I did a quick Google search on the term and the closest thing to a direct definition I'm able to find is from contextual clues. It seems the term "local universe" is usually used to describe the observable universe, that is, that portion of spacetime that lies within our particle horizon.
If current observations suggest that our Milky Way galaxy is the largest we can see, this may perhaps mean that we're comparing images of our galaxy at a few tens of thousands of years old, to images of galaxies a few hundred million years old. What would you call that... Temporal parallax? You wouldn't think there should be so much of a difference on a cosmological scale.
OTOH, maybe we are at the center of the universe [grin].
...but the fear of retribution is every bit as real here as it is anywhere else.
My point is that fear of retribution is unnecessary and not a reasonable fear to have in the U.S. There is no retribution from the authorities if you voice dissent, no punishment for publicly disagreeing with government policy. In real tyrannical or totalitarian governments, you would be killed for voicing dissent.
If people publicly (if anonymously) disagree with you, this is not retribution. If people make fun of you on Slashdot, this is not retribution. If people make a habit out of "sneering" at you in a post on a forum, I do not believe that this qualifies as harassment in a legal sense.
There is no such thing as a "right to be agreed with." Nor is there any such thing as a "right to an audience." Vocal disagreement or even vocal derision can be ignored, even if it is unpleasant. There is no such thing as a "right to be pleased," either.
Again, this is just my personal opinion, but I have a hard time equating dissenting posts with punishment (retribution). If you were unreasonably moderated down, that's another thing. But if that moderation is actually reasonable, you can't claim punishment on that account either.
Paper cuts and knife wounds are not the same thing.
Tyranny? What tyranny are you talking about? As a form of government, all power must be concentrated on a single individual. It isn't in the U.S. You want to have a look at tyranny? Try Cuba or North Korea.
Tyranny in the sense of "oppressive power" exerted by the government? Where do you see that in the U.S., really? You can speak out against the government without fear of retribution from the government. You don't get to make threats, you don't get to put people in danger, but you do get to voice your opinion. You can even talk to a member of Al Qaeda if you like, but you shouldn't expect the call to be private. If you really want to see "oppressive power" exerted by the government (i.e. a police state), have a look at Iran.
Or did you mean tyranny in the form of "a rigorous condition imposed by some outside agency or force?" If you compare the rule of law in the U.S. to a system of anarchy, then yes, the American government may be a bit tyrranical. But how about some real comparisons to, say, China? This particular sense of the word is relative, and relative to the rest of the nations in the world, the U.S. government comes off pretty well.
You may not have intended to use a word with such force. There is real tyrrany in this world, but you will be hard-pressed to find it in any real sense here in the U.S., with the possible exception of the corporate world. If you really did mean to apply that word to the U.S., then I must take exception to such hyperbole. It diminishes the language. Granted, that's just my opinion.
Actually, on an intergalactic scale, this thing is freakishly close. According to TFA this dwarf galaxy is 30,000 light years from Earth. The distance from Earth to the center of the Milky Way galaxy is roughly 27,700 light years (according to Wikipedia). This thing is nearly right on top of us.
BTW, if you're preparing to shoot it, the quote you're looking for is "It's coming right for us!"
Having actually been interviewed (and misquoted) by IT press, I have to say that I wasn't so impressed with there interest in getting the facts right. They were more interested in getting a quote about some technology of ours that was "insanely great" or about how my opinion of someone else's technology was that it was "monstrously horrible."
There was very little journalism in the piece and significantly less technical savvy than I had hoped for. (I happened to mention XDoclet and it came out in the transcript X Doplet, and I was ostensibly speaking with Java-oriented "journalists.")
For many in the IT press, talking to a Microsoft person is "a get" and the facts don't matter so much. If you actually are looking for solid computing journalism, I've been impressed with Linux Journal. It has the feel that Byte and PC Magazine used to have. If you really want to know where MS technology is and where it's going, you'd be much better off reading the MS developer blogs.
If the development team is undisciplined enough to require a formal process, then RUP is one of the least harmful heavyweight processes. But make no mistake, it is heavyweight.
