Actually, on most days, I am a successful businessperson. My clients get their money, and their clients don't get their knees busted.:)
Seriously, I've done consulting and development freelance in the past, and hope to get back to that someday, but for now I do software development for a megacorp. It's not exciting, but it pays the bills.
To make this work, in addition to an NDA, you would need to make the source for each customer just a little bit different. Then, if it turns up elsewhere, you know, and can prove in court if necessary, where it came from.
Having said that, I still think that the "sell disks with ones and zeroes on it" model is flawed. In my long experience, most custom software should be a thin layer of Open Source glue around Open Source components, distributed under an approrpriate and most likely Open Source license, but working in conjunction with proprietary, customer-specific data that describes and implements each customer's or client's specific business logic and rules. It then doesn't matter if someone "steals" the source - it's open anyway. It just won't be very useful to anyone without your unique ability to add the necessary business logic to tailor it to a specific customer's needs. Smaller and mid-size organizations won't have that expertise, and bigger ones will have legal and compliance departments with a strong bias toward paying for "officially" supported software, rather than "borrowing" your code even though, being Open Source, it is perfectly legal to do so. And your clients, regardless of size, will have absolutely no reason or incentive to give away the business logic data - indeed they have a very strong incentive not to, since that would be giving away any possible competitive advantage that your software otherwise might give them.
. . . deadlocks are going to be your enemies. Especially deadlocks.
An easily vanquished enemy. Just log into Visual Haircut 2005 at least once a month or two, and don't forget to run the Help Me Stop Smoking Ganjj wizard as needed.
OK, I'll feed the parent poster and hope he's not a troll.:)
I will concede that.NET is a great improvement over previous Microsoft development tools, and probably the best way to write rich-client Windows applications. The new 2.0 framework and VS.NET 2005 are quite improved over even their immediate predecessors.
Having said this, however, using the.NET still locks you into the Microsoft platform and Microsoft's development methodologies, both of which change constantly. As these change, perfectly good code becomes obsolete, begins to conflict with newer versions of the OS, browser, system DLLs, and so forth.
Also, what is popularly called "AJAX," while overhyped, really can eliminate much of the need to have rich-client applications in the first place, by eliminating most of the obnoxious limitations of static HTML forms while preserving the benefits of simple, cross-platform deployment.
And I'm still far from convinced that.NET is truly competitive with Java or the various Open Source (LAMP) application stacks for building software other than rich clients. In my view, it trades somewhat shorter initial development time for higher long-term lifecycle costs.
So I can't really see.NET escaping very far outside its current niche. It's big, and is going to stay big, in the shops that have historically been all-Microsoft for whatever reason. It's a huge win over the older Microsoft tools. But for app servers, middle-tier components, Web apps, etc., I don't see it gaining much ground over Java and/or open-source platforms.
I recommend that.NET apps, like any other apps, be partitioned into separate, reasonably self-contained logical layers for data, logic, and presentation, communicating if possible via XML over HTTP(s). This allows each component to be maintained, upgraded, and possibly moved to another technology if necessary or desirable for whatever reason, independently of the others. I avoid rich clients when possible, although sometimes of course it isn't. I keep dependencies on any specific platform (Windows, or any other) to an absolute minimum. As time goes on I find the need for them less and less frequently.
By "long term" I mean a person's lifetime, and his children's, not 10 years. I should have made that more clear.
BTW: do your mutual funds consistently return more, in nominal dollar terms, than the dollar's value falls (against whatever other currency or commodity that you consider valuable)?
Gold historically holds its value well over long periods of time, while paper currencies do not.
The dollar has been better than most, but even it has lost something like 95% of its value since 1913, and it is grossly overvalued right now.
Most people with a positive net worth should own some gold, as a hedge against the continuing erosion of the dollar. (Real estate used to be valuable for that purpose as well, and may still be in non-boom areas, but it is way overpriced near the coasts.)
