Natural copyright is more important for software than it is for a lot of other media because it is so often revised (though some code has a longer fixed life, like various versions of malloc() which have been around and unchanged forever because they need to be predictable).
It is still important for other works, too, though. As an author, you may have to show several revisions of your book to your editor ("take out the scene with the dead horse and make the lighthouse worker a spaceman") before it is accepted for publication. All of these versions need automatic copyright protection.
Natural copyright also helps deal with the issue that corporations tend to have more money to throw around than individuals. What if you are dirt poor, and truly can't afford to register your copyright? There are actually people out there in the US who cannot afford to pay anything whatsoever. They should not be denied copyright protection.
If you are really stuck between Scylla and the shore, you could try to get them to pay half up front.
That way it is much less worthwhile for them to bother going through the potential legal hassles involved with stealing your stuff.
Of course, if they feel confident that they can get away with stealing your stuff anyway, it would just mean that they get it at half price.
Also, keep in mind the difference between copyright and patent. Copyright is yours whether or not you file with the government. Not so with patents. If they use your idea before you patent it, I believe that that constitutes prior art.
Don't bother trying any spiffy copy protection. 45 days is enough for them to get the idea even if there were no way for them to get a copy of the source (worst case for that: they take screenshots with a digital camera and ocr them).
Sorry, but you have the right to preserve your investment by backing up media that you buy. This steps all over that by making it illegal to own or make devices capable of making legitimate backups.
Chomsky's point about free speech during the whole "holocoust never happenned" fiasco (Chomsky flat out disagreed with the guy's findings, but supported his right to publish them) was basicaly,
(paraphrase) Supporting free speech means supporting exactly the ideas that you hate. Supporting someone's right to free speech only if you agree with them is meaningless. Of course you support their right to say what you already believe.
On the other hand, I never used to have a credit card. I never wanted one because I consider it to be a borrowing tool, and I have never been in the position where I needed to buy something which I could not afford (not that I am rich, I just don't buy it if I don't have the money).
There are two major problems with not having a credit card: 1.) I live in SF, and my family lives in MA. In order to buy plane tickets, I need a credit card (or else I have to borrow a friend's credit card). 2.) Since I never borrowed money, I had no credit record whatsoever. This could eventually prevent me from being able to buy a house that I could afford. It made it very difficult for me to get a credit card in the first place. They offer credit cards to students (worst case: mom and dad will pay), people with good credit (they will get their money back), and people with bad credit (they will get lots of money in interest payments).
So the problem arises when they make things that you really "need" contingent on participation.
I agree, I just think that it is a very, very bad thing to do which they are taking very lightly from a journalistic point of view. Whatever their intentions (and I agree that sensationalism is a big cause) they are actually lying by misquoting this way.
I will also say that I see ellipses and brackets in those side boxes all of the time.
Sorry to be anal, but "IE" being in caps, I translated it out of the corner of my eye, before I had even read most of the post, as a reference to the crappiest "browser/integral operating system component" that I know of.
PG&E restructured itself just to take advantage of the loopholes which they had written into deregulation. They knew what was going to happen the whole time. It was a total scam. Also, the increase in demand was mostly an illusion created by the manipulation of supply.
My point about the quote is that they modify it without notation. The quotes in the sidebar have always been there, but usually they match up with the actual quote or else there is notation to indicate paraphrase or omission. The BBC is just modifying the quotes with no indication that they are not really quotes. This means that if I say, person X said, "blah," and you say, no they actually said, "foo," we can both go to BBC online and find evidence for the accuracy of our version of the quote. This means that you can't verify what someone really said, which is important.
The other issue is that people have a right not to be misrepresented. Changing quotes like this amounts to putting words into someone's mouth, potentially diluting or changing their meaning. They would be justified to react with total outrage - "that's not what I said!" The journalist may not understand the subtleties of the quote, and may destroy the meaning inadvertently. At least with a real quote you can go back to it and say, "this is what he said exactly - make your own judgement about what it means."
"San Francisco is one of the most pathological cities on earth. The people who live here lost their sense of human connection (in the '90s). The city was completely emptied of diversity at a certain point, and the entire population that came in were suburban kids who had never lived in any city or town or community in their whole lives. They had no sense of community. It's now a place where if you give eye contact, you get maced.
Wow, that sure is totally off-base from my perspective. I have a great community of neighbors (who are adults who have mostly lived here for a while). They bring over fresh vegetables. We give each other copies of our house keys in case we get locked out. People watch out for potential break-ins at each other's houses.