The truth of the matter is that you can automate much of the gating needed to keep "unauthorized" code from making it into production. The key to your statement is that developers were adding "untested" changes to the code base. Part of the demand of agile processes is that you write code to make a test pass (whether this be an acceptance test or a lower-level unit test). The net effect of this is that disciplined developers write code that is required by the nature of the system, and the nature of the tests. Even at an architectural level, you can automate verification of architectural styles. This tends to require a more significant effort, however.
With regard to open source, the issue is one of communication. Developers may be in different time zones and may rarely have the opportunity to speak to each other face to face. There is a minimum of process, but it is to coordinate general direction for the project, and even in these cases, working code, proven with tests makes the strongest argument in favor of a particular approach.
My suspicion is that you are catching the issues you are because people are sitting in a room, face to face, and talking about it. The change documents simply set the agenda for the discussion.
First, I have personally used the RUP successfully. The success was in spite of the process, not because of it. The excellent people I had on my team made the work a success, and not a paperwork-on-rails approach to software development.
On the upside, the RUP is geared toward control of iterative projects. On the downside, it treats every diagram you draw as though it were as valuable as the working software you really intend to produce. It also adds artificial divisions between roles in the process (the architect sends X to the analyst who elaborates it and sends it on to the developer who extrudes Y...). It tends to reduce communication among team members, and between team members and stakeholders. It's original intent seems to have been to give all the diagrams in the UML a reason for being (and by extension, Rose).
Show me a failing unit test and I'll show you a low-level design awaiting implementation. Running code trumps "managed artifacts" any day.
Additionally, the bible has been causally related, more often and more demonstrably, to more killings than every video game on the market combined. From the crusades to psychopaths, the bible is often used as justification for violent acts...
The crusades were politically motivated, instigated by a corrupt church, not based on anything taught in the Bible. In fact, this same church burned people at the stake for owning or reading the Bible, because the hypocrisy of the church leaders was so blatant to anyone who did read the Bible.
Psychopaths are psychopaths and can gain motivation from nearly anywhere, so that doesn't support your point either.
When the Bible depicts human violence, it is careful to depict the consequences. The Bible also carefully points out that humans warring against humans in God's name was no longer to be practiced ('vengeance is mine,' 'turn the other cheek').
You may seek to blame the Bible (as many do, "more often and more demonstrably"), but the things you blame it for have little to do with its content or teachings.
I agree, these people who wrote and enacted an unenforceable, unbalanced law certainly are hypocrites. The article actually points out that it is likely they were wasting taxpayer dollars to pad their resumes. In other words, they created these laws for the sole purpose of having press releases and media mentions of how "socially conscious" they are; solely for appearances sake.
Please, for the love of God, don't you believe they have anything to do with the content or teachings of the Bible, either.
Distributing said software may be illegal, but mere possession is not.
Give the media companies time. There's only so much bad legislation you can ram through in a year. It's extraordinarily hard work decrying the misfortunes of gargantuan media conglomerates so as to convince the other representatives or senators to vote for "protection" of all that poor, miserable, wretched... err.. content.
I for one plan to practice "safe media" through abstinence... Just after the Star Wars Iridium Collectors Edition with Special Light Saber Tooth Brush and Vader Beanie comes out.
I'll agree that many software patents are absurd, and certainly harmful to the software business at large.
I don't think the problem can actually be solved by getting better examiners. That would be a losing battle in today's business climate, because there will always be some trick to wording the application so that it gets approved.
Rather, we need some way to level the playing field for the little guy or gal. If a little vendor, or even a lone programmer working out of his garage, let's say, violates an absurd patent, it ought to be easy enough for him to present a reasonable argument and overturn the patent. What happens today is that it becomes so financially burdensome to overturn a patent held by a large company that it is beyond the means of anyone save another large company.
We need some way to level the effect of the resources coming from the giant corporation. The laws and lawmakers (in the U.S.) favor big business, however, and I don't see how this could be fixed without a change to the laws, and to lawmakers' attitude toward big business.
So ordinary guys wear underpants to protect their trousers from their rear. Extrapolating from the notion of "super," superheros must've given up on protecting their suits, but rather, find it critical to protect the rest of the world from, well... right.
I would hate to be a super-dry-cleaner: "I'm sorry, Captain Barium, we just couldn't get that... spot... out. We really tried, honest."
