What bugs me about operator overloading is how tediously verbose it can get. For example, say you define operator functions for < and ==. You still have to do <=. Even when all the <= function is is: return this < that || this == that;, you still have to write it. It's so tempting to skip writing the code for an unused operator that many programmers do so. Languages are mostly unable to automatically fill in obvious code of that sort. C++ does have a default assignment operator function, but that's all. Too much chance of the obvious being wrong, so they opt not to do anything.
To make matters worse, the above implementation of <= is inefficient. Down at the machine level, the computer does not stupidly require 2 separate comparisons to test <=. It has instructions such as JLE. The above function will at the least result in the computer having to do JL; JE;. While JE may be executed only 50% of the time that JL is executed, depends entirely on the data and code, it's still a waste. Further, two branches takes more space in the CPU's branch prediction, and the extra instruction takes more space in cache, so JL; JE is not as good as 50% slower.
I find your gratuitous slur against "academic types" unwarranted and unfair. Academia has produced much innovation in programming. Do you forget the proof that Structured Programming is sufficient, and GOTOs are not necessary? All the work done on Turing machines, and universal computation? Automata Theory, with the classification of grammars into such categories as "context free"? BNF? Without that academia you sneer at, we couldn't be sure of all that. What of the entire concept of OOP? Where did that come from? And functional programming and LISP? It's easy for some hack to bang out a programming language built around what he feels are a few good ideas, drawn from perhaps years of experience. But without careful examination of the problems, insightful modeling that leads to good, pertinent questions which can be proven one way or another, we would just be flailing around even more than we already do. We might all still be trying to program in ALGOL. I put more trust in academia's ability to create a good programming language than I do a modern corporation with its dismissive attitude towards fundamental research.
But there are other reasons. Lot of managers are easily seduced into being patronizing slave drivers. Still others have issues with insecurity over their control and power, and overcompensate. Treat their workers like children who have to be told how to behave properly and how to do their jobs. It's a foolish way of handling people, and it drives the best right out the door-- as long as they have alternatives. Then these managers have the arrogance and gall to think they're being really nice for suffering incompetent underlings, never seeing that they created the environment. Ever had the boss pat you on the shoulder in forgiveness for "your" mistake, assuring you that he isn't firing you today because he's such a softie, and he realizes you couldn't help yourself, you just don't know how to think right, but, you know, you really should try a little harder?
The big lesson of the US Civil War is that slavery does not work. It's not just that slavery is evil, it's that slavery is dumb. That is why the Confederacy was at such a disadvantage when they started the war. Despite having more land in warmer, nicer climates, their population was 1/4 of the Union. Innovation was practically non-existent. The war was hopeless before it was ever started, yet they started it anyway. The system dumbed down the slaves-- slaves have very little drive-- and, it seems, made for stupidly arrogant masters as well. It certainly was stupid to start an unwinnable war. The slavery system assured that the Confederacy could never hope to match the Union in any way.
However, many people still really believe in servitude, really think it works, and practice it religiously, that is, as long as they get to be the masters. Those who support H-1B visas reveal themselves as wannabe slave drivers and control freaks.
And yet, most of us are rather wasteful with what money we have. One of the biggest wastes is this insistence on cranking up the A/C to get indoor temperatures into the lower 70s. 80 F not only saves money, it is actually healthier. Acclimatizing to the seasons is better for you. Heating and cooling accounts for about half of our energy expenses. These expenses are made all the worse by the bloating of homes up to McMansion sizes, which we do not need, not with the ever smaller families we have. It's a similar story with cars, but so many people link status with car size and power. Detroit really suckered the public on that one.
Still, I am not in the least sympathetic towards lying executives who wail that there's a shortage of STEM workers, not when they pull in 7, 8, or even 9 figure pay packages.
I wonder if the entire practice of using percentages to measure economic increase is wrong. And this wrong thinking is perhaps driven by greed? Percentage increases imply exponential growth, which we realize is impossible to sustain in the space we can reach if limited to a fixed maximum possible speed such as lightspeed. The only way to sustain a bank account that pays compound interest is ultimately have the inflation rate closely match it. In short, to fake it.
Growth can only be at an exponential rate over a short period of time, not indefinitely. Population has the capacity to grow exponentially, which makes percentage increases such a natural way to describe growth, but can never sustain it thanks to external limitations. Population only grows exponentially for a short time, in response to some change that increased the available resources, such as finding uninhabited land, a big war or plague, or a significant invention or discovery. Over a long period of time such as 10000 years, a savings account earning just 1% compound interest could easily be worth more than humanity's total output. Worth even more than the RIAA's claims of losses to piracy. It would be worth about 2^138 times the initial investment.
It's done to books too. Take Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings. The movies have great visual appeal, but the dialog is awful and the plot which arguably already was a simplistic good vs. evil fantasy, is watered down and mucked up with infantile plot devices, jokes, and near constant action. Can hardly go 2 minutes without another fight or chase or tightrope walk happening. I'm talking about things like the lame short jokes on Gimli-- the scene in which he jumps up and down to see over the wall at Helms Deep was especially excruciating-- and the bit about Gollum framing Sam for eating all their food, and Frodo believes this (no way!), Aragorn manhandling Frodo at the Prancing Pony (totally out of character), the start of the battle at Minas Tirith in which an orc soldier announces that now is the age of orcs as he stabs a fallen soldier (cheesy), elves showing up to help fight at Helm's Deep announcing that they came to die, Denethor refusing to light the beacons so Gandalf has Pippin sneak up and do it as if he couldn't have just set the beacons off himself with a bolt of lightning, and so on. What was especially annoying about things like the elven fighters at Helm's Deep was that was a few wasted minutes that could have been used on any of the many, many good things they cut from the books. The worst cut was leaving out the Scouring of the Shire.
There are very, very few film adaptations that equal the books that inspired them. The Harry Potter movies are decent jobs, except they are awfully rushed. So is LOTR. But then, what happens when a director wangles plenty of time, as with The Hobbit? He adds filler! Bulks the movies up with fight scenes that never happened in the book! Then there are movies like I, Robot. Let's just use the setting, and wing it with our own characters and plot!
Long ago, I tried xlib only, because at that time Motif was the only higher layer available, and it was proprietary. It was horrible. xlib has been superceded by XCB, but I wouldn't use that, not with all the other options out there today. XCB is a very low level graphics library, for drawing lines and letters in 2D. 3D graphics can be done with that, but your code would have to have all the math to transform 3D representations in your data into 2D window coordinates for XCB. LessTif is a free replacement for Motif, but by the time it was complete enough to be usable, the world was already moving on. With Wayland likely pushing X aside in the near future, XCB and xlib may not perform so well. They will continue to be supported for a while through a compatibility layer, but I think they're on the way out. Motif is also not much good these days either. For one, Motif rests on top of xlib, and if xlib goes, so does Motif. Today, we have many better libraries for interfacing with GUIs.
When OpenGL became available, I tried it. OpenGL is great for drawing simple 3D graphics, but it lacks intelligence. The easy part is that you just pass x,y,z coordinates to the library routines, and OpenGL does the rest. The bad part is that if you want to draw a fairly complicated scene, containing many objects that may be partly or completely hidden behind other objects, OpenGL has no intelligence to deal with that. It just dumbly draws everything your code tells it to draw. To speed that up, your code has to have the smarts to figure out what not to draw, so it can skip calling on OpenGL for invisible objects.
That's where a library like OpenSceneGraph comes in. Your code feeds all the info to OSG. OSG figures out visibility, then calls OpenGL accordingly.
You may need still other libraries for window management, something like FLTK. Yes, FLTK and OSG can work together.
You will also most likely be working in C/C++. OpenGL has many language bindings. But OSG is C++ and doesn't have so many. FLTK is also C++, and has even fewer bindings. Trouble with picking a language like Python for this work is that it can be difficult to find bindings for all the libraries. Even when bindings to a particular language exist, they tend to be incomplete, and don't always perfectly work around differences in data representation. Pick libraries first, then see what language bindings they all have in common, then code in one of those common languages. It's possible C/C++ will turn out to be the only language common to all the libraries.
people need to be handed MORE and MORE money so they can go to school?
Sort of like high school, you mean? Last I heard, high school is still provided gratis. Really, college should also be free for the students. If these businesses were serious about addressing this supposed skills shortage, they would push for free college. And I don't mean necessarily by pumping money into universities. How about instead we stop screwing students over with all the money making schemes that infest college these days, things like required textbooks costing at least $100 each, and rapacious parking enforcement? The main idea of dorm living is to save money, and free up more time for studies by providing meals, however bad, and eliminating the expense and time of commuting by car. Why else put up with dorm life? Yet somehow dorms have been turned into luxury apartments, seemingly to justify raising the charges for room and board. It should be no wonder that the young are running away from the traditional university as fast as possible. They're hardly educational centers any more, they're company towns. And we see crap like student loans being held apart from all other kinds of debt in that they cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. And the latest thing is Congress dragging their feet on student loan rates. We assume the young can bear heavier burdens because they are young and healthy. But they can't, if there aren't any decent jobs. These jerks complaining of a labor shortage are insulting us.
