repair for Hackers' CD-ROM."
What are the health effects of a diet of Twinkies? "Click here to view the ingredients of this food product. By clicking, you agree to the following terms and conditions: You may not reproduce, share, or discuss this information with anyone."
but i'm sure you think this is a worthwhile price to pay in exchange for some dilettante reader to be able to "check my reporting" or "understand potential bias".
If you choose to speak or publish anonymously, great. I believe you have every right to do so; I've posted anonymously on/. before, and in fact back in the glory days of USENET I sometimes acted as a forwarder for anonymous posts to alt.drugs. And if I'd had a forum like/. in my oppressed school days, yes, I probably would have posted anonymously.
And anonymous sources are recognized as being valid journalism, no problem there.
But these are at the option of the speaker or writer. What I object to - ethically, esthetically, and legally - is having anonymity forced upon me.
My genuine real honest-to-goodness mom-and-dad-gave-it-to-me name is on the bottom of this post, and has been on almost all of them since I started shooting my mouth off on FidoNet almost thirteen years ago. (I think I've made fewer than a dozen anonymous posts in all that time.) For good or for ill, I put my reputation on the line to back up what I say. When you take off my name, you've not only stripped away that reputation, you're taken off the fact that the author was willing to back up his statements with his reputation.
Anyone who's been on the net for a while takes anonymous communications less seriously than those attached to a name, even a nym. Stripping away authorship credit damages the integrity of the work, as well as depriving the author of due credit.
I have to disagree with you there. Undoubtedly, the web started out as and was designed for a text oriented medium of information propagation. However, it is also true that it has outgrown its original design. How else do you explain "IMG" tags? Why would they be required in a txt only medium?
You're confusing "text oriented" with "text only". "Text oriented" doesn't mean that images, animations, sounds, etcetera aren't present; it just means that text is primary.
How do people find your pages? How do indexes and search engines work? It's all based on the textual content. Google doesn't do OCR on your GIFs of scanned brochures, or voice recognition on your MP3s of your radio spots. Even if images or sounds are the focus of your site, you'd best have plenty of text that indexes and describes that content.
What loads fastest, given surfers the information they're looking for in the least time? Text.
What can be displayed in the user's choice of colors and fonts, so that it's legible in any situation? Text.
What can be rendered on a PDA, or read by a text-to-speech converter for the blind? Text.
What should web designers do when clients don't understand these issues? Apply the clue stick. Gently and with respect, but firmly, make it clear that you know more about the internet and the WWW than they do, that's why they are paying you, and if they want an rhinestone-encrusted illegible and unusable site that takes three days to load over a 28.8k PPP link, then they can hire a 12-year-old who's just finished reading HTML for Dummies instead of a professional - and then spend the next few months wondering why they bother having a web site, since it's done fsck all for their business.
Let me give you a hint: your "work" is already giving slashdot / Andover $$$:
Only to about the same extent that my sparkling conversation gives my favorite coffeehouse money when I'm there, because having witty people around makes people want to hang around and buy more food and drink. If they start charging a cover to come in and talk to me, I think I'd deserve a cut.
The buyers of the book are paying to have the publically available information delivered to them in a form convenient to them (print), in the same way that mp3.com delivers content already available to viewers in a more convenient format (streamed mp3).
If that's really the case, then the cover price would reflect that, and there would be no profits to give to charity; the cover price would be materials + labor + shipping and stocking costs.
it doesn't hurt you a bit for someone to quote your work and attribute it to anonymous.
There is a distinction between a brief quote and reproducing a long work. If you say:
There is a distinction betweena brief quote and reproducing a long work. - some Slashdot geek
that's all well and good. But if you reproduce something that's hundreds of words long (either an independent piece or a section of a longer work) you're obligated to attribute properly.
It does, however, benefit the reader.
No. You've deprived the reader of vital information needed to check your reporting, to understand potential bias, or to follow up for futher information. Proper attribution is vital - didn't people learn that in high school English?
For what moral reason should anyone ever have to ask permission to print publically available information, sell the printed copy, and give the profits to charity!??
The fact that the profits are going to charity is irrelevant. After all, you're picking the charity, not me - I don't want you supporting your favorite charity (which might be one I oppose!) with my work.
Want to quote a short section of something I've written? Feel free, that's fair use. Want to copy it entirely for your own pleasure or reference, or give a friend a copy, or even put it up on Napster/Freenet/Gnutella? Go right ahead (I couldn't stop you anyway, as the recording industry is slowly and painfully learning), but I demand that you keep my name on it. (Which, as I understand, they weren't going to do with this book.)
But if you're going to sell copies of my work and make money, you owe me a cut. It doesn't matter if your intent in selling is to buy a Porche, or give the money to your church or even the ACLU; if anyone else is going to make a buck off my work, I should too.
Actually, in Colonial America some state's armies had officers elected by the rank-and-file soldiers. When George Washington took over, he ended this practice, as well as forcing out free blacks.
I seem to recall that pirate ships used to work similarly, with the captain chosen by the crew.
