This is so true. I speak from personal experience.
A few years ago, I was developing a research application to explore ancient documents. It had to be really flexible, as the data kept changing, so I made this whizzy configurable system, which was worth it.
But the interface... the target users were medieval historians. To say they weren't technically literate would be an understatement. After much resistance on my part to sacrificing my super configurable interface, I dumbed the whole thing down, and immediately lost about 90% of the true power of the system, although the engine was still there underneath, waiting to be used.
But the users loved it. Real work was done. Reviews praised it's ease of use. Now we're working on version 2, and I can now see ways of exposing a lot of this power to the rarer advanced users without *in any way* burdening the non technical user.
Make it configurable and powerful, but always choose sensible defaults (for the novice user). It's a myth that people want choice as a desirable thing in itself (geeks aside). They put up with choice when circumstance forces them to make a decision.
The only time people really want choice is when they aren't being satisfied by what's in front of them...
Interesting points. Although, in some ways, we are still operating in a patronage system. The big record labels give money to musicians to record their works, in return for control over the product.
They then sell and market the CDs, protected by copyright. The artists gets a little of this money back (minus costs, hidden costs, small print costs...), but it's the labels that make the real money by controlling the copy and distribution of the work.
So yes, copyright does appear to have more relevance to the publisher than the musician, who still needs the patronage of the labels to earn a living...
I agree - let's not return to direct patronage. But existing copyright law is not necessarily the right way either.
It made sense in a world dominated by the economics of scarcity, as a way to achieve a balance between ideas being placed in the public domain and the need to incentivise the creators, by granting a limited monopoly to them.
We need new ideas in a world where copying and distribution is as near to free as it can be - it's no longer a good point of control to achieve the aim of incentivising the creation of culture.
More draconian legislation and increasingly invasive technology is not the right way to achieve this balance, for the public good.
I am pointing out that it is not the same thing as theft, and that the difference is founded in the context of the activity.
It's not just semantics. Your attempt to label two fundamentally different activities as the same thing is ill advised. The law doesn't see it this way, nor do most people in the world.
We will not move forward in this debate until the hysteria is removed. The battle over ownership of intellectual property and digital culture is tremendously important and deserves careful thought.
I really urge you to have a look at Lawrence Lessig's book (see my other post on copyright and culture).
"You know that if everyone acted as you do, then nothing new and creative would be created anymore"
Amazing. That must be why humans spent so long mucking about in caves. They had to invent copyright law first, so they could get on with inventing and creating our culture.
It's important to realise that copyright is not an obvious thing, that it has a very interesting history, and culture and invention predate it by, well, most of human history.
Have a look at the free, online book by Lawrence Lessig, "Free Culture". A very interesting read:
Murder, manslaughter... I mean, it's all killing people. And its definitely wrong. So they must be the same thing, right?
Let's all be thankful that the law sees fit to distinguish between things that have different ethical dimensions, even if you don't.
I was laid off last year, along with all my development team in the UK, and I was given the dubious honor of not only training our Pakistani replacements, but coordinating the whole training program.
Unlike the original visionaries who drove the original development, our new management were pure short termists. They didn't listen when we told them that the development practices they were adopting would come back to bite them. Over the preceding year, purely as a result of a management drive to win each new customer by agreeing to anything they wanted, the system had become kludged to hell - by now we were scared of parts of it, and we wrote it. Guess how much good quality documentation existed?
Three people were sent over to London to learn all they could about the system we'd spent 3 years creating. I felt sorry for these three guys, so far from their families, struggling to understand something they had no realistic hope of ever getting to grips with. My job was toast anyway - the writing had been on the wall. We were courteous and friendly to them. We tried to help them understand the system. They failed - it was inevitable. The company didn't allocate very much time for the transfer either - it would have cost too much to keep us much longer, apparently.
I'm now in a much more interesting and visionary organisation, from where I've had the bittersweet pleasure of watching that company slowly die. Don't blame your replacements - they're normally nice and intelligent people, who'll normally feel quite bad about the situation too.
Any system complex and interesting enough to be worthy of your time is going to be very hard, if not impossible, to transfer working knowledge to a completely new bunch of people all in one go.
Especially if your management is already in the mindset of cost cutting at all costs.
You make a valid point about the difference between design and programming, but I'm still inclined to stick with my point;)
Few designs are going to specify every class and interface required. If you're an OO programmer, you will use OO constructs in realising a design. If you're a procedural programmer you'll use procedural constructs. In my book, this doesn't make you an OO programmer - just a programmer using an OO language. But we're arguing semantics here.
You're right that the main discussion is really about putting Java on your CV. It's on mine, and while I can read the code, I couldn't write it in an interview situation. I have years of experience specifying systems written in Java and J2EE, as well as in many other systems and languages.
I think part of the confusion is because Sun named both the platform and the language Java. I know the platform - but I can't code the language without a reference manual sitting by me.
I think you need to examine your logic a bit here.
Just using an OO language to accomplish a task does not make you an OO programmer, even if the language or compiler imposes some OO onto your fundamentally non-OO code.