Then a guy like you sticks your two cents in, and blames it all on the students' poor financial decisions. I grant they need to learn that, and many aren't serious about their studies, partying until they flunk out, but damn is the deck stacked against them. Get a job, you say? That sure blows a big point of dorm life. Yeah, live in the dorms to free up time for studying, then spend all that time working, to pay for the dorms?!
But businesses never were serious about the alleged skills shortage. The shortage would have never happened, because there never was a real shortage. It's purely a manufactured shortage, a non-problem that businesses have created out of nothing, evidently to give them something to complain about. Takes real chutzpah to make such complaints in the midst of the Great Recession.
Patents promote progress by mitigating the effects of the free rider problem
I understand what you mean, but that reasoning only holds up under a long chain of assumptions. That's what I'm trying to say.
Assumption 1: patents promote progress. Patents are supposed to promote progress, yes, but do they actually? I think not. They are monopolies on ideas. Monopolies have a long and poor history of serving the public good. We have seen many examples in which patents actually hindered progress, by denying the use of ideas that should never have been patented. We've seen an explosion in the scope of what can be patented. Used to be you had to have a working machine, an idea alone was not enough. And the patent covered only the particular method used by your machine, not all methods that could arrive at the same result. But now? Software is full of infamous patents, such as Amazon's One Click, and IBM's Fat Line. Software should have been treated like mathematical formulas, not machines, and patents should never have been applicable to software at all.
Assumption 2: copying is free riding. Copying is not stealing, nor is it free riding. What did the "victim" lose? You are basing this on the thinking that ideas can be owned, that the "right" to use an idea is a commodity that can be bought, sold, traded, and so forth, and that anyone who operates outside this mercenary system is a pirate, mooch, leech, ingrate, and possibly even a dangerous revolutionary whose activities are undermining a valuable system. So many believers in free market systems have such blind faith in them they use it as a universal hammer to address all problems in all ways. Not every problem is a nail. A market can be a good way to handle this, but only if properly applied. Scarcity is an essential component. Whatever is scarce about ideas is not the ability to make copies, and trying to make scarce by fiat something that is not, in the hopes this will cause a market in the commodity to function, is a gross misapplication and folly. If anything is free riding, it is rent seeking.
Assumption 3: free riding (copying) hurts progress. Quite the opposite! Copying is at the heart of progress. It is a central tenet of research that results must be reproducible. Education to our current levels would be impossible if students could not copy, instead having to rediscover everything on their own. Further, if copying does indeed reduce incentives to invest in research because it is harder to profit, it also increases incentives because you still have the first mover advantage, and you have to keep moving, which means do more research.
Scientists are not prohibited from sharing ideas. They are however prohibited (temporarily) from profiting from someone else's ideas or buying knockoff products of patented ideas.
But extreme patents do in effect prohibit the sharing of ideas. And what's this talk of "someone else's ideas"? Who owns an idea? 2 people independently think of the same idea, but one thought of it 5 minutes before the other, and suddenly the other guy owes the 1st guy money? I have found this aspect of human language most unfortunate. When we say "his idea", we don't mean that he owns the idea, we mean only that he discovered it. Thanks to our language, it's been far to easy to conflate that into the same meaning as "his car" or "his right arm".
the free rider problem... is the entire reason why patents exist in the first place
No. Patents exist to promote progress.
You characterize copying first as "free riding", which is not true, and second as a "problem", which it definitely is not. By that logic, education all the way through high school is a massive free ride, what with all those students faithfully copying down what their teachers impart to them. That baby suckling at its mother's breast? Free rider! Life on Earth is one total free ride off the energy of the sun.
Why is copying not free riding? Because free riding is about material goods and services. Ideas are neither. Also, your argument would seem to assume that the only way to pay for research is to stop everyone else from getting a "free ride". But there are so many other ways to pay for research. Trying to monetize the sharing of ideas strikes at the very core of what makes research possible. If scientists cannot share their ideas with each other and the public without first getting permission and securing payment, to make sure no one is getting a free ride, we will progress very slowly.
A baby is not a free rider, it is an investment in the future. Accounting is a fine discipline, but you have to be careful to apply it correctly. Have you correctly identified all the costs and benefits? It's easy to harp about a "free rider problem" if you characterize an activity as a cost when it is not so clear it should be considered a cost. This is a problem we constantly complain about in IT, the problem that management regards all of IT as a cost center, nothing but a huge expense, because they have not understood or properly appreciated the benefits. Try figuring the expense of doing accounting without computers, if you think IT is only a cost center. It's also a constant problem in the arguments over energy. Coal and oil proponents are always conveniently overlooking certain costs. In their arguments, they dwell upon the pot of gold at the end of their particular rainbow, how big and beautiful it is, how many jobs it will create, how it would really stimulate the economy if only gasoline was $2.50 per gallon, or maybe $1 per gallon, or, heck, free. Sounds nice, but they can't be trusted to make a good case when they refuse to address the external costs. Will we have to spend billions on scrubbing and sequestration to reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere? Or, billions to build sea walls to hold back rising ocean levels? Or, perhaps trillions to relocate half the world population to higher ground? What of the negative health effects? The costs of accidents such as Deepwater Horizon? The proliferation of suburban sprawl? And the costs of switching later rather than sooner to renewable energy when these nonrenewable sources are mined out? If we are to increase our options in these matters, we must explore, seek out ideas, and for that we need progress in science.
So tell me, how many old computers are you still using? That 20 year old hot 60 MHz Pentium machine with the division bug, 8M of RAM and a 500M hard drive still ticking over for you? Still have a 30 year old 4.77 MHz 8088 PC with a 360KB floppy drive serving your needs?
My fridge is about 10 years old, and I've no wish to replace it as it keeps working great.
My fridge is 18 years old, which is very unfortunate. Efficiency standards for fridges went up in 1996. My fridge is one of the least efficient 1995 models there is. A new fridge would use about half the electricity my current fridge uses, that's how big the difference is. It would pay for itself in 6 years. If I also consider that fridges don't last forever, and figure a 30 year lifespan, could argue that the time for a new fridge to pay for itself is more like 3 or even 2 years.
if you keep losing your job, if you are always having problems finding one, well then perhaps you are doing something wrong.
Yes, that's right, blame the victim. I know what job instability is like. 3 of the companies I have worked for in my career went bankrupt. 2 more were bought out after poor performance. Tell me how you keep a job when the company goes under? Maybe I should have worked harder to keep the company afloat? I was not in charge, I was only one foot soldier in an army that suffered defeat. Can one soldier singlehandedly win a war?
The world is not as easy a place as it was a few generations ago. Today is more people, more competition, less frontier. It's most unrealistic for parents to expect their children to do as well as they did themselves, and damn unfair to think less of them went they don't. Grandpa had a family of 8, why can't you have a family of at least 5? You loser!
"Best way?" That's a loaded question. It assumes that it's a given that it's possible to lock down data and keep insiders from exposing it. It's very much like the "problem" that DRM advocates think they can solve with DRM. Measures such as removing USB ports and CD burners, locking the computer in a closet, stopping and frisking all employees at the exit to make sure they aren't carrying out any flash drives, micro SD cards, CDs, printouts and the like are much like airport security, that is, hugely expensive and almost completely ineffective. Suppose the employees doing the frisking decide to sneak something out? The one I really love is how people are fired. The bad news is broken suddenly, with security people abruptly showing up and ordering them to remove their hands from the keyboard. They get a few minutes to clean out their desk, under supervision, and are escorted off the premises. The whole process reeks of stupid paranoia and extreme hostility. It's as if an employee had no idea of their standing, no idea they were in trouble, and couldn't have prepared a few nasty surprises if they'd a mind to do so. Then, just to make extra sure, there are all these crazy laws which mandate extremely harsh penalties for any sort of breach that involves computers.
Like a crime, a security breach requires 3 things: means, motive, and opportunity. Insiders by definition already have means and opportunity. You are not an insider if you don't have means and opportunity. All that's missing is motive. When you assert that a security breach has nothing to do with morality, you could not be more wrong. Morality can generate powerful motives. So can money and sex. The only way to stop insiders from leaking sensitive information is to address their grievances. The first blindingly obvious thing to do is not play the cheap employment games that are so much in vogue currently. If employees are being treated poorly, by being hired as contractors so they can be paid less, and not given health insurance, and be fired instantly for any or no reason at all, do you think they're so stupid they won't understand that? If they're working under a tyrannical and sadistic boss who enjoys making underlings sweat and squirm, do something about it, like demote the boss. Learn people's grievances by, you know, talking to them, not spying on them. If someone in the organization is doing something illegal or immoral, don't let it go on. Organizations ignore this human facet at the peril of their secrets. They think they can commit heinous crimes, treat people like replaceable cogs, then tar anyone who blows the whistle as disloyal or even traitorous, and the rest of us will buy that. Of course there will always be a few whose grievances are unreasonable and unresolvable, and a few spies, but most whistleblowers are neither. Address the issues, and there won't be anything to blow the whistle about. Will solve 99% of the leaks right there.