On the other hand, if you have debts, other than a mortgage backed by significant equity, then, barring a total currency collapse, you are likely better off paying off these debts first. Paydown of debt is the closest thing there is to a guaranteed-return investment. It amazes me how many people don't know this, and brag about 9% returns on their mutual funds while paying 20% on credit card debt.
I think that's so but in a very roundabout way . . . the war clearly and predictably resulted in loss of short-term production, and the upcoming Iran war will even more so; but, if the Empire can manage to build bases in the region, that will help it control access to oil to some of its potential rivals over the next century (China, Russia, India, possibly the EU).
So there is a long-term benefit to the Empire, but one paid for by the loss of countless innocent lives. That in my mind makes it completely unjustifiable. But, besides that, it also means these nations will be forced to choose between imperial control of resources they desperately need for their own continued survival, or war - and probably the first large-scale war since WW2 - in order to attempt to liberate them.
It's depleted uranium. What long term effects? If you're really worried about DU, how about getting the non-depleted uranium out of our Coal smokestacks?
That's pretty nasty garbage too, but really not comparable. Besides, one wrong cannot justify another.
I strongly believe that the true case for war was to keep the petrodollar in power
I agree, although a side "benefit" would have been bases from which to promote continued instability in the Balkans and central Asia, regions where instability is frankly a benefit to the Empire because it potentially disrupts the supply of oil between major producers and potential future foes of the Empire.
And the Empire is not just the US, although the US has been chosen, for its economic and military strength, to do most of its "dirty work."
But all that having been said . . . why does the current strategy continue when it is so obviously doomed to fail? The supremacy of the dollar was based solely on the strength of the U.S. economy, which is now widely known to have the appearance of strength only because of the apparent strength of the dollar. No one of course wants to be the last ones holding dollars, but everyone knows that the collapse is only a matter of time, and probably a short time at that.
War is almost always a hoax, and war other than in self-defense always is.
The only just reason for war is because the alternative would be even worse - that by not going to war we would have doomed even more people to slavery or death. That is almost never the case.
It clearly was not the case here, even if every allegation made against Hussein had been true, although most of them were not. The hypothetical murder of some relatively small number (hundreds or thousands) of people, via a terrorist attack Hussein had little reason and less ability to commit, would not justify the actual murder of hundreds of thousands or millions (keep in mind the long-term effects of depleted uranium, not just on Iraqis, but on US forces as well).
This war and the mindless support US citizens have given it will go down as one of the greatest crimes of modern history, and those who knowingly support it deserve at least as bad as what is coming to them, and probably worse.
But, as is almost always true of almost every war, the innocent - including those in the US - will suffer far, far more.
That of course is one of the many good reasons not to start one.
surely a simple defence to the above would be that the file named "Latest hit by $ARTIST" was in fact just random bits, and not the latest hit by that artist at all. The onus must remain on the prosecution to prove that it really was the material claimed, presumably by making that download.
How would one be able to distinguish between most modern "music" and random bits?
1. No one disputes the part of evolution that can be demonstrated to happen: natural selection. The tricky part is speciation from less complex to more complex forms. The evidence I'm aware of for this is circumstantial and/or circular in nature, which makes me skeptical, although I certainly am open to it should I become aware of any, and I would be willing to alter my views accordingly if I found it convincing.
2. Exposition of the facts, and attempts to interpret these facts, are absolutely fine by me, or anyone else who is intellectually honest. Even though I'm skeptical, I do understand that it is a highly useful theory, regardless of whether or not it turns out to be true.
3. However, to dogmatically insist on it being an "established fact of science," with minimal or no willingness to offer convincing evidence, strikes me as exactly the sort of irrational, childish, and non-self-assured behavior of which "fundies" are often accused.
4. Christianity as I understand it is in no way threatened by evolution. It is not difficult to reconcile Scripture with the geological and historical evidence available to date. There are many plausible arguments for the existence of a deity in general, and for the Judeo-Christian God in particular, that don't in any way depend on creation in any form, nor on a literal reading of Genesis, although I do hold to such a reading, because Jesus did.