Our neighborhood has great diversity. There are many ethnic families around who have been in the neighborhood for more than a decade. I recently read a report which demonstrated (and yes, maybe the report is BS) that the decrease in diversity was grossly overestimated. From what I can see with my own eyes, this appears to be true.
I make eye contact with people all of the time, all over the city, and often end up talking with strangers and making new friends (I got a free painting this way). I have never had the slightest problem here resulting from making eye contact (except maybe downtown, sometimes the tourists think you are going to rob them if you make eye contact - but notably, the business and financial people (who live here, as opposed to the tourists) don't seem to respond that way).
"But I really don't like the society that has grown up around the dot-communists, who are all products of suburbia and television."
There was a big problem with the manners and morality of a lot of "dot commers". People who had lots of money, but no concept of tipping were threatening to drive the cappucino-makers out of the city. It was really getting to the point where the "dot commers" were going to have to make their own cup of coffee, because no one working at a coffee shop could afford to live here without tips hat they weren't getting. I know of one group of individuals who went to the local shop every morning and often had meetings there. They would each get a beverage and breakfast and leave no tip whatsoever.
On the other hand, I spent a short time as a San Francisco "dot commer" myself, and I do not own a television, never mind cable TV. The majority of the professionals I worked with were intelligent, critical thinkers who, although they read the CNN website, didn't mindlessly believe everything that they read. They were not frivolously spending on the latest stupid gadget that the media told them to buy. They were polite and mature, and had insightfull views about the world.
My point is that saying that all "dot commers" are evil is totally false and prejudicial. Just think of all of the statements that have been made about all hippies. This guy should know better than to criticize based on stereotype.
From the article:
"the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a 1998 agreement that banned online distribution of companies' intellectual property"
How's that for oversimplification?
I guess it's better than the constantly repeated line, "the utilities are facing bankruptcy due to California's failed energy deregulation experiment." The deregulation experiment (crafted by the utilities) was a total success. They wanted to see if they could rob CA blind, and they did. Nothing failed about that experiment. If you live in CA then you heard that quote approximately 1.2 billion times.
There is also the one you always hear to the effect that the judge invalidating Thomas Penfield Jackson's remedies found that MS should not be broken up. I don't think that this is true. I believe that the judge found that the circumstances rendered the judgement invalid, and the remedies had to be decided in an unbiased manner, but never said that they were the wrong remedies.
And one more disturbing collapse of journalistic integrity - keep an eye on the bold quotes in the sidelines of BBC online articles. They will "quote" someone (no brackets to indicate paraphrase or elipses to indicate omissions), but when you read the quote in the article it it slightly different. I haven't seen any that twist the meaning, but a quote is a quote - you said it or you didn't. It prevents you from using it as a source for exactly what someone said.
Sorry to rant, but it pisses me off when journalists act like idiots.
Let's assume that the environment was capable of taking everything that we are dishing out.
That still would not change the fact that I would like to live in a place with clean air (read, "without perceptibly filthy air") to breathe, and more plants and animals to look at.
From the hills near San Francisco, you can clearly see the blanket of smog in which people are living. Although this is a localized effect from an intense concentration of cars, etc., and might be safely blown away over the ocean, its effects completely buffered by the vastness and resillience of the environment, it is still a real downer to live in it, and I would much rather be able to simultaneously live in SF and breathe clean air.
So even if there were no negative effects of human activity on the environment whatsoever in the long term, there would still be motivation to reduce emissions and increase the diversity of life.
I wonder what percentage of the people out there are actually real programmers or engineers?
There are certainly a few people responding who seem to have "been there" to a greater or lesser degree.
Progress bars and human perception
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Computing Pet Peeves?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Amusing anecdote about progress bars:
In one project I worked on, there was this homemade progress bar which would update about 4 times over the course of connecting to a piece of hardware (which took about 15 sec.). Since it only updated a few times, there were several times over the course of these 15 seconds where nothing would appear to be happening (keep in mind, a wait of just a few seconds can seem very long and be very distracting, especially if it is something you are doing repetetively). Since it was connecting to external hardware, every time the progress bar would stop moving, you would reflexively think, "did it stop because of an error, or is it still connecting?"
I got really annoyed with this progress bar, especially since I had to do about a million connects to verify my fixes, so I threw in enough extra updates to the progress bar that it kept on moving the whole time you were connecting.