Do we really need patents and copyrights? Their purpose is to put more science and art in the public's hands. Secondary to that is seeing that creators get their due, which we try to do because we realize that they need to cover living expenses and a bit more in order to produce, and they need feedback on how good we think their work is, and monetary persuasion is especially effective at that. But patents and copyrights are only one means, and are very poor. Ironically, they work against their purpose, in many ways. If we can devise other, better ways-- and intellectual property is so bad that it is easy to do better-- why not dump patents and copyrights? I'm thinking widespread and diverse patronage, somewhat like that practiced in Europe in past centuries, in which it was considered fashionable and cultured for courts, especially royal courts, to support art. There were dozens of kingdoms, small and large, and many had court musicians, painters, and the like. Competed with each other for the best. The church was also pretty big into research and was especially keen on funding observatories, though it often didn't turn out the way they wanted, see Galileo. Today we could do patronage so much better, with Internet social groups more than any modern nobility. For instance, why couldn't we here on Slashdot sponsor rock groups or orchestras? Digg, Reddit, and others could do the same. More corporate sites like Facebook, Twitter, and of course Amazon could get into the action as well. Or, perhaps sites devoted more specifically to art could do it, sites like Youtube, Photobucket, tumblr. Maybe a struggling site like Yahoo could use it to boost their flagging numbers. Of course we would insist that any work we sponsor be released under some kind of open license, CC, or maybe just public domain.
A goal I like to orient on is that of realizing the digital public library. The digital public library would be an enormous social good. All the works ever published, all available anywhere in the world that the Internet reaches. The ability to search through this information would put card catalogs and digests to shame. There would no longer be any such thing as all copies checked out, or returns, especially late returns with penalty fees. All the space currently devoted to the extremely redundant storage of billions of paper sheets and plastic discs could be mostly freed up for other uses. 1000s of small towns could have the same library at their fingertips as the biggest cities, instead of the very small facilities with very limited selections that they typically have now. We would save millions, and have a far better public library. But we can't do it, copyright law blocks it. I think the digital public library is more valuable than copyright. Therefore, copyright should go.
We could all tighten up our spending, but there are limits.
$2 per day is all some people live on. I thought what it would take to live on $2 per day. I would have to cancel my Internet and phone service. I could not afford electricity, let alone A/C, so I would have to cancel my electric service. Car? Bwahaha, no way, would have to walk everywhere. The city's water and sewage services cost about $60 per month, so those would also have to go. I would need an outhouse or latrine or chamberpots, and a well with a hand pump for water. Or perhaps I would have to take buckets to the nearest stream or lake every day. Either way, can forget about bathing daily. I would also need a wood burning stove, and access to enough wood to fuel the thing. But stoves are expensive, so I could make do with an open campfire. I'd need my own wooded acreage, perhaps about 10 acres, to have enough wood. But land is subject to property taxes, so I'd have to forgo owning the land and just raid public land. Buying food from the grocery would be intermittent at best. What little land I could afford to own would have to be devoted to a garden, and I don't mean a silly little flower garden, I mean a real garden, a vegetable garden. Then there's the problem of storing the harvest. Some crops need only be dried, and guarded from rats, which cats are all too happy to do, but many foods need more preparation for storage. Would have to take up canning, or perhaps dig a root cellar. The ice house is another way. Northerly enough towns used to have buildings devoted to cold storage. In the winter, flood a shallow depression with water, and the next day it would be frozen, then they would chop out blocks of ice and store them with sawdust for insulation. Amazingly, the ice would last through the year. Clothing is another problem. People used to make dresses out of burlap feed sacks. Homespun is another option, but doing that takes an enormous amount of time and labor. I would never see a doctor. If anything happened to me, I'd heal up on my own, perhaps ending up maimed with all the labor now twice as difficult as before, or die.
This is pretty close to how my great grandparents and grandparents lived in the Great Depression. They were all farmers, and they chopped wood, pumped water, tended the garden, milked the cows by hand, canned the harvest, bathed once a week, and hoped that all their hard, menial labor would lead to a better life for their children. It's terribly inefficient, and they understood that. They got electricity when it became available, and then when the freezer came, they instantly abandoned canning. Frozen vegetables taste way better than canned. Canning takes a lot of wood, and much of the energy from burning the wood is wasted. Pollutes like crazy too. Today, some people think all that sounds sort of romantic and admirable, especially the wood fires part, but it is neither. We could not afford for everyone to live that way today, for one thing there isn't enough acreage for all the wood that would be needed. But screw people way, way down on pay, and this is the kind of life we will all have, for a short while, until resources run out and they will. Then things get ugly, fast.
It was the DBA's duty to handle DB backups, but 2 of the programmers were "elite" and had full access and management blessing to adjust any configurations, settings, and the like any time they thought it a good idea. Performance was a constant issue, and this is because none of the programmers, not even the elite ones, really understood how to write good SQL. Or perhaps they did, but were always rushed, you know how it is, and couldn't take time to write good SQL. There was no time to step back and think things through, so whatever training they had in real CS and algorithms was seldom applied. The main functionality was fairly sound, but the parts of the software that were only used occassionally were full of performance killing code. It didn't help that the boss was a very visual guy, who tended to be dismissive of things he could not see, and more interested in the appearance than substance. His background was video games, and in his opinion polished looks are king, and no game, however good, can succeed with crappy graphics. Programmers' progress was much more visible than administrators' progress.
On a prior occasion in which we met to discuss a performance problem, the programmers unanimously concluded on basically no evidence just speculative likening to a past system performance problem, that the system was to blame. The network admin had heard that one before, and was disgusted. Sure enough, a day later it was found to be bad SQL. In the days leading up to the big disaster, the programmers were once again chasing performance problems, and one of these elite programmers disabled the backup at that time. Didn't want the backup process interfering with his testing, and also he suspected it was a system problem, so he was trying to cut back on all extraneous services to narrow the search. Another problem with all this was that this sort of work was being done on the production servers at all! Took a long time to wean the programmers off the production boxes and get them to use the test environment exclusively. Originally, before a decent test environment had been set up, they would fix bugs on the spot, right there on the production machines, then ask us to copy their code changes back to the software repository. Some time after the big disaster, the DBA decided that the programmers should stop using dynamic SQL. Instead, he would provide stored procedures.
They didn't even fire the programmer who dropped all the tables, though it was a near thing. Two things saved his neck. First, he confessed, and promptly. Didn't try to hide, and make us waste even more effort trying to secure our machines from an attack that didn't happen-- we were gearing up to change all the passwords, and lock down and copy the backups we still had to some place out of reach of an attacker, and thinking about the massive effort needed to wipe and reinstall if we could not get rid of whatever infection we had in any other way, but it wasn't necessary once we learned why the disaster happened. Then we could focus on recovery, rather than defense. And second, his mistake should have and would have been no matter, if the database had passwords. The ultimate mistake was not him pointing at the wrong machines, but the lack of passwords, and the bosses realized this.
Still, I had pointed out that the system which he had written, whereby he pointed at a target machine, was inherently dangerous. This disaster gave me the green light to rewrite the entire installation procedure. Among many other changes, I set it up so that you logged into the target machine and pulled the software towards you, rather than log into the source machine and aim and push out to a target.
Office politics. Just lovely when the management fucks up through sheer stupidity, but still has the cunning to find some way to blame you for it and make it stick.
I'll whip out a car analogy. The bosses direct the driver down the wrong road. The driver questions this, but is told to shut up and drive, he doesn't know what he's talking about. 100 miles later, they realize they're not on the right road, and the screaming starts. They blame the driver for taking the wrong road, and fire him. They hire a map reader. They turn to the mechanic and demand he get 200 mph out of the engine, no excuses will be accepted and if he can't do it, he will be fired and they'll get someone who can. Never mind that the car is a cheap econobox that can't even do 100 mph. The mechanic manages a miracle and coaxes 120 mph out of the engine, and is promptly fired because that's not good enough. Over the protests of the map reader, they elect to take a desperate shortcut on a dirt road, to try to get back on track, and end up stuck in the mud. They fire the map reader, but are still stuck in the mud. With no one left to get them out, and no one left to blame, they finally lose their grip. Customers and supporters abandon them.