5. NEITHER creation nor evolution fit the strict definition of science: the study of that which is observable and repeatable. Whatever happened over the last 4 billion years (or 6,000), you weren't there when most of it happened, and neither was I. Whatever the merits of either theory, or lack thereof, neither can be classified as "scientific" nor "unscientific;" they are outside the bounds of science as properly defined, although many scientific techniques can be used to discover and attempt to explain evidence that would support one theory or another.
6. Mandatory disclaimer: I would consider myself a student of Christianity. I would only very reluctantly call myself a Christian, as, in the most proper sense of that term, I definitely am not (although I hope to be someday). I do hold a high view of Scripture. But I do not profess to understand or follow it very well.
Re:Get the basic premise right, first
on
Ruby Off the Rails
·
· Score: 1
Aside from the common and seemingly unavoidable tasks of generating HTML and SQL, why would one need to generate code in a high-level, multiparadigm language? I've seen very few instances of this need that didn't result from either a weakness in the language or toolset (*cough* old-style VB) or a design issue. It's the job of the toolset to allow you to express business logic in a clear, readable, and maintainable way. It's the job of the developer to do so. And frankly I have to agree that usually the tools do a better job of allowing expressive code than average developers do to actually write it.
Re:Loving complexity for complexity's sake
on
Ruby Off the Rails
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Only crappy developers. The better ones understand that software development (not just coding, but analysis, architecture, and design) is actually a process of documenting, managing, and reducing complexity, to the greatest extent possible.
The Macedonian language uses the phonetic Cyrillic alphabet. Every letter has its own consistent sound and every sound has (more or less, discounting unstressed vowels and voiced/unvoiced consonants in certain places) its own letter.
Vegan diet alone won't keep you from getting fat. I'm an overweight vegan. I can't digest most fats or animal products, but I definitely get my share of sugars, simple carbohydrates, etc., which can be just as bad.
Isn't that where fuel cells and metal hydrides come in? Fuel cells allow conversion of liquid fuel into electricity at high efficiency; metal hydrides show the promise of being able to store hydrogen in a safe and reasonably dense fashion.
The only real problem Java has is that there is no good Free JVM. But I expect that will change in the future.
I too expect it will change, but the JVM and class libraries are very tightly coupled, meaning one can't really be complete without the other. Thus, I strongly encourage anyone who can to support Free (as in Freedom) Java efforts like GCJ, Kaffe, Jikes, and probably most importantly GNU Classpath.
I guess I'm assuming that portability is an issue: Linux users aren't all on x86 platforms, and there are other free *n*xes besides LSB-compliant distributions of Linux. If you care about supporting anything other than x86 Linux, then releasing anything other than source ends up being a LOT of work.
Not to want to start a Gentoo flamefest here, but I'm impressed with how easy it is to work with Gentoo ebuilds (and *BSD ports). You really end up not having to do much packaging at all: the scripts are smart enough to do virtually all of the work for you, at the price of having to spend a little time compiling. I wish it were possible to retrofit RPM- or.deb-based systems with something like this, not to replace RPM or apt necessarily, but to augment it - to provide a nice way to compile and install software from source even if it is not already "packaged" in the traditional sense. From the little bit I've seen of autopackage, it looks like it may fit the bill.
Your point that some business domains may benefit from a highly standardized language is well-taken, but unfortunately most dynamically typed, very-high-level languages are not ANSI/ISO standards. Nonetheless they are highly useful for getting things done that you just can't do as quickly (or reliably) in C or C++, unless you're a much better coder than most people tend to be. And even if the final production version needs to be C++ or Ada or whatever, you still can prototype in a higher-level language, tweak until ready, then rewrite in that standard language with the benefit of a working and highly flexible prototype.
I'm certainly not saying that packaging is an insurmountable problem, or that there aren't similar problems releasing for Windows; it's not, and there are. But the issues do exist and are a little bit different. Much like Linux itself: better than Windows in many ways; possibly worse in a few others; but definitely different.
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Actually, on most days, I am a successful businessperson. My clients get their money, and their clients don't get their knees busted. :)
Seriously, I've done consulting and development freelance in the past, and hope to get back to that someday, but for now I do software development for a megacorp. It's not exciting, but it pays the bills.