Boy, were the customers impressed! I got a bunch of calls about how much faster and more reliably the software was connecting to the hardware. Of course, it wasn't connecting any faster, and this was before I had fixed any real connection bugs, so it wasn't connecting more often, either. It is just that when it was working, you knew it was working, and when it failed, it stopped right away.
The lesson I got from it is that user feedback is what creates the user's perception of what is going on. If a progress bar keeps stalling, the user's intuition is that the program is having some sort of trouble completing the task.
Programs which steal the input focus bug me, too. You should be able to operate your computer with the monitor turned off if you remember the right keystrokes without some program popping up and changing the context.
Also, programs jumping to the front 50 times while they are starting up is really annoying. For a good laugh, start Word and VC++ at the same time and watch how many times they pull the "my splash screen is on top, "no, MY splash screen is on top" crap. If I start VC++ and then start another program right afterwords, I want to use the second program until I explicitly switch away. I do not want VC++ deciding that I need to see every step of startup - "Oops, the user has switched to another app, but never got to see me update this toolbar - better jump to the front, even though I am only 12% done starting up!"
Some other things:
1.) Favor self documenting code over separate comments when possible. Comments need to be maintained separately from code. Self documenting code does not get out of sync with the documentation, and is readable anywhere you use it. For example, if you are writing a function which converts an audio frequency to a wavelength, instead of calling the function CnvtFreqToWaveLen(), and documenting the fact that it takes KHz and returns inches, call it CnvtKHzToInches(). This way, any user of the function knows in what format to supply the input and in what format the return value will be, without relying on the docs being up to date.
2.) Try to construct your variable and function names such that your code reads like English. Rather than "if(hardwareInstalledFlag)" which does not tell you the meaning of the two states of the flag, use "if(hardwareInstalled)" and make sure that hardwareInstalled is TRUE if the hardware is installed. There are few things more annoying than something like runningFlag, where 0 means running and 1 means not running. If that is the case, call it hwNotRunning so you can say, "if(hwNotRunning)".
3.) Write stable code. The common myth that software is too complex to be truly stable is total BS. We have had extremely complex systems running out in the field for several years without a power cycle. Always check your assumptions (the hardest part can be identifying the assumptions you are making). If you find yourself saying that X or Y can never occur, then test for it.
4.) Never assume that the software understands the situation better than the user. MS Word's assumption that it understands the English language better than you possibly could is one of the worst examples (I used to work at Orban - Word 97 by default would silently fix any occurances of "Orban" behind your back with NO confirmation, and change them to what you OBVIOUSLY meant to type, "organ"). Something MS does not understand is that I am the user, and I may happen to decide that I WANT to start a sentence with a lowercase letter ("cvGetStub() is a function which...."). I should not have to be an expert at reconfiguring Word just to get it to allow me to decide what I want to type.
5.) Write self teaching programs. Instead of "Could not complete the requested operation," have your dialog explain what was missing, like, "one or more tracks must be enabled for RECORD in order to enter RECORD mode."
6.) Use descriptive variable names. Even most uses of 'i' in a 'for' loop are inapropriate. Instead of 'i', call it what it is, like dbRecordNum, rather than relying on the context ("oh, this loops maxDbRecordNum times, therefore 'i' must be the record index").
7.) Don't blame the user for your bugs. Never come across as condescending, as you do not know the context in which a message is actually going to be displayed. When the user can see that they are clearly running into a bug, but the software is chastising them for doing something wrong, that is very annoying. Dave Barry talks about the ScanDisk startup message in this context. "To avoid seeing this message in the future, behave, stupid user," is really annoying when you know that the problem was directly caused by the mistakes of the same programmers who are now blaming you. Sarcastically, it should read, "to avoid seeing this message in the future, run an OS which does not arbitrarily crash after having write-cached a bunch of crap that it never bothered to write back to the hard drive." Realistically, "This error could have been caused by turning off the computer without shutting down properly, or the system may have become too unstable to shut down properly."
8.) Use the mouse cursor CONSISTENTLY to tell the user about the state of the app. If you have a mouse arrow, the program should respond to your input. If you have an hourglass cursor, the program should ignore your input, not save it up to deluge the system with when it becomes un-busy. If the program is processing user input while performing some other task (therefore it is honoring your input, but may not get to processing it right away), there is a pointer/hourglass cursor that says just that.
9.) In general, get the user feedback right. This lets the user know that he really clicked the button that he thought he did, etc.. Don't mix control and status in general (some exceptions). It should be obvious which screen elements are used to do something, and which are used to report feedback.