The programmers insisted that the production database not have any passwords, for their convenience. The DBA protested mightily, but was overruled. Then it happened. We were in the middle of something else when the company's website stopped responding. It was a mad scramble to find out what the hell had happened. I remember very well the sick look on the DBA's face when he went to check the database and announced in shock and dismayed surprise "it's gone!" First thought was that somehow we had been hacked. The DBA quickly found what was responsible: SQL commands to drop all the tables. The network admin went hopping about like a rabid frog making sure he could still log in everywhere and trying to run down the IP address that had originated that command. A few minutes investigation didn't turn up any supporting evidence for the hacked hypothesis. Had to be an inside job. We had just reached this conclusion when a programmer fessed up. He meant to wipe out and reload a demonstration database, but accidentally targeted the wrong machines and destroyed production. The idea of setting up a slave database didn't protect from this. Then it was discovered another programmer had turned off the daily backup a week before, to free up some CPU cycles. The DBA managed to recover, because he had also had all the transactions logged, but it took a full day to restore the database to a usable point, and then a further 3 weeks to clean up.
You can refuse to use JS, same as you can make programs without loops. Those programs could be very, very, very, very, very, very, very long and redundant, but they could work. Unless you run out of memory. How would you write "99 bottles of beer on the wall, 99 bottles of beer, take one down pass it around, 98 bottles of beer on the wall. 98 bottles of beer on the wall, 98 bottles of beer..."? You could make a giant print statement that has all 99 sentences in the body. That's pretty much how HTML w/o JS has to do it. Limited reuse is possible in pure HTML, but a lot of trouble.
What if I want to provide totals, averages, and other nice bits of math in 2 or more identically structured tables with the data they contain the only difference? Could be something like sports statistics from different seasons. Without JS, all that has to be calculated beforehand and put in the web page. HTML can't do it. You can't tell HTML that column c of a table is the sum of columns a and b, and have the browser do the sums, there's just no way.
Is it still stupid, if the system is rigged? If you are told something, and it later turns out not to be true, is that your fault for believing what you were told? Should we all be cynical by default? Many business have tried to cheat me, repeatedly. Several times, I've had employers cheat me of my pay because they ran out of money, or so they claimed. They seem to think it's okay to not pay their employees, and not tell their employees the money has run out, because they themselves are really hurting. Hurting, I tell you. And after they got a whole free month of work out of me thanks to that, would I be so good as to work for them for free for just a little longer? The business will surely take off soon and they will be able to pay everyone's back pay. Riiight. Know what a sunk cost is, boss? Then there are the big monopolies. It's just amazing the crap they try to pull, and how predatory they are. AT&T is always making "mistakes" in the phone bill, and somehow the errors are always in their favor. But what am I to do, switch to one of the very few competitors, none of which are any better, or live without a phone? The power company tries to confuse customers with complicated billing choices, offering what seems to be a low rate (7 cents/kWh woohoo!) but then tacking on this "delivery" charge, and a "base" charge, and a minimum usage policy that causes discounts not to be applied in those months with nice enough weather that you didn't need A/C or heating. Once caught the power company scumbags double billing me and my landlord. Of course the landlord accused me first, but I had kept all the bills and so could show him that I had signed up for electricity right away like I was supposed to, and that I had paid every bill on time, in full. Banks are notorious. It's not just fees, it's crap like opting you in for a service that costs money, or changing the terms on accounts, like the time Bank of America abruptly tripled the minimum balance needed to have maintenance fees waived, and suddenly I'm paying $20 per month because my account balance isn't high enough. I really love the $6 per month if an electronic deposit is NOT made. I resent being forced to spend time on all this petty theft, or to let it go because my time is worth more than that, and the bastards know it.
You show a remarkable lack of empathy for your own daughter. Why, I wonder, didn't you educate her better? Oh, right, she never listens to you.
No keyboard is an unresolvable limitation? I very much doubt that. When we have a small and portable enough direct brain reader or eye tracker or something that can figure out what letter or word we're thinking, or where to move the pointer, and I think we will get there, then the keyboard and mouse will instantly become quaint historic relics. Even now, there's the projection keyboard, which from what I've heard isn't yet very good, but with improvement it might eventually dominate.
Pandora, Amazon Video, Netflix, Hulu, etc are not going to move to a platform with no DRM
Amazon and Apple most certainly do move platforms with no DRM. These devices are general purpose computers, such as PCs. If they won't move without DRM, then they will go out of business to someone who will, and no one will miss them. The reality of the world we live in is that these idiots of the content cartels have no chance whatsoever of changing reality to suit their dark fantasies of complete control over everyone's information.
What im endorsing is the practical, workable idea of baking DRM capabilities directly into the browser since it is a VERY commonly requested feature on the modern web
Very commonly requested? No it isn't. Only the content cartels want it. Customers do not want DRM. They quickly learn how awful DRM is the first time it unfairly inconveniences them, for instance by forcing unskipable commercials on them, or by crippling their device when it wrongly decides they've infringed copyright. I've heard that ad blockers are the most popular browser plugin. That alone shows that anyone who thinks customers can be forced to accept DRM better think again. But there is much more. iTunes had to offer mp3. Customers had too many problems with formats that have DRM. Windows Vista was another failure, despite MS's claims to the contrary, and that was in large part due to the DRM they insisted on hobbling Vista with.
You say you don't endorse DRM, yet you are willing to accept it in HTML5. You're willing to cave to the pressure from these content cartels to try to set up that alternate fantasy universe that simply does not work, and is doomed to failure. In my view, that means you are endorsing DRM. Consider the content protection in the HDMI standard, HDCP. It's worse than useless. All it does is complicate the standard, which lowers the reliability and drives up costs and energy usage, and it completely fails to stop piracy. We all pay for that every minute we watch video over an encrypted HDMI link. It's very low cost, fractions of a cent of electricity, but it isn't necessary and it adds up. HDCP demonstrated, again, that DRM does not work. The Content Scrambling System of DVDs was an earlier abysmal failure, easily broken by a 16 year old kid. We didn't need to waste the effort. Competent cryptology researchers tried to tell them it wouldn't work, but they didn't listen. And now you're willing to let them have another chance, this time at HTML5? They didn't deserve the first chance. They sure don't deserve more chances.
Take your own head out of the sand and face it, DRM is a broken concept. It's not only that DRM is unworkable, DRM is contrary to the social good. You think only of the mythical starving artist who deserves a chance to make a living, and skate right past the point that copyright is not the only way or even the best way to profit from artistic endeavor. And you don't think about the millions who are robbed, by this implicit tax, because adding DRM to everything is very costly, and most of all by breaking our implicit social contract to love thy neighbor. Sharing valuable information is more than a courtesy, it's the core of our lives. We are social animals. Artists' bosses will have to accept this eventually.
As an example, do you think it might be a good idea to apply DRM to knives? If a knife refused to function when held by anyone but the owner, you might think criminals could not take your knife and stab you with it, and so it would be safer. They couldn't steal your knife and use it themselves or sell it to a 3rd party. If you were ever convicted of a crime, or diagnosed as mentally troubled, the manufacturer could disable all your knives. Maybe just a speeding or parking ticket would count. This ability could be used to coerce you on other matters, such as being late on paying the rent or utility bills or those parking tickets. Disable your knives until you pay. This could be implemented by making the knife retractable, like a typical utility knife, and adding finger and palm print sensors to the handle. Would need batteries in the handle. The DRM knife would be far bulkier, clumsier, more expensive, and less useful than a knife without DRM. We would also have to outlaw non-DRM knives. Would be quite a task to make sure no one ever makes knives, out of stone, as our ancestors did in the Stone Age, or out of sheet metal or broken glass or who knows what.
Now you may think that's all a strawman. It is not. Trying to apply DRM to knives is just silly. Might not be silly to apply DRM to guns, but knives are just too simple. As silly as it is to apply DRM to knives, it's even sillier to try it on information. Being a physical item, a knife takes some effort to duplicate. Might be easier to make your own design than bother trying to copy another. By comparison, the effort required to share information is trivial.
Bookstores are dead, and I include in that Amazon's book business. I used to shop regularly at Walden's, B. Dalton's, and all them, pop in once every 2 or 3 weeks. Now I hardly ever visit. These days, I'd rather participate in a discussion such as these on Slashdot, than passively read a book.
When I do want to read a book, I much prefer to get it through a public library, rather than participate any further in this overly commercialized private bookstore and publishing business. Our public libraries should go digital, and I see the private bookstore as one of the obstacles to that. The digital public library would save us a great deal of money and give us far, far more access to published works than we now enjoy, but these scumbags in the private book sales industry have done all they could to delay and derail it. That being the case, the death of the private bookstore is reason to celebrate.
