Not exactly true. Artists such as Ian Anderson and Cliff Richard wanted to extend copyright to 95 years in the UK.
I stopped listening to Jethro Tull when I heard Ian Anderson talk about copyright. I have quite a few albums, but I feel sick whenever I think of this millionaire crying how he's being robbed, not by pirates, but by copyright laws.
I'm happy he's made a lot of money from his talent (better than making money by fraudulent banking), but trying to extend his copyright while stealing Bach's Bourree in E minor is a bit hypocritical (and I'm sure that wasn't the only piece for which he needed some "inspiration", just like any other artist - be it a writer, a poet, a painter or a composer).
I speak into a machine that has 15,000 sensors that measure the air speed at each point in a three-dimensional cube. It then converts my speech into a complex symbolic description which is passed by e-mail to another machine. The other machine then converts it into movements of synthetic diaphragm, lung, throat, tongue, teeth and lips (it cost me $1,500,000 to build this unique machine).
The result is a near-perfect replica of my voice. This allows me to send my voice remotely, and to actually have conversions with people in other places (well, it's unidirectional at this point, but the other direction can be implemented by phone... oh, wait...)
I'm not sure real fire fighters like this analogy...
"Of course we follow procedures when we fight fires. Of course it's all documented. Of course we have to prepare a full report about what happened any why it happened. Of course we train other people. Of course we're nice and helpful to anyone we meet, just because we're fire fighters doesn't mean that we're arrogant bastards."
Whenever I hear of someone who's a brilliant bully, I think to myself "I bet there's someone even more brilliant who's also nice to work with".
I've only met one genius (so far), and he was a very nice person. I've also met many bullies. There's no excuse to being a bully, regardless of quantity or quality of code (or amount of money made or saved). If you're that brilliant then surely you can learn how to be a human being.
I'm not sure it's that extreme, again coming from the point of view that insurance companies want to make money and people aren't stupid.
If I live in a valley that gets flooded every year, it would be very hard for me to find an insurance company to insure me against flooding. But I'm sure I'd be able to find someone to insure me against fire. Just because I have a genetic disease doesn't mean insurance companies can't extract money from me, insuring against other illnesses and excludinig the specific disease.
But even this is quite extreme. If the valley only gets flooded once a decade, I might still find someone to insure me against fire, floods and hail - I might have to pay a higher premium, but as a package the insurance company might still get more out of me than I get out of them (and who knows, just because the valley gets flooded doesn't mean my house has to be rebuilt every time from scratch).
It would be very silly for an insurance company to genetically test babies and decide they cannot get any medical insurance just because they have a genetic disease that affects 60+ year old people. Silly in the sense that they can get money out of this baby, and s/he could still die from a heart attack at 49.
Of course, some people might find themselves completely uninsurable (this also happens today). I'm not saying I'd be happy with insurance companies knowing every last detail about everybody (I wouldn't be happy with anyone knowing every last detail about me, including the government and probably my parents as well...), I'm just saying that the view is a bit extreme - if there's money to be made with a certain risk, some people will take the risk and make the money.
The point was about genetic testing - the "horror scenario" is that insurance companies would test you and find out if you have specific genetic properties that would make you an expensive case, and then refuse to insure you.
Insurance companies can't perform a DNA test that would tell them if you'll be involved in a car accident, so there is always risk (and reward) even for good drivers.
However, the scenario of 100% knowledge is absurd - if insurance companies could tell that you are going to have disease X then it's game over for them. If you have that genetic deficiency, they won't insure you (and see $0 from you) and if you don't have it, you won't insure yourself (and they'll see $0 from you). Now why would they want to do that?
Of course, I don't think we'll get to 100% knowledge, there will always be some risk and reward for the insurance comany. But my point is that if insurance companies only insure the people that will not need this insurance, they will see their profits going down.
Would you buy life insurance that's only valid for 6 months? Probably not. If you did, they wouldn't want to sell it, because it meant you knew something they didn't. In theory, that's the best situation for insurance companies - they'll insure only those who don't need this insurance. In practice, nobody would buy it because people aren't totally stupid.
General medical insurance is different, because "you never know what's going to happen". But with genetic testing pinpointing specific diseases and refusing insurance, we're back to insuring only those who don't need the insurance, a situation that doesn't happen in real life.