In fact, the Federation developed a cloak far superior to the Romulan or Klingon cloaking devices. The Federation's phasing cloak permitted the cloaked ship to pass through solid matter. The Romulans were caught trying to develop the same technology. The Federation episode was (unfortunately) revisited (in a final flip-of-the-finger to viewers) in the final episode of Enterprise.
...Further, it was actually the Romans who developed the flush toilet...
...."More like, 'Why don't you modulate the frequency?'... Nerd!...
...so Khan comes back and tells Kirk "Kirk... I'm your father," and then he cuts off Kirk's hand with phaser-sword...
Unit tests (written with frameworks like JUnit or TestNG) are intended to require a perspective shift of the developer writing the code. Specifically, the developer must think like a client programmer for whatever module they are testing. As such, these kinds of tests are design aids, not design replacements. In fact, they are advocated not for their ability to verify requirements, but rather, for their ability make design improvement less risky.
Naturally, accepting this requires a reasonable adjustment in thinking. If you ask yourself what the design of a software module actually is, the answer you arrive at is "the design is the code." After all, the code is a written specification of what the software should do when it actually executes.
Most agile methodologies do not ask you to abandon the principles of adequate forward-looking design. Rather, they ask you to abandon the assumption that all forward-looking design is adequate. This faces up to the hard fact that diagrams drawn in a tool rarely resemble the actual implementation in code, even if the implementation stays true to the spirit of these drawings.
And for the record, Extreme Programming is not the only agile method, nor is it the gold standard for agility.
I can't tell if you're being ironic, sardonic, or juest sarcastic.
Actually, if your other respondents had read Scott Ambler's article sited in your post ("The Fragile Manifesto"), they would have noticed that it is entirely sarcastic, and fairly amusing. For example, Scott writes:
Software development is an engineering discipline, and as such, should depend upon a highly rigorous collection of procedures. Some would argue that this approach didn't work in the past because it resulted in shelves of binders that developers ignored. Luckily, this problem has been solved--you can now write your development procedures as HTML pages, providing developers with easy access to the software processes that they so desperately crave.
Scott goes on to write about the beauties of comprehensive documentation, and how perfected processes permit the hiring of "monkey" level employees.
You have to wonder how posterity will view what our generation is doing. In our lifetimes, in the United States, we've seen the world of business and industry attempt to envelop Art. Works of art will tend to escape the confines of business simply because great art usually enters the public conciousness. An entire generation incorporates that art into its cultural experience and moves on with that shared reference.
Historically, the attempt by industry (and at industry's urging, government) to make societal touchstones a for-pay experience have failed in the long run. Over the short-run, when such efforts are buoyed with greed and short-sightedness, they cause a good bit of harm and often result in the loss of cultural dominance.
So will the history books record this as a great foolishness that was avoided, or as a great cultural train-wreck?
So we can expect to see lots of elliptic curves and modular functions in DNF... Does this mean they're going to use that new Imaginary engine instead of the Unreal engine?
My point is that in many cases, the intended use of such weapons may be classified as criminal. This is not the case with P2P software, and so the analogy loses much of its intended force.
FWIW, I neither made, nor intended to imply, a judgement for or against gun posession. It wouldn't be (and isn't) my personal choice to own one, and it is none of my business if you choose otherwise.
Your point is good, but could've been a bit stronger. Your gun analogy left a bad taste in my mouth, you see. Most firearms, handguns and so-called "assault weapons" are designed specifically to kill or wound people. They aren't for hunting, they are weapons designed for use against other people.
To my knowledge, you can't kill anyone by sharing a file (uploading viruses to power plants notwithstanding). P2P file sharing technology was not designed to steal copyrighted media, it was designed to protect knowledge from extinction.
Gun manufacturers are not responsible for the bad acts of someone using a gun, in spite of the fact of the gun's design. A far better analogy, however, is one of an auto manufacturer. Automobile accidents kill thousands each year, yet common sense tells us that their usefulness far outweighs this risk. And no, auto manufacturers are not responsible when people use automobiles to commit crimes. We may soon find that protected dissemination of information will become as important and life-changing to some peoples on this Earth as the automobile has been to industrial society.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for the correction.