10.) Do not try to maintain multiple copies of the same state information; for example, if you have a dialog box with 10 settings, don't maintain the state of the dialog elements as one thing, and the state of the internal settings as another. Always maintain a master copy of the state and update everybody who cares from that. So when you open the dialog, you don't display the last state of the dialog, you recalculate the state of the dialog from the master state of the program. So if you are maintaining a field in a dialog which contains a username: a) when opening the dialog, update username from the master state. Do not try to keep the dialog state in sync with the master state as you go. b) when closing the dialog, update the master state from the contents of the dialog. c) When the username changes (as a result of the dialog or anything else), perform the appropriate action to respond to it. d) When your program needs username, get it from the master state.
In many cases (no exaggeration) you can get there faster by leisurely strolling than you can by taking MUNI.
On the skateboard subject, it can be a serious drawback to a commuter that skateboarding is illegal in SF (stupid). You may not care, but it could mean being very late for work on an important day. They do haul people off in cuffs for skateboarding sometimes, and often take their board, stranding them if it is not walking distance (although everywhere in SF is technically walking distance).
Commuting wants to be reliable, which is the problem with bikes on BART during rush hour. You could probably get away with bringing your bike most of the time (I don't know), but the one time they stop you, you are stranded.
I've used a Razor to take through the mission to BART, to Embarcadero station, and then up the Embarcadero to Pier 29 (downhill from Coit tower).
It was OK, but a motor would have been better. Also, the wheels are too small, so It's kind of dangerous if you are not constantly leaning back and ready to assume a standing position.
I wouldn't use it on any serious hills, and even on a flat surface the wheels are too small to keep your momentum, even with good bearings (they come with crap).
Unfathomably, the rules for bikes on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) prevent you from bringing anything but a fold-up (which you say doesn't cut it) on the train during peak hours, so unless you do a reverse commute, it doesn't help you any. This is crazy since peak hours are exactly when you want to encourage people not to drive. The problem being that it's too crowded during peak, they should add more cars and trains to solve the problem.
The rules for bikes on the Commuter Rail in the Boston area were the same deal when I lived there (probably still are). Insane!
P.S. Those recliner bikes also put your head at bumper level. Bad for the brain.
At one of my previous jobs, I was part of a very successfull experiment in engineering self-management. The engineers communicated directly with marketing to formulate a plan which took into account the market's desire for features and fixes, but was also grounded in the reality of what would be possible, and when.
Both teams provided visibility on what they were doing to the execs, so the execs only had to step into the details when they thought that there was a problem. This way, the execs could treat the various departments more like black box units, and deal more with steering the ship.
It helped that the engineers were all good friends and the head of marketing for the project was smart AND reasonable....
Mass-of-two-shits (Massachusetts) has no alcohol sales (almost) all day on Sunday, which should be unconstitutional given that it respects one religion's sabbath over another's.
It also leads to some amusing and disturbing side effects.
Disturbing: Every Sunday, the bootleggers come out. They come around to all of the homeless shelters and other hangouts for alcoholics and sell marked-up alcohol that they bought on Saturday. Then they turn around and buy crack with the profits. All it takes is one day of prohibition to have a black market and bootleggers.
Amusing: Since everybody was flocking to NH on Sunday to buy their booze, they changed the law so that towns which were within 10 miles of the NH border could sell alcohol on Sunday. The message: God doesn't want you to drink on Sunday, but he REALLY doesn't want you to give your money to NH!
(New Hampshire - Live free or die making licence plates)
I think that the rationale was not so much about improving quality, but about preventing companies from using a local media monopoly to control public opinion. A company with a media monopoly has incredible sway with the politicians, as they control the news AND the political advertising.
At least with different corporations in control of different local media, although you still get corporations telling you what to think, at least you get a few different corporations telling you what to think (maybe one is owned by a Republican and one by a Democrat, or one owner owns lots of Sun's stock, while another is heavily invested in MS.
The best way I can see to fight this is to vary your news sources. Read the little guy (if you can find him) as well as the mainstream news. Check out several sources from both.
Comparing an article on CNN's site to an article on the BBC's site can really be enlightening. On the same day, CNN failed to report 20,000 Israelis demonstrating for peace with Palestine, while the BBC stuck it at the bottom of an article summarizing the latest violence. I would think that since violence in the Middle East is the status quo, talk of peace is far more newsworthy.