To make this work, in addition to an NDA, you would need to make the source for each customer just a little bit different. Then, if it turns up elsewhere, you know, and can prove in court if necessary, where it came from.
Having said that, I still think that the "sell disks with ones and zeroes on it" model is flawed. In my long experience, most custom software should be a thin layer of Open Source glue around Open Source components, distributed under an approrpriate and most likely Open Source license, but working in conjunction with proprietary, customer-specific data that describes and implements each customer's or client's specific business logic and rules. It then doesn't matter if someone "steals" the source - it's open anyway. It just won't be very useful to anyone without your unique ability to add the necessary business logic to tailor it to a specific customer's needs. Smaller and mid-size organizations won't have that expertise, and bigger ones will have legal and compliance departments with a strong bias toward paying for "officially" supported software, rather than "borrowing" your code even though, being Open Source, it is perfectly legal to do so. And your clients, regardless of size, will have absolutely no reason or incentive to give away the business logic data - indeed they have a very strong incentive not to, since that would be giving away any possible competitive advantage that your software otherwise might give them.
. . . deadlocks are going to be your enemies. Especially deadlocks.
An easily vanquished enemy. Just log into Visual Haircut 2005 at least once a month or two, and don't forget to run the Help Me Stop Smoking Ganjj wizard as needed.
OK, I'll feed the parent poster and hope he's not a troll. :)
I will concede that .NET is a great improvement over previous Microsoft development tools, and probably the best way to write rich-client Windows applications. The new 2.0 framework and VS.NET 2005 are quite improved over even their immediate predecessors.
Having said this, however, using the .NET still locks you into the Microsoft platform and Microsoft's development methodologies, both of which change constantly. As these change, perfectly good code becomes obsolete, begins to conflict with newer versions of the OS, browser, system DLLs, and so forth.
Also, what is popularly called "AJAX," while overhyped, really can eliminate much of the need to have rich-client applications in the first place, by eliminating most of the obnoxious limitations of static HTML forms while preserving the benefits of simple, cross-platform deployment.
And I'm still far from convinced that .NET is truly competitive with Java or the various Open Source (LAMP) application stacks for building software other than rich clients. In my view, it trades somewhat shorter initial development time for higher long-term lifecycle costs.
So I can't really see .NET escaping very far outside its current niche. It's big, and is going to stay big, in the shops that have historically been all-Microsoft for whatever reason. It's a huge win over the older Microsoft tools. But for app servers, middle-tier components, Web apps, etc., I don't see it gaining much ground over Java and/or open-source platforms.
I recommend that .NET apps, like any other apps, be partitioned into separate, reasonably self-contained logical layers for data, logic, and presentation, communicating if possible via XML over HTTP(s). This allows each component to be maintained, upgraded, and possibly moved to another technology if necessary or desirable for whatever reason, independently of the others. I avoid rich clients when possible, although sometimes of course it isn't. I keep dependencies on any specific platform (Windows, or any other) to an absolute minimum. As time goes on I find the need for them less and less frequently.
By "long term" I mean a person's lifetime, and his children's, not 10 years. I should have made that more clear.
BTW: do your mutual funds consistently return more, in nominal dollar terms, than the dollar's value falls (against whatever other currency or commodity that you consider valuable)?
Not if people were deliberately enslaved or killed in order to build them.
Gold historically holds its value well over long periods of time, while paper currencies do not.
The dollar has been better than most, but even it has lost something like 95% of its value since 1913, and it is grossly overvalued right now.
Most people with a positive net worth should own some gold, as a hedge against the continuing erosion of the dollar. (Real estate used to be valuable for that purpose as well, and may still be in non-boom areas, but it is way overpriced near the coasts.)
On the other hand, if you have debts, other than a mortgage backed by significant equity, then, barring a total currency collapse, you are likely better off paying off these debts first. Paydown of debt is the closest thing there is to a guaranteed-return investment. It amazes me how many people don't know this, and brag about 9% returns on their mutual funds while paying 20% on credit card debt.