I did a quick Google search on the term and the closest thing to a direct definition I'm able to find is from contextual clues. It seems the term "local universe" is usually used to describe the observable universe, that is, that portion of spacetime that lies within our particle horizon.
If current observations suggest that our Milky Way galaxy is the largest we can see, this may perhaps mean that we're comparing images of our galaxy at a few tens of thousands of years old, to images of galaxies a few hundred million years old. What would you call that... Temporal parallax? You wouldn't think there should be so much of a difference on a cosmological scale.
OTOH, maybe we are at the center of the universe [grin].
My point is that fear of retribution is unnecessary and not a reasonable fear to have in the U.S. There is no retribution from the authorities if you voice dissent, no punishment for publicly disagreeing with government policy. In real tyrannical or totalitarian governments, you would be killed for voicing dissent.
If people publicly (if anonymously) disagree with you, this is not retribution. If people make fun of you on Slashdot, this is not retribution. If people make a habit out of "sneering" at you in a post on a forum, I do not believe that this qualifies as harassment in a legal sense.
There is no such thing as a "right to be agreed with." Nor is there any such thing as a "right to an audience." Vocal disagreement or even vocal derision can be ignored, even if it is unpleasant. There is no such thing as a "right to be pleased," either.
Again, this is just my personal opinion, but I have a hard time equating dissenting posts with punishment (retribution). If you were unreasonably moderated down, that's another thing. But if that moderation is actually reasonable, you can't claim punishment on that account either.
Paper cuts and knife wounds are not the same thing.
Tyranny? What tyranny are you talking about? As a form of government, all power must be concentrated on a single individual. It isn't in the U.S. You want to have a look at tyranny? Try Cuba or North Korea.
Tyranny in the sense of "oppressive power" exerted by the government? Where do you see that in the U.S., really? You can speak out against the government without fear of retribution from the government. You don't get to make threats, you don't get to put people in danger, but you do get to voice your opinion. You can even talk to a member of Al Qaeda if you like, but you shouldn't expect the call to be private. If you really want to see "oppressive power" exerted by the government (i.e. a police state), have a look at Iran.
Or did you mean tyranny in the form of "a rigorous condition imposed by some outside agency or force?" If you compare the rule of law in the U.S. to a system of anarchy, then yes, the American government may be a bit tyrranical. But how about some real comparisons to, say, China? This particular sense of the word is relative, and relative to the rest of the nations in the world, the U.S. government comes off pretty well.
You may not have intended to use a word with such force. There is real tyrrany in this world, but you will be hard-pressed to find it in any real sense here in the U.S., with the possible exception of the corporate world. If you really did mean to apply that word to the U.S., then I must take exception to such hyperbole. It diminishes the language. Granted, that's just my opinion.
Actually, on an intergalactic scale, this thing is freakishly close. According to TFA this dwarf galaxy is 30,000 light years from Earth. The distance from Earth to the center of the Milky Way galaxy is roughly 27,700 light years (according to Wikipedia). This thing is nearly right on top of us.
BTW, if you're preparing to shoot it, the quote you're looking for is "It's coming right for us!"
Having actually been interviewed (and misquoted) by IT press, I have to say that I wasn't so impressed with there interest in getting the facts right. They were more interested in getting a quote about some technology of ours that was "insanely great" or about how my opinion of someone else's technology was that it was "monstrously horrible."
There was very little journalism in the piece and significantly less technical savvy than I had hoped for. (I happened to mention XDoclet and it came out in the transcript X Doplet, and I was ostensibly speaking with Java-oriented "journalists.")
For many in the IT press, talking to a Microsoft person is "a get" and the facts don't matter so much. If you actually are looking for solid computing journalism, I've been impressed with Linux Journal. It has the feel that Byte and PC Magazine used to have. If you really want to know where MS technology is and where it's going, you'd be much better off reading the MS developer blogs.
If the development team is undisciplined enough to require a formal process, then RUP is one of the least harmful heavyweight processes. But make no mistake, it is heavyweight.
The truth of the matter is that you can automate much of the gating needed to keep "unauthorized" code from making it into production. The key to your statement is that developers were adding "untested" changes to the code base. Part of the demand of agile processes is that you write code to make a test pass (whether this be an acceptance test or a lower-level unit test). The net effect of this is that disciplined developers write code that is required by the nature of the system, and the nature of the tests. Even at an architectural level, you can automate verification of architectural styles. This tends to require a more significant effort, however.