Let's say insurance companies only chose the healthy ones, or rather made it cheaper for healthy (genetically speaking) people to get insurance and a lot more expensive for genetically "ill" people.
The immediate result is that 80% of the genetically ill people can't afford the insurance, and 80% of the genetically healthy people decide not to buy insurance (after all, they've done the test and they know they're in a low-risk group).
Net result: insurance company loses.
I thought this was the way it worked in general, which is why insurance companies would only go so far in separating people into groups and charging according to cost to the insurer.
Some guy somewhere (I say 'guy' because women write perfect code) sat down and wrote this function.
Now, I don't know the guy, but I'm assuming that he was trying a few values and checking that they make sense.
The *same* guy, with TDD, would have written exactly the same tests before he coded the function - a few random values just to see that they make sense. TDD wouldn't have transformed him into something he isn't.
The point is, if he could have written tests that go through all the edge cases, or tested every day from 1980 to 2500, he would have done it with his code, whether before or after writing the function. He didn't, because he couldn't (not saying he's stupid or anything like that - in most cases it's a combination of over-confidence, lack of time and pressure from your boss).
TDD doesn't make you better. If you can think of all the edge cases, and if it's important enough, you'll write the test either before or after the function and find your bugs. If testing a few cases is enough for you, you wouldn't write better tests just because you write them before you write the function and you make sure they fail first.
Maybe the reason TDD works for so many people is that by acknowledging they don't know everything, being willing to try a new thing, they simply mature and stop thinking that every line of code they write is gold. Maybe TDD makes you more humble and more mature. But it's not the only way.
If you don't care about what you write (and no one above you cares, so code reviews are a waste of time and quality assurance is cost) then TDD is not going to change that. The assumption that just because you write the test before you write the function somehow you'll start to care is simply wrong.
Testing edge cases is not a new thing. Thinking about every 'if' in the code and how to test it is not new either. Making a test fail first and then pass is not some magic - you still have to think about what you do, and most importantly - you still have to care about what you do.
That sentence had a first part as well, something about thinking that you're helping the environment. I'm not aware of any company making such claims about incandescent light bulbs.
I'm not sure the issue is porn sites. I though it was more about racism, violence etc. These sort of sites would like to spread the word as far as possible, and will not self-label themselves.
Voluntary systems only work when people have something to gain from the system. Otherwise they just don't care (and why should they?)
The new proposal is once again voluntary. It will work for "good" sites that want to be seen as legitimate (from children's sites to porn sites).
It will not work for gang sites that put the latest stabbing and beating videos online - they don't care about the law and they're not going to state that they should only be viewed by 18 year olds or over (especially when the gang itself consists of 14-17 year olds).
If you had a site that required a "Not to be seen by anyone" rating, would you voluntarily use it?
The problem with self-labeling is that the good guys suffer and the bad guys don't care. That's why systems like that don't work.
How about a rating system for hotels, where each hotel manager decides what the star rating is? Some would declare themselves 3 stars (compromise between price and features), but how many people would put one star on their own hotels?
Also, IE might support it, but I'm sure you could find (or find someone to write) a browser that ignores these ratings. So the standard user would lose the value "penis" in wikipedia, but power users would get snuff films without a problem.
Having a system doesn't mean that it works (or makes sense).
Just think how much time you could have saved if you didn't have to constantly switch modes in your editor and instead used your fingers simultaneously...
Sounds like the company was destroyed by stupidity. I wouldn't blame coding standards...
I have worked in a few companies (most weren't very successful). Although the code was never perfect, the problems were always elsewhere.
It takes a very special company to be destroyed by bad technology alone (i.e. everything else, including the people, is perfect). It takes an even more special company to be destroyed by "important" stuff like braces, variable names or even the odd goto here and there. In most cases it's the over-promising, panic-mode-all-the-time, bad budgeting, bad communication and general stupidity that destroys companies.
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I thought emacs was a gaming platform, at least that's what I use it for (mmmm... dunnet...)
For writing code I actually use Word. Syntax highlighting sucks, but using word-art for comments is really good.
Are you talking about this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSSIL
Not exactly true. Artists such as Ian Anderson and Cliff Richard wanted to extend copyright to 95 years in the UK.
I stopped listening to Jethro Tull when I heard Ian Anderson talk about copyright. I have quite a few albums, but I feel sick whenever I think of this millionaire crying how he's being robbed, not by pirates, but by copyright laws.