OO isn't about a language, or what a compiler does with the language. It's a way of deconstructing problems into objects and the way they interact. If you aren't doing that, you're not doing OO programming.
This will actually be a major problem for society and deserves serious consideration. Research in particular builds on prior research, not just recent research, but research which may have taken place 100 years ago or more.
It's implications go way beyond web pages, which are just one of the first manifestations of our electronic culture creating records that never touch paper, or other more established and permanent mediums.
Businesses typically only have to archive material for around 7 years legally, although some industries like pharaceuticals have to preserve data considerably longer. This is fine when records are primarly paper based, with some nice computers to speed our current business along. When records are totally electronic from start to end, ("born digital"), we start to have problems, legally and culturally. Some researches are talking about a digital dark ages, where many of our records today will simply vanish from history, totally inaccessible and unpreserved.
This is about storage, migration and emulation. It's about persistent identifiers. It's about technology obsolesence leading to cultural obsolesence.
Matt Palmer
Digital Preservation Department
UK National Archives.
Long term I agree with this position. To be useful, it can't just mean sending people up for a year or two; it has to mean actually living entirely independantly away from the earth - forever, if needs be.
It may take a while to achieve this, so I think we'd still keep an eye out for any nasties out there. In order to achieve it, we're going to need cheap, commercialised access to space. I don't see NASA or the ESA providing this.
To those people who say we should sort all our problems out at home before venturing into space, hands up all those who think we'll *ever* sort out all the problems on Earth...? Will we ever get to some kind of enlightened utopian position?
I hope so, but of course, there's a good chance we'll wipe ourselves out before that hunk of rock gets to in any case, so let's not keep all our eggs in one basket any longer than we have to.
It's not true to say we couldn't do anything. We are actively tracking near earth objects, and estimates I've heard say we currently know about a third to a half of them fairly accurately.
There are a number of proposals for dealing with objects on a collision course with earth. Mostly it depends on the nature of the object.
Fast spinning objects are likely to be a solid rock and could be deflected by explosions.
Slower spinning objects are far more likely to be rubble piles, and experiments show that rubble piles can't be deflected by explosion - the pile simply absorbs the blast.
Proposals to deal with these include solar mirrors on a following orbit to the object focussing the suns rays on a point on the object. Over a period of several years (note: you have to know about the object and get there well in advance), the slow outgassing caused by evaporating parts of the object create sufficient trajectory change to the whole pile to miss the earth.
Why do you say catastrophic planetary accidents "aren't very likely at this point"? At what point do they become likely?
Just because we've only had the knowledge and capability to track near earth objects very recently, says nothing about the likelihood of such an event occurring.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't think that was allowed until at least 50 posts were made...
This is so true. I speak from personal experience.
A few years ago, I was developing a research application to explore ancient documents. It had to be really flexible, as the data kept changing, so I made this whizzy configurable system, which was worth it.
But the interface... the target users were medieval historians. To say they weren't technically literate would be an understatement. After much resistance on my part to sacrificing my super configurable interface, I dumbed the whole thing down, and immediately lost about 90% of the true power of the system, although the engine was still there underneath, waiting to be used.
But the users loved it. Real work was done. Reviews praised it's ease of use. Now we're working on version 2, and I can now see ways of exposing a lot of this power to the rarer advanced users without *in any way* burdening the non technical user.
Make it configurable and powerful, but always choose sensible defaults (for the novice user). It's a myth that people want choice as a desirable thing in itself (geeks aside). They put up with choice when circumstance forces them to make a decision.
The only time people really want choice is when they aren't being satisfied by what's in front of them...
Interesting points. Although, in some ways, we are still operating in a patronage system. The big record labels give money to musicians to record their works, in return for control over the product.
They then sell and market the CDs, protected by copyright. The artists gets a little of this money back (minus costs, hidden costs, small print costs...), but it's the labels that make the real money by controlling the copy and distribution of the work.
So yes, copyright does appear to have more relevance to the publisher than the musician, who still needs the patronage of the labels to earn a living...
I agree - let's not return to direct patronage. But existing copyright law is not necessarily the right way either.
It made sense in a world dominated by the economics of scarcity, as a way to achieve a balance between ideas being placed in the public domain and the need to incentivise the creators, by granting a limited monopoly to them.
We need new ideas in a world where copying and distribution is as near to free as it can be - it's no longer a good point of control to achieve the aim of incentivising the creation of culture.
More draconian legislation and increasingly invasive technology is not the right way to achieve this balance, for the public good.
Woah! I'm not defending copyright infringment.
I am pointing out that it is not the same thing as theft, and that the difference is founded in the context of the activity.
It's not just semantics. Your attempt to label two fundamentally different activities as the same thing is ill advised. The law doesn't see it this way, nor do most people in the world.
We will not move forward in this debate until the hysteria is removed. The battle over ownership of intellectual property and digital culture is tremendously important and deserves careful thought.
I really urge you to have a look at Lawrence Lessig's book (see my other post on copyright and culture).
"You know that if everyone acted as you do, then nothing new and creative would be created anymore"
Amazing. That must be why humans spent so long mucking about in caves. They had to invent copyright law first, so they could get on with inventing and creating our culture.