With regard to open source, the issue is one of communication. Developers may be in different time zones and may rarely have the opportunity to speak to each other face to face. There is a minimum of process, but it is to coordinate general direction for the project, and even in these cases, working code, proven with tests makes the strongest argument in favor of a particular approach.
My suspicion is that you are catching the issues you are because people are sitting in a room, face to face, and talking about it. The change documents simply set the agenda for the discussion.
First, I have personally used the RUP successfully. The success was in spite of the process, not because of it. The excellent people I had on my team made the work a success, and not a paperwork-on-rails approach to software development.
On the upside, the RUP is geared toward control of iterative projects. On the downside, it treats every diagram you draw as though it were as valuable as the working software you really intend to produce. It also adds artificial divisions between roles in the process (the architect sends X to the analyst who elaborates it and sends it on to the developer who extrudes Y...). It tends to reduce communication among team members, and between team members and stakeholders. It's original intent seems to have been to give all the diagrams in the UML a reason for being (and by extension, Rose).
Show me a failing unit test and I'll show you a low-level design awaiting implementation. Running code trumps "managed artifacts" any day.
The crusades were politically motivated, instigated by a corrupt church, not based on anything taught in the Bible. In fact, this same church burned people at the stake for owning or reading the Bible, because the hypocrisy of the church leaders was so blatant to anyone who did read the Bible.
Psychopaths are psychopaths and can gain motivation from nearly anywhere, so that doesn't support your point either.
When the Bible depicts human violence, it is careful to depict the consequences. The Bible also carefully points out that humans warring against humans in God's name was no longer to be practiced ('vengeance is mine,' 'turn the other cheek').
You may seek to blame the Bible (as many do, "more often and more demonstrably"), but the things you blame it for have little to do with its content or teachings.
I agree, these people who wrote and enacted an unenforceable, unbalanced law certainly are hypocrites. The article actually points out that it is likely they were wasting taxpayer dollars to pad their resumes. In other words, they created these laws for the sole purpose of having press releases and media mentions of how "socially conscious" they are; solely for appearances sake.
Please, for the love of God, don't you believe they have anything to do with the content or teachings of the Bible, either.
Give the media companies time. There's only so much bad legislation you can ram through in a year. It's extraordinarily hard work decrying the misfortunes of gargantuan media conglomerates so as to convince the other representatives or senators to vote for "protection" of all that poor, miserable, wretched... err.. content.
I for one plan to practice "safe media" through abstinence... Just after the Star Wars Iridium Collectors Edition with Special Light Saber Tooth Brush and Vader Beanie comes out.
Doesn't Windows automatically disable that as soon as you launch IE?
I'll agree that many software patents are absurd, and certainly harmful to the software business at large.
I don't think the problem can actually be solved by getting better examiners. That would be a losing battle in today's business climate, because there will always be some trick to wording the application so that it gets approved.
Rather, we need some way to level the playing field for the little guy or gal. If a little vendor, or even a lone programmer working out of his garage, let's say, violates an absurd patent, it ought to be easy enough for him to present a reasonable argument and overturn the patent. What happens today is that it becomes so financially burdensome to overturn a patent held by a large company that it is beyond the means of anyone save another large company.
We need some way to level the effect of the resources coming from the giant corporation. The laws and lawmakers (in the U.S.) favor big business, however, and I don't see how this could be fixed without a change to the laws, and to lawmakers' attitude toward big business.
So ordinary guys wear underpants to protect their trousers from their rear. Extrapolating from the notion of "super," superheros must've given up on protecting their suits, but rather, find it critical to protect the rest of the world from, well... right.
I would hate to be a super-dry-cleaner: "I'm sorry, Captain Barium, we just couldn't get that... spot... out. We really tried, honest."
The monetary damages were listed in pounds, and at the moment one US Dollar is worth slightly more than half a British Pound ($1 = £0.51 rounded).
In fact, the Federation developed a cloak far superior to the Romulan or Klingon cloaking devices. The Federation's phasing cloak permitted the cloaked ship to pass through solid matter. The Romulans were caught trying to develop the same technology. The Federation episode was (unfortunately) revisited (in a final flip-of-the-finger to viewers) in the final episode of Enterprise.