T'was Chairface Chippendale, and he got as far as "CHA" before The Tick stopped his nefarious scheme. In both the comic and the cartoon, whenever you saw the moon in the background it had "CHA" carved on it.
So when did the United States occupy Canda and Mexico?
With Mexico, mid 1800's, an occupation that continues today. With Canada, I think there were some border skirmishes ("54 40 or fight!") around the same time, but no real war.
Of course, the US occupied, and continues to occupy, many other nations - it's all stolen Indian land. So until we start paying serious reparations to the surviving Indian nations, it's a bit hypocritical for the US government to criticize anyone else's land grabbing tendancies.
Slashdot Mirror
I just put them in my Hall of Shame.
A lot of those changes have been extremely positive.
Do you know what the market has made the most popular television show in the world? Baywatch. Would you seriously suggest that it is therefore the best television program in the world?
Markets produce efficient solutions when buyers and sellers meet with full knowledge and equal power. By defintion, closed-source can't provide the buyer with full information, and by making repair of broken software impossible by anyone except the vendor is creates a power imbalance.
What's needed is a "meta-process", a process to develop the software process and keep it directed towards the goal. I would suggest that a democratic meta-process, where developers themselves work together to evolve the procedures they will use, would work better than decrees from clueless management.
Well, that's one set of religions. Others - such as Zen Buddhism - would say that such rules, or "process", are things to ultimately be transcended. The enlightened person, the sage or bodhisattva, does not refrain from killing based on some religious law; he simply acts. The practice of these religions is designed to help lead ordinary people to that state of enlightenment.Perhaps that should be the goal of software development practices, as well - to help lead ordinary programmers into that state where they are enlightened enough to be simply incapable of producing flawed software.
I'm working on a large NASA project now. I have determined that the purpose of this project is not to produce a working software system, but rather to produce a wall full of loose-leaf binders of incomprehensible documentation that no one will ever refer to again.
The process says we must have code reviews - great! But instead of being an analysis of the logic of my code, it turns into a check against the local code formatting standards - "You can't declare two variables with one declaration, use int a; int b; instead of int a,b;" (yes, that's an actual standard around here) instead of "Hey, if foo is true and bar is negative, you're going to dereference a garbage pointer here!"
The forms are observed, but the meaning is forgotten, like Christians going to church on Sunday then cutting people off and flipping them the bird on the drive home.
"Process" won't save us. Which doesn't mean that a certain amount of it can't help, but there is no silver bullet.
I spend a significant amount of time configuring my browser to use a font style and size that, when combined with my monitor, video card, OS, and lighting environment, causes me the least eyestrain. My choice on my Mac at work is different than my choice on my Linux box at home. I'd appreciate it if you would respect that.
Sure, for headers and side notes and the like get fancy, but for the main body of text please leave my preferences intact.
(Yes, it took me a while to learn that lesson, and you may find a page on one of my sites that I haven't updated since I learned it; that's laziness, not hypocracy, on my part.)
If that makes for a rush on Delaware real estate as megacorps build large campuses there, Delaware might just change some of its laws when it finds that all these corporations it chartered are now showing up and affecting the people who live there, rather than leeching off their real home states.
I would think that regulating an activity includes determining conditions for taking part in it at all.Certainly banning a misbehaving corporation from selling across state lines is a hell of a lot less questionable application of the interstate commerce clause than, say, recent attempts to make violence against women a federal crime on the basis that it affects the economy.
(Lest I be misunderstood: violence against any innocent person is a bad thing. People who perpitrate domestic violence need to be removed from polite society. However, if a state fails to do so, the proper remedy is to use the federal courts to make the state respect the civil rights of women, not to expand the powers of the federal government on a half-assed pretext.)
Not really. His policies helped save capitalism, at the price of more regulation, but I don't desire a regulated capitalism so much as a libertarian socialism.(Briefly: it is a fallacy to think that the political left necessarily wants bigger government and the right wants smaller government. The attributes of government include not just its size and power, but also the direction in which it applies that power - think of it as a vector quantity. Like the libertarian capitalists, I wish to keep the magnitude of that vector small. However, I want it pointed in a different direction; one supporting personal freedom and a free economy, but based on labor (leftist) rather than property (rightist). Which doesn't mean the abolition of private property, just recognizing that it is a human creation meant as a means to an end - human freedom and contentment - not an end in itself; and that concentrating control of resources into the hands of a few is destructive of that end.)
A few month back I read T.H. White's The Once and Future King, a wonderful version of the King Arthur story (and the basis for the musical Camelot). In it, after Arthur has gotten rid of trial by combat and replaced it with trial by jury, he finds that nothing has really changed - the only difference is that instead of the victor being the side who can get the better fighter as its champion, the victor is the side who can get the better lawyer.
"Loser pays" would make it very, very difficult for the "little guy" to sue corporate behemoths. Would you bring suit against Microsoft, knowing that if you lost you'd have to pay their legal fees?Corporations don't have rights. Their very existence is a privilege, contingent upon good behavior and revokable at any time by the people. Unfortunately, the mechanism for this is badly broken at the moment.