Slashdot Mirror
What bugs me about operator overloading is how tediously verbose it can get. For example, say you define operator functions for < and ==. You still have to do <=. Even when all the <= function is is: return this < that || this == that;, you still have to write it. It's so tempting to skip writing the code for an unused operator that many programmers do so. Languages are mostly unable to automatically fill in obvious code of that sort. C++ does have a default assignment operator function, but that's all. Too much chance of the obvious being wrong, so they opt not to do anything.
To make matters worse, the above implementation of <= is inefficient. Down at the machine level, the computer does not stupidly require 2 separate comparisons to test <=. It has instructions such as JLE. The above function will at the least result in the computer having to do JL; JE;. While JE may be executed only 50% of the time that JL is executed, depends entirely on the data and code, it's still a waste. Further, two branches takes more space in the CPU's branch prediction, and the extra instruction takes more space in cache, so JL; JE is not as good as 50% slower.
I find your gratuitous slur against "academic types" unwarranted and unfair. Academia has produced much innovation in programming. Do you forget the proof that Structured Programming is sufficient, and GOTOs are not necessary? All the work done on Turing machines, and universal computation? Automata Theory, with the classification of grammars into such categories as "context free"? BNF? Without that academia you sneer at, we couldn't be sure of all that. What of the entire concept of OOP? Where did that come from? And functional programming and LISP? It's easy for some hack to bang out a programming language built around what he feels are a few good ideas, drawn from perhaps years of experience. But without careful examination of the problems, insightful modeling that leads to good, pertinent questions which can be proven one way or another, we would just be flailing around even more than we already do. We might all still be trying to program in ALGOL. I put more trust in academia's ability to create a good programming language than I do a modern corporation with its dismissive attitude towards fundamental research.
Phoenix, eh? Do you use a clothes dryer?
But there are other reasons. Lot of managers are easily seduced into being patronizing slave drivers. Still others have issues with insecurity over their control and power, and overcompensate. Treat their workers like children who have to be told how to behave properly and how to do their jobs. It's a foolish way of handling people, and it drives the best right out the door-- as long as they have alternatives. Then these managers have the arrogance and gall to think they're being really nice for suffering incompetent underlings, never seeing that they created the environment. Ever had the boss pat you on the shoulder in forgiveness for "your" mistake, assuring you that he isn't firing you today because he's such a softie, and he realizes you couldn't help yourself, you just don't know how to think right, but, you know, you really should try a little harder?
The big lesson of the US Civil War is that slavery does not work. It's not just that slavery is evil, it's that slavery is dumb. That is why the Confederacy was at such a disadvantage when they started the war. Despite having more land in warmer, nicer climates, their population was 1/4 of the Union. Innovation was practically non-existent. The war was hopeless before it was ever started, yet they started it anyway. The system dumbed down the slaves-- slaves have very little drive-- and, it seems, made for stupidly arrogant masters as well. It certainly was stupid to start an unwinnable war. The slavery system assured that the Confederacy could never hope to match the Union in any way.
However, many people still really believe in servitude, really think it works, and practice it religiously, that is, as long as they get to be the masters. Those who support H-1B visas reveal themselves as wannabe slave drivers and control freaks.
And yet, most of us are rather wasteful with what money we have. One of the biggest wastes is this insistence on cranking up the A/C to get indoor temperatures into the lower 70s. 80 F not only saves money, it is actually healthier. Acclimatizing to the seasons is better for you. Heating and cooling accounts for about half of our energy expenses. These expenses are made all the worse by the bloating of homes up to McMansion sizes, which we do not need, not with the ever smaller families we have. It's a similar story with cars, but so many people link status with car size and power. Detroit really suckered the public on that one.
Still, I am not in the least sympathetic towards lying executives who wail that there's a shortage of STEM workers, not when they pull in 7, 8, or even 9 figure pay packages.
I wonder if the entire practice of using percentages to measure economic increase is wrong. And this wrong thinking is perhaps driven by greed? Percentage increases imply exponential growth, which we realize is impossible to sustain in the space we can reach if limited to a fixed maximum possible speed such as lightspeed. The only way to sustain a bank account that pays compound interest is ultimately have the inflation rate closely match it. In short, to fake it.
Growth can only be at an exponential rate over a short period of time, not indefinitely. Population has the capacity to grow exponentially, which makes percentage increases such a natural way to describe growth, but can never sustain it thanks to external limitations. Population only grows exponentially for a short time, in response to some change that increased the available resources, such as finding uninhabited land, a big war or plague, or a significant invention or discovery. Over a long period of time such as 10000 years, a savings account earning just 1% compound interest could easily be worth more than humanity's total output. Worth even more than the RIAA's claims of losses to piracy. It would be worth about 2^138 times the initial investment.
It's done to books too. Take Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings. The movies have great visual appeal, but the dialog is awful and the plot which arguably already was a simplistic good vs. evil fantasy, is watered down and mucked up with infantile plot devices, jokes, and near constant action. Can hardly go 2 minutes without another fight or chase or tightrope walk happening. I'm talking about things like the lame short jokes on Gimli-- the scene in which he jumps up and down to see over the wall at Helms Deep was especially excruciating-- and the bit about Gollum framing Sam for eating all their food, and Frodo believes this (no way!), Aragorn manhandling Frodo at the Prancing Pony (totally out of character), the start of the battle at Minas Tirith in which an orc soldier announces that now is the age of orcs as he stabs a fallen soldier (cheesy), elves showing up to help fight at Helm's Deep announcing that they came to die, Denethor refusing to light the beacons so Gandalf has Pippin sneak up and do it as if he couldn't have just set the beacons off himself with a bolt of lightning, and so on. What was especially annoying about things like the elven fighters at Helm's Deep was that was a few wasted minutes that could have been used on any of the many, many good things they cut from the books. The worst cut was leaving out the Scouring of the Shire.
There are very, very few film adaptations that equal the books that inspired them. The Harry Potter movies are decent jobs, except they are awfully rushed. So is LOTR. But then, what happens when a director wangles plenty of time, as with The Hobbit? He adds filler! Bulks the movies up with fight scenes that never happened in the book! Then there are movies like I, Robot. Let's just use the setting, and wing it with our own characters and plot!
Gah, should have read the summary more carefully. I was talking about 3D graphics, not general programming on the GPU.
I went with OpenSceneGraph.
Long ago, I tried xlib only, because at that time Motif was the only higher layer available, and it was proprietary. It was horrible. xlib has been superceded by XCB, but I wouldn't use that, not with all the other options out there today. XCB is a very low level graphics library, for drawing lines and letters in 2D. 3D graphics can be done with that, but your code would have to have all the math to transform 3D representations in your data into 2D window coordinates for XCB. LessTif is a free replacement for Motif, but by the time it was complete enough to be usable, the world was already moving on. With Wayland likely pushing X aside in the near future, XCB and xlib may not perform so well. They will continue to be supported for a while through a compatibility layer, but I think they're on the way out. Motif is also not much good these days either. For one, Motif rests on top of xlib, and if xlib goes, so does Motif. Today, we have many better libraries for interfacing with GUIs.
When OpenGL became available, I tried it. OpenGL is great for drawing simple 3D graphics, but it lacks intelligence. The easy part is that you just pass x,y,z coordinates to the library routines, and OpenGL does the rest. The bad part is that if you want to draw a fairly complicated scene, containing many objects that may be partly or completely hidden behind other objects, OpenGL has no intelligence to deal with that. It just dumbly draws everything your code tells it to draw. To speed that up, your code has to have the smarts to figure out what not to draw, so it can skip calling on OpenGL for invisible objects.
That's where a library like OpenSceneGraph comes in. Your code feeds all the info to OSG. OSG figures out visibility, then calls OpenGL accordingly.
You may need still other libraries for window management, something like FLTK. Yes, FLTK and OSG can work together.
You will also most likely be working in C/C++. OpenGL has many language bindings. But OSG is C++ and doesn't have so many. FLTK is also C++, and has even fewer bindings. Trouble with picking a language like Python for this work is that it can be difficult to find bindings for all the libraries. Even when bindings to a particular language exist, they tend to be incomplete, and don't always perfectly work around differences in data representation. Pick libraries first, then see what language bindings they all have in common, then code in one of those common languages. It's possible C/C++ will turn out to be the only language common to all the libraries.
people need to be handed MORE and MORE money so they can go to school?
Sort of like high school, you mean? Last I heard, high school is still provided gratis. Really, college should also be free for the students. If these businesses were serious about addressing this supposed skills shortage, they would push for free college. And I don't mean necessarily by pumping money into universities. How about instead we stop screwing students over with all the money making schemes that infest college these days, things like required textbooks costing at least $100 each, and rapacious parking enforcement? The main idea of dorm living is to save money, and free up more time for studies by providing meals, however bad, and eliminating the expense and time of commuting by car. Why else put up with dorm life? Yet somehow dorms have been turned into luxury apartments, seemingly to justify raising the charges for room and board. It should be no wonder that the young are running away from the traditional university as fast as possible. They're hardly educational centers any more, they're company towns. And we see crap like student loans being held apart from all other kinds of debt in that they cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. And the latest thing is Congress dragging their feet on student loan rates. We assume the young can bear heavier burdens because they are young and healthy. But they can't, if there aren't any decent jobs. These jerks complaining of a labor shortage are insulting us.