...Further, it was actually the Romans who developed the flush toilet...
...."More like, 'Why don't you modulate the frequency?'... Nerd!...
...so Khan comes back and tells Kirk "Kirk... I'm your father," and then he cuts off Kirk's hand with phaser-sword...
+5 Geeky
Actually that quote should be "You underestimate the power of the dork side."
Unit tests (written with frameworks like JUnit or TestNG) are intended to require a perspective shift of the developer writing the code. Specifically, the developer must think like a client programmer for whatever module they are testing. As such, these kinds of tests are design aids, not design replacements. In fact, they are advocated not for their ability to verify requirements, but rather, for their ability make design improvement less risky.
Naturally, accepting this requires a reasonable adjustment in thinking. If you ask yourself what the design of a software module actually is, the answer you arrive at is "the design is the code." After all, the code is a written specification of what the software should do when it actually executes.
Most agile methodologies do not ask you to abandon the principles of adequate forward-looking design. Rather, they ask you to abandon the assumption that all forward-looking design is adequate. This faces up to the hard fact that diagrams drawn in a tool rarely resemble the actual implementation in code, even if the implementation stays true to the spirit of these drawings.
And for the record, Extreme Programming is not the only agile method, nor is it the gold standard for agility.
I can't tell if you're being ironic, sardonic, or juest sarcastic.
Actually, if your other respondents had read Scott Ambler's article sited in your post ("The Fragile Manifesto"), they would have noticed that it is entirely sarcastic, and fairly amusing. For example, Scott writes:
Scott goes on to write about the beauties of comprehensive documentation, and how perfected processes permit the hiring of "monkey" level employees.
Funny.
You have to wonder how posterity will view what our generation is doing. In our lifetimes, in the United States, we've seen the world of business and industry attempt to envelop Art. Works of art will tend to escape the confines of business simply because great art usually enters the public conciousness. An entire generation incorporates that art into its cultural experience and moves on with that shared reference.
Historically, the attempt by industry (and at industry's urging, government) to make societal touchstones a for-pay experience have failed in the long run. Over the short-run, when such efforts are buoyed with greed and short-sightedness, they cause a good bit of harm and often result in the loss of cultural dominance.
So will the history books record this as a great foolishness that was avoided, or as a great cultural train-wreck?
Perhaps another cup of coffee is in order...
Bah! Proprietary smell technology... On Gentoo linux you just
and you get the freedom of open source smell technology. Granted, it makes compilation smell like burnt cooling fan, but it's open source, man!I hear that the GNU/Aroma will be far superior when it's finished. I wonder what Hurd will smell like then.
So we can expect to see lots of elliptic curves and modular functions in DNF... Does this mean they're going to use that new Imaginary engine instead of the Unreal engine?
My point is that in many cases, the intended use of such weapons may be classified as criminal. This is not the case with P2P software, and so the analogy loses much of its intended force.
FWIW, I neither made, nor intended to imply, a judgement for or against gun posession. It wouldn't be (and isn't) my personal choice to own one, and it is none of my business if you choose otherwise.
Regards,
Michael
Your point is good, but could've been a bit stronger. Your gun analogy left a bad taste in my mouth, you see. Most firearms, handguns and so-called "assault weapons" are designed specifically to kill or wound people. They aren't for hunting, they are weapons designed for use against other people.
To my knowledge, you can't kill anyone by sharing a file (uploading viruses to power plants notwithstanding). P2P file sharing technology was not designed to steal copyrighted media, it was designed to protect knowledge from extinction.
Gun manufacturers are not responsible for the bad acts of someone using a gun, in spite of the fact of the gun's design. A far better analogy, however, is one of an auto manufacturer. Automobile accidents kill thousands each year, yet common sense tells us that their usefulness far outweighs this risk. And no, auto manufacturers are not responsible when people use automobiles to commit crimes. We may soon find that protected dissemination of information will become as important and life-changing to some peoples on this Earth as the automobile has been to industrial society.
It cannot be mere coincidence that such a keystroke may be read aloud as "Control excess."
To paraphrase Homer Simpson:
He was speaking of Canada at the time, of course...