It was all about oil (for long term goals)
I think that's so but in a very roundabout way . . . the war clearly and predictably resulted in loss of short-term production, and the upcoming Iran war will even more so; but, if the Empire can manage to build bases in the region, that will help it control access to oil to some of its potential rivals over the next century (China, Russia, India, possibly the EU).
So there is a long-term benefit to the Empire, but one paid for by the loss of countless innocent lives. That in my mind makes it completely unjustifiable. But, besides that, it also means these nations will be forced to choose between imperial control of resources they desperately need for their own continued survival, or war - and probably the first large-scale war since WW2 - in order to attempt to liberate them.
There are tough times ahead.
I do not watch broadcast or cable TV.
Unfortunately most of my family, friends, cow-orkers, etc. do, and most of them are as blindly pro-war as Bush himself.
It's depleted uranium. What long term effects? If you're really worried about DU, how about getting the non-depleted uranium out of our Coal smokestacks?
That's pretty nasty garbage too, but really not comparable. Besides, one wrong cannot justify another.
I strongly believe that the true case for war was to keep the petrodollar in power
I agree, although a side "benefit" would have been bases from which to promote continued instability in the Balkans and central Asia, regions where instability is frankly a benefit to the Empire because it potentially disrupts the supply of oil between major producers and potential future foes of the Empire.
And the Empire is not just the US, although the US has been chosen, for its economic and military strength, to do most of its "dirty work."
But all that having been said . . . why does the current strategy continue when it is so obviously doomed to fail? The supremacy of the dollar was based solely on the strength of the U.S. economy, which is now widely known to have the appearance of strength only because of the apparent strength of the dollar. No one of course wants to be the last ones holding dollars, but everyone knows that the collapse is only a matter of time, and probably a short time at that.
War is almost always a hoax, and war other than in self-defense always is.
The only just reason for war is because the alternative would be even worse - that by not going to war we would have doomed even more people to slavery or death. That is almost never the case.
It clearly was not the case here, even if every allegation made against Hussein had been true, although most of them were not. The hypothetical murder of some relatively small number (hundreds or thousands) of people, via a terrorist attack Hussein had little reason and less ability to commit, would not justify the actual murder of hundreds of thousands or millions (keep in mind the long-term effects of depleted uranium, not just on Iraqis, but on US forces as well).
This war and the mindless support US citizens have given it will go down as one of the greatest crimes of modern history, and those who knowingly support it deserve at least as bad as what is coming to them, and probably worse.
But, as is almost always true of almost every war, the innocent - including those in the US - will suffer far, far more.
That of course is one of the many good reasons not to start one.
surely a simple defence to the above would be that the file named "Latest hit by $ARTIST" was in fact just random bits, and not the latest hit by that artist at all. The onus must remain on the prosecution to prove that it really was the material claimed, presumably by making that download.
How would one be able to distinguish between most modern "music" and random bits?
Before you know if the internet contains only zombie machines and linux/macs.
And how is that different than now??1. No one disputes the part of evolution that can be demonstrated to happen: natural selection. The tricky part is speciation from less complex to more complex forms. The evidence I'm aware of for this is circumstantial and/or circular in nature, which makes me skeptical, although I certainly am open to it should I become aware of any, and I would be willing to alter my views accordingly if I found it convincing.
2. Exposition of the facts, and attempts to interpret these facts, are absolutely fine by me, or anyone else who is intellectually honest. Even though I'm skeptical, I do understand that it is a highly useful theory, regardless of whether or not it turns out to be true.
3. However, to dogmatically insist on it being an "established fact of science," with minimal or no willingness to offer convincing evidence, strikes me as exactly the sort of irrational, childish, and non-self-assured behavior of which "fundies" are often accused.
4. Christianity as I understand it is in no way threatened by evolution. It is not difficult to reconcile Scripture with the geological and historical evidence available to date. There are many plausible arguments for the existence of a deity in general, and for the Judeo-Christian God in particular, that don't in any way depend on creation in any form, nor on a literal reading of Genesis, although I do hold to such a reading, because Jesus did.