Another comparison is when Bush caused the Yen to tumble during his speech by using the wrong economic term (devaluation instead of deflation - suggesting to some that he was supporting artificial devaluation of the Yen in order to make exports more attractive to consumers, when he was really just referring to bad things already going on with the Japanese economy).
The BBC used the occasion to print an entire article (quite amusing, but also quite editorial) describing the incident and recalling other times Bush has misspoken, ending with the observation that somehow, despite his obvious stupidity and incompetence, he was still extremely popular with the American people. CNN covered the speech about Japan's economic troubles, but made no mention whatsoever of the economic troubles that the speech caused. ABC briefly mentioned it at the bottom.
Every news source I know of is biased in some way, and over the years it seems that journalists have blurred the lines between news and editorialism more and more (they are both good to have, but should be properly labeled).
Reading different sources can often tell you just as much about these companies' motives as it can fill in your understanding of what actually happened.
Even reading news from fanatical and therefore unreliable sources tells you what various extremists are thinking and alerts you to the subject so that you can do your own research.
And to be trite, every lie that you spot shows you some truth about the liar.
Slashdot Mirror
Natural copyright is more important for software than it is for a lot of other media because it is so often revised (though some code has a longer fixed life, like various versions of malloc() which have been around and unchanged forever because they need to be predictable).
It is still important for other works, too, though. As an author, you may have to show several revisions of your book to your editor ("take out the scene with the dead horse and make the lighthouse worker a spaceman") before it is accepted for publication. All of these versions need automatic copyright protection.
Natural copyright also helps deal with the issue that corporations tend to have more money to throw around than individuals. What if you are dirt poor, and truly can't afford to register your copyright? There are actually people out there in the US who cannot afford to pay anything whatsoever. They should not be denied copyright protection.
That way it is much less worthwhile for them to bother going through the potential legal hassles involved with stealing your stuff.
Of course, if they feel confident that they can get away with stealing your stuff anyway, it would just mean that they get it at half price.
Also, keep in mind the difference between copyright and patent. Copyright is yours whether or not you file with the government. Not so with patents. If they use your idea before you patent it, I believe that that constitutes prior art.
Don't bother trying any spiffy copy protection. 45 days is enough for them to get the idea even if there were no way for them to get a copy of the source (worst case for that: they take screenshots with a digital camera and ocr them).
And, obviously, don't trust me, ask your lawyer.
Sorry, but you have the right to preserve your investment by backing up media that you buy. This steps all over that by making it illegal to own or make devices capable of making legitimate backups.
What you mean is "i.e."
Unfortunately, IE in caps sticks out off of the page and looks like an MS product out of the corner of your eye.
On the other hand, I never used to have a credit card. I never wanted one because I consider it to be a borrowing tool, and I have never been in the position where I needed to buy something which I could not afford (not that I am rich, I just don't buy it if I don't have the money).
There are two major problems with not having a credit card: 1.) I live in SF, and my family lives in MA. In order to buy plane tickets, I need a credit card (or else I have to borrow a friend's credit card). 2.) Since I never borrowed money, I had no credit record whatsoever. This could eventually prevent me from being able to buy a house that I could afford. It made it very difficult for me to get a credit card in the first place. They offer credit cards to students (worst case: mom and dad will pay), people with good credit (they will get their money back), and people with bad credit (they will get lots of money in interest payments).
So the problem arises when they make things that you really "need" contingent on participation.
I will also say that I see ellipses and brackets in those side boxes all of the time.
Just clarifying the subject...
Being a confessed MS hater, you should use "i.e."
Sorry to be anal, but "IE" being in caps, I translated it out of the corner of my eye, before I had even read most of the post, as a reference to the crappiest "browser/integral operating system component" that I know of.
Again, sorry to be anal.
My point about the quote is that they modify it without notation. The quotes in the sidebar have always been there, but usually they match up with the actual quote or else there is notation to indicate paraphrase or omission. The BBC is just modifying the quotes with no indication that they are not really quotes. This means that if I say, person X said, "blah," and you say, no they actually said, "foo," we can both go to BBC online and find evidence for the accuracy of our version of the quote. This means that you can't verify what someone really said, which is important.
The other issue is that people have a right not to be misrepresented. Changing quotes like this amounts to putting words into someone's mouth, potentially diluting or changing their meaning. They would be justified to react with total outrage - "that's not what I said!" The journalist may not understand the subtleties of the quote, and may destroy the meaning inadvertently. At least with a real quote you can go back to it and say, "this is what he said exactly - make your own judgement about what it means."