Then a guy like you sticks your two cents in, and blames it all on the students' poor financial decisions. I grant they need to learn that, and many aren't serious about their studies, partying until they flunk out, but damn is the deck stacked against them. Get a job, you say? That sure blows a big point of dorm life. Yeah, live in the dorms to free up time for studying, then spend all that time working, to pay for the dorms?!
But businesses never were serious about the alleged skills shortage. The shortage would have never happened, because there never was a real shortage. It's purely a manufactured shortage, a non-problem that businesses have created out of nothing, evidently to give them something to complain about. Takes real chutzpah to make such complaints in the midst of the Great Recession.
Patents promote progress by mitigating the effects of the free rider problem
I understand what you mean, but that reasoning only holds up under a long chain of assumptions. That's what I'm trying to say.
Assumption 1: patents promote progress. Patents are supposed to promote progress, yes, but do they actually? I think not. They are monopolies on ideas. Monopolies have a long and poor history of serving the public good. We have seen many examples in which patents actually hindered progress, by denying the use of ideas that should never have been patented. We've seen an explosion in the scope of what can be patented. Used to be you had to have a working machine, an idea alone was not enough. And the patent covered only the particular method used by your machine, not all methods that could arrive at the same result. But now? Software is full of infamous patents, such as Amazon's One Click, and IBM's Fat Line. Software should have been treated like mathematical formulas, not machines, and patents should never have been applicable to software at all.
Assumption 2: copying is free riding. Copying is not stealing, nor is it free riding. What did the "victim" lose? You are basing this on the thinking that ideas can be owned, that the "right" to use an idea is a commodity that can be bought, sold, traded, and so forth, and that anyone who operates outside this mercenary system is a pirate, mooch, leech, ingrate, and possibly even a dangerous revolutionary whose activities are undermining a valuable system. So many believers in free market systems have such blind faith in them they use it as a universal hammer to address all problems in all ways. Not every problem is a nail. A market can be a good way to handle this, but only if properly applied. Scarcity is an essential component. Whatever is scarce about ideas is not the ability to make copies, and trying to make scarce by fiat something that is not, in the hopes this will cause a market in the commodity to function, is a gross misapplication and folly. If anything is free riding, it is rent seeking.
Assumption 3: free riding (copying) hurts progress. Quite the opposite! Copying is at the heart of progress. It is a central tenet of research that results must be reproducible. Education to our current levels would be impossible if students could not copy, instead having to rediscover everything on their own. Further, if copying does indeed reduce incentives to invest in research because it is harder to profit, it also increases incentives because you still have the first mover advantage, and you have to keep moving, which means do more research.
Scientists are not prohibited from sharing ideas. They are however prohibited (temporarily) from profiting from someone else's ideas or buying knockoff products of patented ideas.
But extreme patents do in effect prohibit the sharing of ideas. And what's this talk of "someone else's ideas"? Who owns an idea? 2 people independently think of the same idea, but one thought of it 5 minutes before the other, and suddenly the other guy owes the 1st guy money? I have found this aspect of human language most unfortunate. When we say "his idea", we don't mean that he owns the idea, we mean only that he discovered it. Thanks to our language, it's been far to easy to conflate that into the same meaning as "his car" or "his right arm".
the free rider problem ... is the entire reason why patents exist in the first place
No. Patents exist to promote progress.
You characterize copying first as "free riding", which is not true, and second as a "problem", which it definitely is not. By that logic, education all the way through high school is a massive free ride, what with all those students faithfully copying down what their teachers impart to them. That baby suckling at its mother's breast? Free rider! Life on Earth is one total free ride off the energy of the sun.
Why is copying not free riding? Because free riding is about material goods and services. Ideas are neither. Also, your argument would seem to assume that the only way to pay for research is to stop everyone else from getting a "free ride". But there are so many other ways to pay for research. Trying to monetize the sharing of ideas strikes at the very core of what makes research possible. If scientists cannot share their ideas with each other and the public without first getting permission and securing payment, to make sure no one is getting a free ride, we will progress very slowly.
A baby is not a free rider, it is an investment in the future. Accounting is a fine discipline, but you have to be careful to apply it correctly. Have you correctly identified all the costs and benefits? It's easy to harp about a "free rider problem" if you characterize an activity as a cost when it is not so clear it should be considered a cost. This is a problem we constantly complain about in IT, the problem that management regards all of IT as a cost center, nothing but a huge expense, because they have not understood or properly appreciated the benefits. Try figuring the expense of doing accounting without computers, if you think IT is only a cost center. It's also a constant problem in the arguments over energy. Coal and oil proponents are always conveniently overlooking certain costs. In their arguments, they dwell upon the pot of gold at the end of their particular rainbow, how big and beautiful it is, how many jobs it will create, how it would really stimulate the economy if only gasoline was $2.50 per gallon, or maybe $1 per gallon, or, heck, free. Sounds nice, but they can't be trusted to make a good case when they refuse to address the external costs. Will we have to spend billions on scrubbing and sequestration to reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere? Or, billions to build sea walls to hold back rising ocean levels? Or, perhaps trillions to relocate half the world population to higher ground? What of the negative health effects? The costs of accidents such as Deepwater Horizon? The proliferation of suburban sprawl? And the costs of switching later rather than sooner to renewable energy when these nonrenewable sources are mined out? If we are to increase our options in these matters, we must explore, seek out ideas, and for that we need progress in science.
So tell me, how many old computers are you still using? That 20 year old hot 60 MHz Pentium machine with the division bug, 8M of RAM and a 500M hard drive still ticking over for you? Still have a 30 year old 4.77 MHz 8088 PC with a 360KB floppy drive serving your needs?
My fridge is about 10 years old, and I've no wish to replace it as it keeps working great.
My fridge is 18 years old, which is very unfortunate. Efficiency standards for fridges went up in 1996. My fridge is one of the least efficient 1995 models there is. A new fridge would use about half the electricity my current fridge uses, that's how big the difference is. It would pay for itself in 6 years. If I also consider that fridges don't last forever, and figure a 30 year lifespan, could argue that the time for a new fridge to pay for itself is more like 3 or even 2 years.
if you keep losing your job, if you are always having problems finding one, well then perhaps you are doing something wrong.
Yes, that's right, blame the victim. I know what job instability is like. 3 of the companies I have worked for in my career went bankrupt. 2 more were bought out after poor performance. Tell me how you keep a job when the company goes under? Maybe I should have worked harder to keep the company afloat? I was not in charge, I was only one foot soldier in an army that suffered defeat. Can one soldier singlehandedly win a war?
The world is not as easy a place as it was a few generations ago. Today is more people, more competition, less frontier. It's most unrealistic for parents to expect their children to do as well as they did themselves, and damn unfair to think less of them went they don't. Grandpa had a family of 8, why can't you have a family of at least 5? You loser!
"Best way?" That's a loaded question. It assumes that it's a given that it's possible to lock down data and keep insiders from exposing it. It's very much like the "problem" that DRM advocates think they can solve with DRM. Measures such as removing USB ports and CD burners, locking the computer in a closet, stopping and frisking all employees at the exit to make sure they aren't carrying out any flash drives, micro SD cards, CDs, printouts and the like are much like airport security, that is, hugely expensive and almost completely ineffective. Suppose the employees doing the frisking decide to sneak something out? The one I really love is how people are fired. The bad news is broken suddenly, with security people abruptly showing up and ordering them to remove their hands from the keyboard. They get a few minutes to clean out their desk, under supervision, and are escorted off the premises. The whole process reeks of stupid paranoia and extreme hostility. It's as if an employee had no idea of their standing, no idea they were in trouble, and couldn't have prepared a few nasty surprises if they'd a mind to do so. Then, just to make extra sure, there are all these crazy laws which mandate extremely harsh penalties for any sort of breach that involves computers.