I'm happy he's made a lot of money from his talent (better than making money by fraudulent banking), but trying to extend his copyright while stealing Bach's Bourree in E minor is a bit hypocritical (and I'm sure that wasn't the only piece for which he needed some "inspiration", just like any other artist - be it a writer, a poet, a painter or a composer).
Ask Inky, Pinky and Blinky.
Yes, like philology is the study of love.
Despite the original meaning, some words get new meanings with time, even if it's very annoying to those who understand the original meaning.
You can correct people about methodology, but it's a lost cause.
Now back to my book about object orientated methodologies.
So you've heard of my invention then?
I speak into a machine that has 15,000 sensors that measure the air speed at each point in a three-dimensional cube. It then converts my speech into a complex symbolic description which is passed by e-mail to another machine. The other machine then converts it into movements of synthetic diaphragm, lung, throat, tongue, teeth and lips (it cost me $1,500,000 to build this unique machine).
The result is a near-perfect replica of my voice. This allows me to send my voice remotely, and to actually have conversions with people in other places (well, it's unidirectional at this point, but the other direction can be implemented by phone... oh, wait...)
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in a rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."
I'm not sure real fire fighters like this analogy...
"Of course we follow procedures when we fight fires. Of course it's all documented. Of course we have to prepare a full report about what happened any why it happened. Of course we train other people. Of course we're nice and helpful to anyone we meet, just because we're fire fighters doesn't mean that we're arrogant bastards."
Whenever I hear of someone who's a brilliant bully, I think to myself "I bet there's someone even more brilliant who's also nice to work with".
I've only met one genius (so far), and he was a very nice person. I've also met many bullies. There's no excuse to being a bully, regardless of quantity or quality of code (or amount of money made or saved). If you're that brilliant then surely you can learn how to be a human being.
Sounds like a movie to me... maybe the sequel to American Ninja?
We're here, we're squeer, get used to it.
I hire only lottery winners.
Oh, wait...
Yes, with the first word usually being "IANAL" and the second one being "but"...
I'm not sure it's that extreme, again coming from the point of view that insurance companies want to make money and people aren't stupid.
If I live in a valley that gets flooded every year, it would be very hard for me to find an insurance company to insure me against flooding. But I'm sure I'd be able to find someone to insure me against fire. Just because I have a genetic disease doesn't mean insurance companies can't extract money from me, insuring against other illnesses and excludinig the specific disease.
But even this is quite extreme. If the valley only gets flooded once a decade, I might still find someone to insure me against fire, floods and hail - I might have to pay a higher premium, but as a package the insurance company might still get more out of me than I get out of them (and who knows, just because the valley gets flooded doesn't mean my house has to be rebuilt every time from scratch).
It would be very silly for an insurance company to genetically test babies and decide they cannot get any medical insurance just because they have a genetic disease that affects 60+ year old people. Silly in the sense that they can get money out of this baby, and s/he could still die from a heart attack at 49.
Of course, some people might find themselves completely uninsurable (this also happens today). I'm not saying I'd be happy with insurance companies knowing every last detail about everybody (I wouldn't be happy with anyone knowing every last detail about me, including the government and probably my parents as well...), I'm just saying that the view is a bit extreme - if there's money to be made with a certain risk, some people will take the risk and make the money.
The point was about genetic testing - the "horror scenario" is that insurance companies would test you and find out if you have specific genetic properties that would make you an expensive case, and then refuse to insure you.
Insurance companies can't perform a DNA test that would tell them if you'll be involved in a car accident, so there is always risk (and reward) even for good drivers.
However, the scenario of 100% knowledge is absurd - if insurance companies could tell that you are going to have disease X then it's game over for them. If you have that genetic deficiency, they won't insure you (and see $0 from you) and if you don't have it, you won't insure yourself (and they'll see $0 from you). Now why would they want to do that?
Of course, I don't think we'll get to 100% knowledge, there will always be some risk and reward for the insurance comany. But my point is that if insurance companies only insure the people that will not need this insurance, they will see their profits going down.
Would you buy life insurance that's only valid for 6 months? Probably not. If you did, they wouldn't want to sell it, because it meant you knew something they didn't. In theory, that's the best situation for insurance companies - they'll insure only those who don't need this insurance. In practice, nobody would buy it because people aren't totally stupid.