Wow, that sure is totally off-base from my perspective. I have a great community of neighbors (who are adults who have mostly lived here for a while). They bring over fresh vegetables. We give each other copies of our house keys in case we get locked out. People watch out for potential break-ins at each other's houses.
Our neighborhood has great diversity. There are many ethnic families around who have been in the neighborhood for more than a decade. I recently read a report which demonstrated (and yes, maybe the report is BS) that the decrease in diversity was grossly overestimated. From what I can see with my own eyes, this appears to be true.
I make eye contact with people all of the time, all over the city, and often end up talking with strangers and making new friends (I got a free painting this way). I have never had the slightest problem here resulting from making eye contact (except maybe downtown, sometimes the tourists think you are going to rob them if you make eye contact - but notably, the business and financial people (who live here, as opposed to the tourists) don't seem to respond that way).
"But I really don't like the society that has grown up around the dot-communists, who are all products of suburbia and television."
There was a big problem with the manners and morality of a lot of "dot commers". People who had lots of money, but no concept of tipping were threatening to drive the cappucino-makers out of the city. It was really getting to the point where the "dot commers" were going to have to make their own cup of coffee, because no one working at a coffee shop could afford to live here without tips hat they weren't getting. I know of one group of individuals who went to the local shop every morning and often had meetings there. They would each get a beverage and breakfast and leave no tip whatsoever.
On the other hand, I spent a short time as a San Francisco "dot commer" myself, and I do not own a television, never mind cable TV. The majority of the professionals I worked with were intelligent, critical thinkers who, although they read the CNN website, didn't mindlessly believe everything that they read. They were not frivolously spending on the latest stupid gadget that the media told them to buy. They were polite and mature, and had insightfull views about the world.
My point is that saying that all "dot commers" are evil is totally false and prejudicial. Just think of all of the statements that have been made about all hippies. This guy should know better than to criticize based on stereotype.
How's that for oversimplification?
I guess it's better than the constantly repeated line, "the utilities are facing bankruptcy due to California's failed energy deregulation experiment." The deregulation experiment (crafted by the utilities) was a total success. They wanted to see if they could rob CA blind, and they did. Nothing failed about that experiment. If you live in CA then you heard that quote approximately 1.2 billion times.
There is also the one you always hear to the effect that the judge invalidating Thomas Penfield Jackson's remedies found that MS should not be broken up. I don't think that this is true. I believe that the judge found that the circumstances rendered the judgement invalid, and the remedies had to be decided in an unbiased manner, but never said that they were the wrong remedies.
And one more disturbing collapse of journalistic integrity - keep an eye on the bold quotes in the sidelines of BBC online articles. They will "quote" someone (no brackets to indicate paraphrase or elipses to indicate omissions), but when you read the quote in the article it it slightly different. I haven't seen any that twist the meaning, but a quote is a quote - you said it or you didn't. It prevents you from using it as a source for exactly what someone said.
Sorry to rant, but it pisses me off when journalists act like idiots.
That still would not change the fact that I would like to live in a place with clean air (read, "without perceptibly filthy air") to breathe, and more plants and animals to look at.
From the hills near San Francisco, you can clearly see the blanket of smog in which people are living. Although this is a localized effect from an intense concentration of cars, etc., and might be safely blown away over the ocean, its effects completely buffered by the vastness and resillience of the environment, it is still a real downer to live in it, and I would much rather be able to simultaneously live in SF and breathe clean air.
So even if there were no negative effects of human activity on the environment whatsoever in the long term, there would still be motivation to reduce emissions and increase the diversity of life.
He recognizes that it is there, and he originally pointed out to me that it sounds like "aboat".
So that reinforces the "further east you go" thing.
There are certainly a few people responding who seem to have "been there" to a greater or lesser degree.
In one project I worked on, there was this homemade progress bar which would update about 4 times over the course of connecting to a piece of hardware (which took about 15 sec.). Since it only updated a few times, there were several times over the course of these 15 seconds where nothing would appear to be happening (keep in mind, a wait of just a few seconds can seem very long and be very distracting, especially if it is something you are doing repetetively). Since it was connecting to external hardware, every time the progress bar would stop moving, you would reflexively think, "did it stop because of an error, or is it still connecting?"
I got really annoyed with this progress bar, especially since I had to do about a million connects to verify my fixes, so I threw in enough extra updates to the progress bar that it kept on moving the whole time you were connecting.