Like a crime, a security breach requires 3 things: means, motive, and opportunity. Insiders by definition already have means and opportunity. You are not an insider if you don't have means and opportunity. All that's missing is motive. When you assert that a security breach has nothing to do with morality, you could not be more wrong. Morality can generate powerful motives. So can money and sex. The only way to stop insiders from leaking sensitive information is to address their grievances. The first blindingly obvious thing to do is not play the cheap employment games that are so much in vogue currently. If employees are being treated poorly, by being hired as contractors so they can be paid less, and not given health insurance, and be fired instantly for any or no reason at all, do you think they're so stupid they won't understand that? If they're working under a tyrannical and sadistic boss who enjoys making underlings sweat and squirm, do something about it, like demote the boss. Learn people's grievances by, you know, talking to them, not spying on them. If someone in the organization is doing something illegal or immoral, don't let it go on. Organizations ignore this human facet at the peril of their secrets. They think they can commit heinous crimes, treat people like replaceable cogs, then tar anyone who blows the whistle as disloyal or even traitorous, and the rest of us will buy that. Of course there will always be a few whose grievances are unreasonable and unresolvable, and a few spies, but most whistleblowers are neither. Address the issues, and there won't be anything to blow the whistle about. Will solve 99% of the leaks right there.
Do we really need patents and copyrights? Their purpose is to put more science and art in the public's hands. Secondary to that is seeing that creators get their due, which we try to do because we realize that they need to cover living expenses and a bit more in order to produce, and they need feedback on how good we think their work is, and monetary persuasion is especially effective at that. But patents and copyrights are only one means, and are very poor. Ironically, they work against their purpose, in many ways. If we can devise other, better ways-- and intellectual property is so bad that it is easy to do better-- why not dump patents and copyrights? I'm thinking widespread and diverse patronage, somewhat like that practiced in Europe in past centuries, in which it was considered fashionable and cultured for courts, especially royal courts, to support art. There were dozens of kingdoms, small and large, and many had court musicians, painters, and the like. Competed with each other for the best. The church was also pretty big into research and was especially keen on funding observatories, though it often didn't turn out the way they wanted, see Galileo. Today we could do patronage so much better, with Internet social groups more than any modern nobility. For instance, why couldn't we here on Slashdot sponsor rock groups or orchestras? Digg, Reddit, and others could do the same. More corporate sites like Facebook, Twitter, and of course Amazon could get into the action as well. Or, perhaps sites devoted more specifically to art could do it, sites like Youtube, Photobucket, tumblr. Maybe a struggling site like Yahoo could use it to boost their flagging numbers. Of course we would insist that any work we sponsor be released under some kind of open license, CC, or maybe just public domain.
A goal I like to orient on is that of realizing the digital public library. The digital public library would be an enormous social good. All the works ever published, all available anywhere in the world that the Internet reaches. The ability to search through this information would put card catalogs and digests to shame. There would no longer be any such thing as all copies checked out, or returns, especially late returns with penalty fees. All the space currently devoted to the extremely redundant storage of billions of paper sheets and plastic discs could be mostly freed up for other uses. 1000s of small towns could have the same library at their fingertips as the biggest cities, instead of the very small facilities with very limited selections that they typically have now. We would save millions, and have a far better public library. But we can't do it, copyright law blocks it. I think the digital public library is more valuable than copyright. Therefore, copyright should go.
We could all tighten up our spending, but there are limits.
$2 per day is all some people live on. I thought what it would take to live on $2 per day. I would have to cancel my Internet and phone service. I could not afford electricity, let alone A/C, so I would have to cancel my electric service. Car? Bwahaha, no way, would have to walk everywhere. The city's water and sewage services cost about $60 per month, so those would also have to go. I would need an outhouse or latrine or chamberpots, and a well with a hand pump for water. Or perhaps I would have to take buckets to the nearest stream or lake every day. Either way, can forget about bathing daily. I would also need a wood burning stove, and access to enough wood to fuel the thing. But stoves are expensive, so I could make do with an open campfire. I'd need my own wooded acreage, perhaps about 10 acres, to have enough wood. But land is subject to property taxes, so I'd have to forgo owning the land and just raid public land. Buying food from the grocery would be intermittent at best. What little land I could afford to own would have to be devoted to a garden, and I don't mean a silly little flower garden, I mean a real garden, a vegetable garden. Then there's the problem of storing the harvest. Some crops need only be dried, and guarded from rats, which cats are all too happy to do, but many foods need more preparation for storage. Would have to take up canning, or perhaps dig a root cellar. The ice house is another way. Northerly enough towns used to have buildings devoted to cold storage. In the winter, flood a shallow depression with water, and the next day it would be frozen, then they would chop out blocks of ice and store them with sawdust for insulation. Amazingly, the ice would last through the year. Clothing is another problem. People used to make dresses out of burlap feed sacks. Homespun is another option, but doing that takes an enormous amount of time and labor. I would never see a doctor. If anything happened to me, I'd heal up on my own, perhaps ending up maimed with all the labor now twice as difficult as before, or die.
This is pretty close to how my great grandparents and grandparents lived in the Great Depression. They were all farmers, and they chopped wood, pumped water, tended the garden, milked the cows by hand, canned the harvest, bathed once a week, and hoped that all their hard, menial labor would lead to a better life for their children. It's terribly inefficient, and they understood that. They got electricity when it became available, and then when the freezer came, they instantly abandoned canning. Frozen vegetables taste way better than canned. Canning takes a lot of wood, and much of the energy from burning the wood is wasted. Pollutes like crazy too. Today, some people think all that sounds sort of romantic and admirable, especially the wood fires part, but it is neither. We could not afford for everyone to live that way today, for one thing there isn't enough acreage for all the wood that would be needed. But screw people way, way down on pay, and this is the kind of life we will all have, for a short while, until resources run out and they will. Then things get ugly, fast.
It was the DBA's duty to handle DB backups, but 2 of the programmers were "elite" and had full access and management blessing to adjust any configurations, settings, and the like any time they thought it a good idea. Performance was a constant issue, and this is because none of the programmers, not even the elite ones, really understood how to write good SQL. Or perhaps they did, but were always rushed, you know how it is, and couldn't take time to write good SQL. There was no time to step back and think things through, so whatever training they had in real CS and algorithms was seldom applied. The main functionality was fairly sound, but the parts of the software that were only used occassionally were full of performance killing code. It didn't help that the boss was a very visual guy, who tended to be dismissive of things he could not see, and more interested in the appearance than substance. His background was video games, and in his opinion polished looks are king, and no game, however good, can succeed with crappy graphics. Programmers' progress was much more visible than administrators' progress.
On a prior occasion in which we met to discuss a performance problem, the programmers unanimously concluded on basically no evidence just speculative likening to a past system performance problem, that the system was to blame. The network admin had heard that one before, and was disgusted. Sure enough, a day later it was found to be bad SQL. In the days leading up to the big disaster, the programmers were once again chasing performance problems, and one of these elite programmers disabled the backup at that time. Didn't want the backup process interfering with his testing, and also he suspected it was a system problem, so he was trying to cut back on all extraneous services to narrow the search. Another problem with all this was that this sort of work was being done on the production servers at all! Took a long time to wean the programmers off the production boxes and get them to use the test environment exclusively. Originally, before a decent test environment had been set up, they would fix bugs on the spot, right there on the production machines, then ask us to copy their code changes back to the software repository. Some time after the big disaster, the DBA decided that the programmers should stop using dynamic SQL. Instead, he would provide stored procedures.
They didn't even fire the programmer who dropped all the tables, though it was a near thing. Two things saved his neck. First, he confessed, and promptly. Didn't try to hide, and make us waste even more effort trying to secure our machines from an attack that didn't happen-- we were gearing up to change all the passwords, and lock down and copy the backups we still had to some place out of reach of an attacker, and thinking about the massive effort needed to wipe and reinstall if we could not get rid of whatever infection we had in any other way, but it wasn't necessary once we learned why the disaster happened. Then we could focus on recovery, rather than defense. And second, his mistake should have and would have been no matter, if the database had passwords. The ultimate mistake was not him pointing at the wrong machines, but the lack of passwords, and the bosses realized this.
Still, I had pointed out that the system which he had written, whereby he pointed at a target machine, was inherently dangerous. This disaster gave me the green light to rewrite the entire installation procedure. Among many other changes, I set it up so that you logged into the target machine and pulled the software towards you, rather than log into the source machine and aim and push out to a target.
Office politics. Just lovely when the management fucks up through sheer stupidity, but still has the cunning to find some way to blame you for it and make it stick.
I'll whip out a car analogy. The bosses direct the driver down the wrong road. The driver questions this, but is told to shut up and drive, he doesn't know what he's talking about. 100 miles later, they realize they're not on the right road, and the screaming starts. They blame the driver for taking the wrong road, and fire him. They hire a map reader. They turn to the mechanic and demand he get 200 mph out of the engine, no excuses will be accepted and if he can't do it, he will be fired and they'll get someone who can. Never mind that the car is a cheap econobox that can't even do 100 mph. The mechanic manages a miracle and coaxes 120 mph out of the engine, and is promptly fired because that's not good enough. Over the protests of the map reader, they elect to take a desperate shortcut on a dirt road, to try to get back on track, and end up stuck in the mud. They fire the map reader, but are still stuck in the mud. With no one left to get them out, and no one left to blame, they finally lose their grip. Customers and supporters abandon them.