General medical insurance is different, because "you never know what's going to happen". But with genetic testing pinpointing specific diseases and refusing insurance, we're back to insuring only those who don't need the insurance, a situation that doesn't happen in real life.
Let's say insurance companies only chose the healthy ones, or rather made it cheaper for healthy (genetically speaking) people to get insurance and a lot more expensive for genetically "ill" people.
The immediate result is that 80% of the genetically ill people can't afford the insurance, and 80% of the genetically healthy people decide not to buy insurance (after all, they've done the test and they know they're in a low-risk group).
Net result: insurance company loses.
I thought this was the way it worked in general, which is why insurance companies would only go so far in separating people into groups and charging according to cost to the insurer.
Some guy somewhere (I say 'guy' because women write perfect code) sat down and wrote this function.
Now, I don't know the guy, but I'm assuming that he was trying a few values and checking that they make sense.
The *same* guy, with TDD, would have written exactly the same tests before he coded the function - a few random values just to see that they make sense. TDD wouldn't have transformed him into something he isn't.
The point is, if he could have written tests that go through all the edge cases, or tested every day from 1980 to 2500, he would have done it with his code, whether before or after writing the function. He didn't, because he couldn't (not saying he's stupid or anything like that - in most cases it's a combination of over-confidence, lack of time and pressure from your boss).
TDD doesn't make you better. If you can think of all the edge cases, and if it's important enough, you'll write the test either before or after the function and find your bugs. If testing a few cases is enough for you, you wouldn't write better tests just because you write them before you write the function and you make sure they fail first.
Maybe the reason TDD works for so many people is that by acknowledging they don't know everything, being willing to try a new thing, they simply mature and stop thinking that every line of code they write is gold. Maybe TDD makes you more humble and more mature. But it's not the only way.
If you don't care about what you write (and no one above you cares, so code reviews are a waste of time and quality assurance is cost) then TDD is not going to change that. The assumption that just because you write the test before you write the function somehow you'll start to care is simply wrong.
Testing edge cases is not a new thing. Thinking about every 'if' in the code and how to test it is not new either. Making a test fail first and then pass is not some magic - you still have to think about what you do, and most importantly - you still have to care about what you do.
That sentence had a first part as well, something about thinking that you're helping the environment. I'm not aware of any company making such claims about incandescent light bulbs.
I'm not sure the issue is porn sites. I though it was more about racism, violence etc. These sort of sites would like to spread the word as far as possible, and will not self-label themselves.
Voluntary systems only work when people have something to gain from the system. Otherwise they just don't care (and why should they?)
The new proposal is once again voluntary. It will work for "good" sites that want to be seen as legitimate (from children's sites to porn sites).
It will not work for gang sites that put the latest stabbing and beating videos online - they don't care about the law and they're not going to state that they should only be viewed by 18 year olds or over (especially when the gang itself consists of 14-17 year olds).
If you had a site that required a "Not to be seen by anyone" rating, would you voluntarily use it?
The problem with self-labeling is that the good guys suffer and the bad guys don't care. That's why systems like that don't work.
How about a rating system for hotels, where each hotel manager decides what the star rating is? Some would declare themselves 3 stars (compromise between price and features), but how many people would put one star on their own hotels?
Also, IE might support it, but I'm sure you could find (or find someone to write) a browser that ignores these ratings. So the standard user would lose the value "penis" in wikipedia, but power users would get snuff films without a problem.
Having a system doesn't mean that it works (or makes sense).
Just think how much time you could have saved if you didn't have to constantly switch modes in your editor and instead used your fingers simultaneously...
As long as it ends with QED, I believe it!
Something like the Tiny C Compiler (and libtcc which allows you to compile C on the fly)?
http://bellard.org/tcc/
Sounds like the company was destroyed by stupidity. I wouldn't blame coding standards...
I have worked in a few companies (most weren't very successful). Although the code was never perfect, the problems were always elsewhere.
It takes a very special company to be destroyed by bad technology alone (i.e. everything else, including the people, is perfect). It takes an even more special company to be destroyed by "important" stuff like braces, variable names or even the odd goto here and there. In most cases it's the over-promising, panic-mode-all-the-time, bad budgeting, bad communication and general stupidity that destroys companies.
Ah.... Shadow warrior...
But I never understood "Ancient Chinese Cigarette"...