5. NEITHER creation nor evolution fit the strict definition of science: the study of that which is observable and repeatable. Whatever happened over the last 4 billion years (or 6,000), you weren't there when most of it happened, and neither was I. Whatever the merits of either theory, or lack thereof, neither can be classified as "scientific" nor "unscientific;" they are outside the bounds of science as properly defined, although many scientific techniques can be used to discover and attempt to explain evidence that would support one theory or another.
6. Mandatory disclaimer: I would consider myself a student of Christianity. I would only very reluctantly call myself a Christian, as, in the most proper sense of that term, I definitely am not (although I hope to be someday). I do hold a high view of Scripture. But I do not profess to understand or follow it very well.
Aside from the common and seemingly unavoidable tasks of generating HTML and SQL, why would one need to generate code in a high-level, multiparadigm language? I've seen very few instances of this need that didn't result from either a weakness in the language or toolset (*cough* old-style VB) or a design issue. It's the job of the toolset to allow you to express business logic in a clear, readable, and maintainable way. It's the job of the developer to do so. And frankly I have to agree that usually the tools do a better job of allowing expressive code than average developers do to actually write it.
Only crappy developers. The better ones understand that software development (not just coding, but analysis, architecture, and design) is actually a process of documenting, managing, and reducing complexity, to the greatest extent possible.
Many if not most of your proposed solutions attempt to fight government aggression with more government aggression. That won't work.
See the link in my sig for a better solution.
The Macedonian language uses the phonetic Cyrillic alphabet. Every letter has its own consistent sound and every sound has (more or less, discounting unstressed vowels and voiced/unvoiced consonants in certain places) its own letter.
Vegan diet alone won't keep you from getting fat. I'm an overweight vegan. I can't digest most fats or animal products, but I definitely get my share of sugars, simple carbohydrates, etc., which can be just as bad.
Isn't that where fuel cells and metal hydrides come in? Fuel cells allow conversion of liquid fuel into electricity at high efficiency; metal hydrides show the promise of being able to store hydrogen in a safe and reasonably dense fashion.
Crap. Competition.
How do you get interoperability without reverse-engineering?
The only real problem Java has is that there is no good Free JVM. But I expect that will change in the future.
I too expect it will change, but the JVM and class libraries are very tightly coupled, meaning one can't really be complete without the other. Thus, I strongly encourage anyone who can to support Free (as in Freedom) Java efforts like GCJ, Kaffe, Jikes, and probably most importantly GNU Classpath.
I guess I'm assuming that portability is an issue: Linux users aren't all on x86 platforms, and there are other free *n*xes besides LSB-compliant distributions of Linux. If you care about supporting anything other than x86 Linux, then releasing anything other than source ends up being a LOT of work.
Not to want to start a Gentoo flamefest here, but I'm impressed with how easy it is to work with Gentoo ebuilds (and *BSD ports). You really end up not having to do much packaging at all: the scripts are smart enough to do virtually all of the work for you, at the price of having to spend a little time compiling. I wish it were possible to retrofit RPM- or .deb-based systems with something like this, not to replace RPM or apt necessarily, but to augment it - to provide a nice way to compile and install software from source even if it is not already "packaged" in the traditional sense. From the little bit I've seen of autopackage, it looks like it may fit the bill.
Your point that some business domains may benefit from a highly standardized language is well-taken, but unfortunately most dynamically typed, very-high-level languages are not ANSI/ISO standards. Nonetheless they are highly useful for getting things done that you just can't do as quickly (or reliably) in C or C++, unless you're a much better coder than most people tend to be. And even if the final production version needs to be C++ or Ada or whatever, you still can prototype in a higher-level language, tweak until ready, then rewrite in that standard language with the benefit of a working and highly flexible prototype.
I'm certainly not saying that packaging is an insurmountable problem, or that there aren't similar problems releasing for Windows; it's not, and there are. But the issues do exist and are a little bit different. Much like Linux itself: better than Windows in many ways; possibly worse in a few others; but definitely different.