Been there, done that.
The programmers insisted that the production database not have any passwords, for their convenience. The DBA protested mightily, but was overruled. Then it happened. We were in the middle of something else when the company's website stopped responding. It was a mad scramble to find out what the hell had happened. I remember very well the sick look on the DBA's face when he went to check the database and announced in shock and dismayed surprise "it's gone!" First thought was that somehow we had been hacked. The DBA quickly found what was responsible: SQL commands to drop all the tables. The network admin went hopping about like a rabid frog making sure he could still log in everywhere and trying to run down the IP address that had originated that command. A few minutes investigation didn't turn up any supporting evidence for the hacked hypothesis. Had to be an inside job. We had just reached this conclusion when a programmer fessed up. He meant to wipe out and reload a demonstration database, but accidentally targeted the wrong machines and destroyed production. The idea of setting up a slave database didn't protect from this. Then it was discovered another programmer had turned off the daily backup a week before, to free up some CPU cycles. The DBA managed to recover, because he had also had all the transactions logged, but it took a full day to restore the database to a usable point, and then a further 3 weeks to clean up.
You can refuse to use JS, same as you can make programs without loops. Those programs could be very, very, very, very, very, very, very long and redundant, but they could work. Unless you run out of memory. How would you write "99 bottles of beer on the wall, 99 bottles of beer, take one down pass it around, 98 bottles of beer on the wall. 98 bottles of beer on the wall, 98 bottles of beer..."? You could make a giant print statement that has all 99 sentences in the body. That's pretty much how HTML w/o JS has to do it. Limited reuse is possible in pure HTML, but a lot of trouble.
What if I want to provide totals, averages, and other nice bits of math in 2 or more identically structured tables with the data they contain the only difference? Could be something like sports statistics from different seasons. Without JS, all that has to be calculated beforehand and put in the web page. HTML can't do it. You can't tell HTML that column c of a table is the sum of columns a and b, and have the browser do the sums, there's just no way.
Is it still stupid, if the system is rigged? If you are told something, and it later turns out not to be true, is that your fault for believing what you were told? Should we all be cynical by default? Many business have tried to cheat me, repeatedly. Several times, I've had employers cheat me of my pay because they ran out of money, or so they claimed. They seem to think it's okay to not pay their employees, and not tell their employees the money has run out, because they themselves are really hurting. Hurting, I tell you. And after they got a whole free month of work out of me thanks to that, would I be so good as to work for them for free for just a little longer? The business will surely take off soon and they will be able to pay everyone's back pay. Riiight. Know what a sunk cost is, boss? Then there are the big monopolies. It's just amazing the crap they try to pull, and how predatory they are. AT&T is always making "mistakes" in the phone bill, and somehow the errors are always in their favor. But what am I to do, switch to one of the very few competitors, none of which are any better, or live without a phone? The power company tries to confuse customers with complicated billing choices, offering what seems to be a low rate (7 cents/kWh woohoo!) but then tacking on this "delivery" charge, and a "base" charge, and a minimum usage policy that causes discounts not to be applied in those months with nice enough weather that you didn't need A/C or heating. Once caught the power company scumbags double billing me and my landlord. Of course the landlord accused me first, but I had kept all the bills and so could show him that I had signed up for electricity right away like I was supposed to, and that I had paid every bill on time, in full. Banks are notorious. It's not just fees, it's crap like opting you in for a service that costs money, or changing the terms on accounts, like the time Bank of America abruptly tripled the minimum balance needed to have maintenance fees waived, and suddenly I'm paying $20 per month because my account balance isn't high enough. I really love the $6 per month if an electronic deposit is NOT made. I resent being forced to spend time on all this petty theft, or to let it go because my time is worth more than that, and the bastards know it.
You show a remarkable lack of empathy for your own daughter. Why, I wonder, didn't you educate her better? Oh, right, she never listens to you.
It's not a limitation that can be resolved
No keyboard is an unresolvable limitation? I very much doubt that. When we have a small and portable enough direct brain reader or eye tracker or something that can figure out what letter or word we're thinking, or where to move the pointer, and I think we will get there, then the keyboard and mouse will instantly become quaint historic relics. Even now, there's the projection keyboard, which from what I've heard isn't yet very good, but with improvement it might eventually dominate.
Pandora, Amazon Video, Netflix, Hulu, etc are not going to move to a platform with no DRM
Amazon and Apple most certainly do move platforms with no DRM. These devices are general purpose computers, such as PCs. If they won't move without DRM, then they will go out of business to someone who will, and no one will miss them. The reality of the world we live in is that these idiots of the content cartels have no chance whatsoever of changing reality to suit their dark fantasies of complete control over everyone's information.
What im endorsing is the practical, workable idea of baking DRM capabilities directly into the browser since it is a VERY commonly requested feature on the modern web
Very commonly requested? No it isn't. Only the content cartels want it. Customers do not want DRM. They quickly learn how awful DRM is the first time it unfairly inconveniences them, for instance by forcing unskipable commercials on them, or by crippling their device when it wrongly decides they've infringed copyright. I've heard that ad blockers are the most popular browser plugin. That alone shows that anyone who thinks customers can be forced to accept DRM better think again. But there is much more. iTunes had to offer mp3. Customers had too many problems with formats that have DRM. Windows Vista was another failure, despite MS's claims to the contrary, and that was in large part due to the DRM they insisted on hobbling Vista with.
You say you don't endorse DRM, yet you are willing to accept it in HTML5. You're willing to cave to the pressure from these content cartels to try to set up that alternate fantasy universe that simply does not work, and is doomed to failure. In my view, that means you are endorsing DRM. Consider the content protection in the HDMI standard, HDCP. It's worse than useless. All it does is complicate the standard, which lowers the reliability and drives up costs and energy usage, and it completely fails to stop piracy. We all pay for that every minute we watch video over an encrypted HDMI link. It's very low cost, fractions of a cent of electricity, but it isn't necessary and it adds up. HDCP demonstrated, again, that DRM does not work. The Content Scrambling System of DVDs was an earlier abysmal failure, easily broken by a 16 year old kid. We didn't need to waste the effort. Competent cryptology researchers tried to tell them it wouldn't work, but they didn't listen. And now you're willing to let them have another chance, this time at HTML5? They didn't deserve the first chance. They sure don't deserve more chances.
Take your own head out of the sand and face it, DRM is a broken concept. It's not only that DRM is unworkable, DRM is contrary to the social good. You think only of the mythical starving artist who deserves a chance to make a living, and skate right past the point that copyright is not the only way or even the best way to profit from artistic endeavor. And you don't think about the millions who are robbed, by this implicit tax, because adding DRM to everything is very costly, and most of all by breaking our implicit social contract to love thy neighbor. Sharing valuable information is more than a courtesy, it's the core of our lives. We are social animals. Artists' bosses will have to accept this eventually.
As an example, do you think it might be a good idea to apply DRM to knives? If a knife refused to function when held by anyone but the owner, you might think criminals could not take your knife and stab you with it, and so it would be safer. They couldn't steal your knife and use it themselves or sell it to a 3rd party. If you were ever convicted of a crime, or diagnosed as mentally troubled, the manufacturer could disable all your knives. Maybe just a speeding or parking ticket would count. This ability could be used to coerce you on other matters, such as being late on paying the rent or utility bills or those parking tickets. Disable your knives until you pay. This could be implemented by making the knife retractable, like a typical utility knife, and adding finger and palm print sensors to the handle. Would need batteries in the handle. The DRM knife would be far bulkier, clumsier, more expensive, and less useful than a knife without DRM. We would also have to outlaw non-DRM knives. Would be quite a task to make sure no one ever makes knives, out of stone, as our ancestors did in the Stone Age, or out of sheet metal or broken glass or who knows what.
Now you may think that's all a strawman. It is not. Trying to apply DRM to knives is just silly. Might not be silly to apply DRM to guns, but knives are just too simple. As silly as it is to apply DRM to knives, it's even sillier to try it on information. Being a physical item, a knife takes some effort to duplicate. Might be easier to make your own design than bother trying to copy another. By comparison, the effort required to share information is trivial.
Bookstores are dead, and I include in that Amazon's book business. I used to shop regularly at Walden's, B. Dalton's, and all them, pop in once every 2 or 3 weeks. Now I hardly ever visit. These days, I'd rather participate in a discussion such as these on Slashdot, than passively read a book.
When I do want to read a book, I much prefer to get it through a public library, rather than participate any further in this overly commercialized private bookstore and publishing business. Our public libraries should go digital, and I see the private bookstore as one of the obstacles to that. The digital public library would save us a great deal of money and give us far, far more access to published works than we now enjoy, but these scumbags in the private book sales industry have done all they could to delay and derail it. That being the case, the death of the private bookstore is reason to celebrate.