Boy, were the customers impressed! I got a bunch of calls about how much faster and more reliably the software was connecting to the hardware. Of course, it wasn't connecting any faster, and this was before I had fixed any real connection bugs, so it wasn't connecting more often, either. It is just that when it was working, you knew it was working, and when it failed, it stopped right away.
The lesson I got from it is that user feedback is what creates the user's perception of what is going on. If a progress bar keeps stalling, the user's intuition is that the program is having some sort of trouble completing the task.
Also, programs jumping to the front 50 times while they are starting up is really annoying. For a good laugh, start Word and VC++ at the same time and watch how many times they pull the "my splash screen is on top, "no, MY splash screen is on top" crap. If I start VC++ and then start another program right afterwords, I want to use the second program until I explicitly switch away. I do not want VC++ deciding that I need to see every step of startup - "Oops, the user has switched to another app, but never got to see me update this toolbar - better jump to the front, even though I am only 12% done starting up!"
Some other things:
1.) Favor self documenting code over separate comments when possible. Comments need to be maintained separately from code. Self documenting code does not get out of sync with the documentation, and is readable anywhere you use it. For example, if you are writing a function which converts an audio frequency to a wavelength, instead of calling the function CnvtFreqToWaveLen(), and documenting the fact that it takes KHz and returns inches, call it CnvtKHzToInches(). This way, any user of the function knows in what format to supply the input and in what format the return value will be, without relying on the docs being up to date.
2.) Try to construct your variable and function names such that your code reads like English. Rather than "if(hardwareInstalledFlag)" which does not tell you the meaning of the two states of the flag, use "if(hardwareInstalled)" and make sure that hardwareInstalled is TRUE if the hardware is installed. There are few things more annoying than something like runningFlag, where 0 means running and 1 means not running. If that is the case, call it hwNotRunning so you can say, "if(hwNotRunning)".
3.) Write stable code. The common myth that software is too complex to be truly stable is total BS. We have had extremely complex systems running out in the field for several years without a power cycle. Always check your assumptions (the hardest part can be identifying the assumptions you are making). If you find yourself saying that X or Y can never occur, then test for it.
4.) Never assume that the software understands the situation better than the user. MS Word's assumption that it understands the English language better than you possibly could is one of the worst examples (I used to work at Orban - Word 97 by default would silently fix any occurances of "Orban" behind your back with NO confirmation, and change them to what you OBVIOUSLY meant to type, "organ"). Something MS does not understand is that I am the user, and I may happen to decide that I WANT to start a sentence with a lowercase letter ("cvGetStub() is a function which...."). I should not have to be an expert at reconfiguring Word just to get it to allow me to decide what I want to type.
5.) Write self teaching programs. Instead of "Could not complete the requested operation," have your dialog explain what was missing, like, "one or more tracks must be enabled for RECORD in order to enter RECORD mode."
6.) Use descriptive variable names. Even most uses of 'i' in a 'for' loop are inapropriate. Instead of 'i', call it what it is, like dbRecordNum, rather than relying on the context ("oh, this loops maxDbRecordNum times, therefore 'i' must be the record index").
7.) Don't blame the user for your bugs. Never come across as condescending, as you do not know the context in which a message is actually going to be displayed. When the user can see that they are clearly running into a bug, but the software is chastising them for doing something wrong, that is very annoying. Dave Barry talks about the ScanDisk startup message in this context. "To avoid seeing this message in the future, behave, stupid user," is really annoying when you know that the problem was directly caused by the mistakes of the same programmers who are now blaming you. Sarcastically, it should read, "to avoid seeing this message in the future, run an OS which does not arbitrarily crash after having write-cached a bunch of crap that it never bothered to write back to the hard drive." Realistically, "This error could have been caused by turning off the computer without shutting down properly, or the system may have become too unstable to shut down properly."
8.) Use the mouse cursor CONSISTENTLY to tell the user about the state of the app. If you have a mouse arrow, the program should respond to your input. If you have an hourglass cursor, the program should ignore your input, not save it up to deluge the system with when it becomes un-busy. If the program is processing user input while performing some other task (therefore it is honoring your input, but may not get to processing it right away), there is a pointer/hourglass cursor that says just that.
9.) In general, get the user feedback right. This lets the user know that he really clicked the button that he thought he did, etc.. Don't mix control and status in general (some exceptions). It should be obvious which screen elements are used to do something, and which are used to report feedback.