It's important to realise that copyright is not an obvious thing, that it has a very interesting history, and culture and invention predate it by, well, most of human history.
Have a look at the free, online book by Lawrence Lessig, "Free Culture". A very interesting read:
http://www.free-culture.cc/freecontent/
Murder, manslaughter... I mean, it's all killing people. And its definitely wrong. So they must be the same thing, right? Let's all be thankful that the law sees fit to distinguish between things that have different ethical dimensions, even if you don't.
I was laid off last year, along with all my development team in the UK, and I was given the dubious honor of not only training our Pakistani replacements, but coordinating the whole training program.
Unlike the original visionaries who drove the original development, our new management were pure short termists. They didn't listen when we told them that the development practices they were adopting would come back to bite them. Over the preceding year, purely as a result of a management drive to win each new customer by agreeing to anything they wanted, the system had become kludged to hell - by now we were scared of parts of it, and we wrote it. Guess how much good quality documentation existed?
Three people were sent over to London to learn all they could about the system we'd spent 3 years creating. I felt sorry for these three guys, so far from their families, struggling to understand something they had no realistic hope of ever getting to grips with. My job was toast anyway - the writing had been on the wall. We were courteous and friendly to them. We tried to help them understand the system. They failed - it was inevitable. The company didn't allocate very much time for the transfer either - it would have cost too much to keep us much longer, apparently.
I'm now in a much more interesting and visionary organisation, from where I've had the bittersweet pleasure of watching that company slowly die. Don't blame your replacements - they're normally nice and intelligent people, who'll normally feel quite bad about the situation too.
Any system complex and interesting enough to be worthy of your time is going to be very hard, if not impossible, to transfer working knowledge to a completely new bunch of people all in one go.
Especially if your management is already in the mindset of cost cutting at all costs.
You make a valid point about the difference between design and programming, but I'm still inclined to stick with my point ;)
Few designs are going to specify every class and interface required. If you're an OO programmer, you will use OO constructs in realising a design. If you're a procedural programmer you'll use procedural constructs. In my book, this doesn't make you an OO programmer - just a programmer using an OO language. But we're arguing semantics here.
You're right that the main discussion is really about putting Java on your CV. It's on mine, and while I can read the code, I couldn't write it in an interview situation. I have years of experience specifying systems written in Java and J2EE, as well as in many other systems and languages.
I think part of the confusion is because Sun named both the platform and the language Java. I know the platform - but I can't code the language without a reference manual sitting by me.
Matt P.
I think you need to examine your logic a bit here. Just using an OO language to accomplish a task does not make you an OO programmer, even if the language or compiler imposes some OO onto your fundamentally non-OO code. OO isn't about a language, or what a compiler does with the language. It's a way of deconstructing problems into objects and the way they interact. If you aren't doing that, you're not doing OO programming.
It's implications go way beyond web pages, which are just one of the first manifestations of our electronic culture creating records that never touch paper, or other more established and permanent mediums.
Businesses typically only have to archive material for around 7 years legally, although some industries like pharaceuticals have to preserve data considerably longer. This is fine when records are primarly paper based, with some nice computers to speed our current business along. When records are totally electronic from start to end, ("born digital"), we start to have problems, legally and culturally. Some researches are talking about a digital dark ages, where many of our records today will simply vanish from history, totally inaccessible and unpreserved.
This is about storage, migration and emulation. It's about persistent identifiers. It's about technology obsolesence leading to cultural obsolesence.
Matt Palmer Digital Preservation Department UK National Archives.
Long term I agree with this position. To be useful, it can't just mean sending people up for a year or two; it has to mean actually living entirely independantly away from the earth - forever, if needs be. It may take a while to achieve this, so I think we'd still keep an eye out for any nasties out there. In order to achieve it, we're going to need cheap, commercialised access to space. I don't see NASA or the ESA providing this. To those people who say we should sort all our problems out at home before venturing into space, hands up all those who think we'll *ever* sort out all the problems on Earth...? Will we ever get to some kind of enlightened utopian position? I hope so, but of course, there's a good chance we'll wipe ourselves out before that hunk of rock gets to in any case, so let's not keep all our eggs in one basket any longer than we have to.
It's not true to say we couldn't do anything. We are actively tracking near earth objects, and estimates I've heard say we currently know about a third to a half of them fairly accurately. There are a number of proposals for dealing with objects on a collision course with earth. Mostly it depends on the nature of the object. Fast spinning objects are likely to be a solid rock and could be deflected by explosions. Slower spinning objects are far more likely to be rubble piles, and experiments show that rubble piles can't be deflected by explosion - the pile simply absorbs the blast. Proposals to deal with these include solar mirrors on a following orbit to the object focussing the suns rays on a point on the object. Over a period of several years (note: you have to know about the object and get there well in advance), the slow outgassing caused by evaporating parts of the object create sufficient trajectory change to the whole pile to miss the earth.
Why do you say catastrophic planetary accidents "aren't very likely at this point"? At what point do they become likely?
Just because we've only had the knowledge and capability to track near earth objects very recently, says nothing about the likelihood of such an event occurring.
Some might say we're overdue a big one...