In the case of Microsoft, rather than trust-busting I'd rather that the state had not empowered them to build a trust in the first place. Without the legal structure of the modern corporation, and bogus legal theories that loading a program into memory constitutes making a copy - not to mention copyright laws themselves, especially with a corporation as copyright holder - Microsoft would be no problem at all.
Governments don't need more power to fight the corporations. All we need are a few applications of existing powers:- Congress should use its interstate commerce powers to force corporations to be chartered in the state where they are really headquartered. No more of this Deleware corporation crap, which steps on the rights of the real home state.
- The courts should make it clear that corporations are not citizens or natural persons, that the mid-1800's Supreme Court decision that said so was as bogus as Dred Scott - that the state cannot create, via charter, new legal persons.
- State governments should start revoking some fscking charters of corporations that can't seem to learn to behave.
This would just about put corporations back in their place.Congress should use that same power to simply ban misbehaving corporations from engaging in interstate trade.
So, if Microsoft doesn't be good, it can sell Windows to the fine folks in Washington, but not bother the rest of us.
This would return power to the states, away from the federal government, and so should be appealing to conservatives, even if it does help liberal ends.
The courts should also make it clear that Congress's copyright and patent powers extend only to the original authors or creators - real natural people - of a work. (Yes, that might mean a collaborative copyright held by dozens of individuals. We can deal with that.) No 100-year copyrights held by corporations.
Both of these are reductions, not increases, in state power.
Of course, we know what the odds of this ever happening are.
How can I fix that leaky pipe in my house? "Insert $5 to view the plumbing chapter on your `Home Repair for Hackers' CD-ROM."
What are the health effects of a diet of Twinkies? "Click here to view the ingredients of this food product. By clicking, you agree to the following terms and conditions: You may not reproduce, share, or discuss this information with anyone."
"init() has already started. It is too late for the BIOS to vote."
And anonymous sources are recognized as being valid journalism, no problem there.
But these are at the option of the speaker or writer. What I object to - ethically, esthetically, and legally - is having anonymity forced upon me.
My genuine real honest-to-goodness mom-and-dad-gave-it-to-me name is on the bottom of this post, and has been on almost all of them since I started shooting my mouth off on FidoNet almost thirteen years ago. (I think I've made fewer than a dozen anonymous posts in all that time.) For good or for ill, I put my reputation on the line to back up what I say. When you take off my name, you've not only stripped away that reputation, you're taken off the fact that the author was willing to back up his statements with his reputation.
Anyone who's been on the net for a while takes anonymous communications less seriously than those attached to a name, even a nym. Stripping away authorship credit damages the integrity of the work, as well as depriving the author of due credit.
How do people find your pages? How do indexes and search engines work? It's all based on the textual content. Google doesn't do OCR on your GIFs of scanned brochures, or voice recognition on your MP3s of your radio spots. Even if images or sounds are the focus of your site, you'd best have plenty of text that indexes and describes that content.
What loads fastest, given surfers the information they're looking for in the least time? Text.
What can be displayed in the user's choice of colors and fonts, so that it's legible in any situation? Text.
What can be rendered on a PDA, or read by a text-to-speech converter for the blind? Text.
What should web designers do when clients don't understand these issues? Apply the clue stick. Gently and with respect, but firmly, make it clear that you know more about the internet and the WWW than they do, that's why they are paying you, and if they want an rhinestone-encrusted illegible and unusable site that takes three days to load over a 28.8k PPP link, then they can hire a 12-year-old who's just finished reading HTML for Dummies instead of a professional - and then spend the next few months wondering why they bother having a web site, since it's done fsck all for their business.
Only to about the same extent that my sparkling conversation gives my favorite coffeehouse money when I'm there, because having witty people around makes people want to hang around and buy more food and drink. If they start charging a cover to come in and talk to me, I think I'd deserve a cut.
Want to quote a short section of something I've written? Feel free, that's fair use. Want to copy it entirely for your own pleasure or reference, or give a friend a copy, or even put it up on Napster/Freenet/Gnutella? Go right ahead (I couldn't stop you anyway, as the recording industry is slowly and painfully learning), but I demand that you keep my name on it. (Which, as I understand, they weren't going to do with this book.)
But if you're going to sell copies of my work and make money, you owe me a cut. It doesn't matter if your intent in selling is to buy a Porche, or give the money to your church or even the ACLU; if anyone else is going to make a buck off my work, I should too.
I seem to recall that pirate ships used to work similarly, with the captain chosen by the crew.
T'was Chairface Chippendale, and he got as far as "CHA" before The Tick stopped his nefarious scheme. In both the comic and the cartoon, whenever you saw the moon in the background it had "CHA" carved on it.
Of course, the US occupied, and continues to occupy, many other nations - it's all stolen Indian land. So until we start paying serious reparations to the surviving Indian nations, it's a bit hypocritical for the US government to criticize anyone else's land grabbing tendancies.