10.) Do not try to maintain multiple copies of the same state information; for example, if you have a dialog box with 10 settings, don't maintain the state of the dialog elements as one thing, and the state of the internal settings as another. Always maintain a master copy of the state and update everybody who cares from that. So when you open the dialog, you don't display the last state of the dialog, you recalculate the state of the dialog from the master state of the program. So if you are maintaining a field in a dialog which contains a username: a) when opening the dialog, update username from the master state. Do not try to keep the dialog state in sync with the master state as you go. b) when closing the dialog, update the master state from the contents of the dialog. c) When the username changes (as a result of the dialog or anything else), perform the appropriate action to respond to it. d) When your program needs username, get it from the master state.
Enough rambling for now....
On the skateboard subject, it can be a serious drawback to a commuter that skateboarding is illegal in SF (stupid). You may not care, but it could mean being very late for work on an important day. They do haul people off in cuffs for skateboarding sometimes, and often take their board, stranding them if it is not walking distance (although everywhere in SF is technically walking distance).
Commuting wants to be reliable, which is the problem with bikes on BART during rush hour. You could probably get away with bringing your bike most of the time (I don't know), but the one time they stop you, you are stranded.
It was OK, but a motor would have been better. Also, the wheels are too small, so It's kind of dangerous if you are not constantly leaning back and ready to assume a standing position.
I wouldn't use it on any serious hills, and even on a flat surface the wheels are too small to keep your momentum, even with good bearings (they come with crap).
Somebody told me that they go up and down stairs. I didn't believe them. Is it true? If so, then maybe it is an option.
The escalators and elevators are always busted on BART, so you can't rely on being able to get a lift to street level.
The rules for bikes on the Commuter Rail in the Boston area were the same deal when I lived there (probably still are). Insane!
P.S. Those recliner bikes also put your head at bumper level. Bad for the brain.
Both teams provided visibility on what they were doing to the execs, so the execs only had to step into the details when they thought that there was a problem. This way, the execs could treat the various departments more like black box units, and deal more with steering the ship.
It helped that the engineers were all good friends and the head of marketing for the project was smart AND reasonable....
It also leads to some amusing and disturbing side effects.
Disturbing: Every Sunday, the bootleggers come out. They come around to all of the homeless shelters and other hangouts for alcoholics and sell marked-up alcohol that they bought on Saturday. Then they turn around and buy crack with the profits. All it takes is one day of prohibition to have a black market and bootleggers.
Amusing: Since everybody was flocking to NH on Sunday to buy their booze, they changed the law so that towns which were within 10 miles of the NH border could sell alcohol on Sunday. The message: God doesn't want you to drink on Sunday, but he REALLY doesn't want you to give your money to NH!
(New Hampshire - Live free or die making licence plates)
At least with different corporations in control of different local media, although you still get corporations telling you what to think, at least you get a few different corporations telling you what to think (maybe one is owned by a Republican and one by a Democrat, or one owner owns lots of Sun's stock, while another is heavily invested in MS.
The best way I can see to fight this is to vary your news sources. Read the little guy (if you can find him) as well as the mainstream news. Check out several sources from both.
Comparing an article on CNN's site to an article on the BBC's site can really be enlightening. On the same day, CNN failed to report 20,000 Israelis demonstrating for peace with Palestine, while the BBC stuck it at the bottom of an article summarizing the latest violence. I would think that since violence in the Middle East is the status quo, talk of peace is far more newsworthy.
Another comparison is when Bush caused the Yen to tumble during his speech by using the wrong economic term (devaluation instead of deflation - suggesting to some that he was supporting artificial devaluation of the Yen in order to make exports more attractive to consumers, when he was really just referring to bad things already going on with the Japanese economy).
The BBC used the occasion to print an entire article (quite amusing, but also quite editorial) describing the incident and recalling other times Bush has misspoken, ending with the observation that somehow, despite his obvious stupidity and incompetence, he was still extremely popular with the American people. CNN covered the speech about Japan's economic troubles, but made no mention whatsoever of the economic troubles that the speech caused. ABC briefly mentioned it at the bottom.
Every news source I know of is biased in some way, and over the years it seems that journalists have blurred the lines between news and editorialism more and more (they are both good to have, but should be properly labeled).
Reading different sources can often tell you just as much about these companies' motives as it can fill in your understanding of what actually happened.
Even reading news from fanatical and therefore unreliable sources tells you what various extremists are thinking and alerts you to the subject so that you can do your own research.
And to be trite, every lie that you spot shows you some truth about the liar.