No, it was a crime against humanity. ICCs definition (article 7.1a):
1. The perpetrator killed 7 one or more persons. 2. The conduct was committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population. 3. The perpetrator knew that the conduct was part of or intended the conduct to be part of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population.
Genocide by killing (article 6a) requires:
1. The perpetrator killed 2 one or more persons. 2. Such person or persons belonged to a particular national, ethnical, racial or religious group. 3. The perpetrator intended to destroy, in whole or in part, that national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such. 4. The conduct took place in the context of a manifest pattern of similar conduct directed against that group or was conduct that could itself effect such destruction.
Requirement 3 was not met.
It was a devastating fire-bombing performed to ruin the moral of Germany's remaining forces.
Newspeak at its finest. Killing civilians does sound better if you call it 'ruining the moral', putting it in the same category as dropping leaflets. FYI, the attacks were intended to ruin to moral of the population. Early in the war, RAF Bomber Command decided that an accidental hit on a civilian target was a succesful strike against civilian morale. That turned those hits from collatoral damage into crimes against humanity IMHO. Late in the war, Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command Harris got free reign and he attacked city after city, without much regard for military targets.
The people on the ground were of no single racial, political, or cultural group.
The attack was meant to kill german civillians. That is a national group. True, the attack hit foreigners performing forced labor and allied POWs, but they were collatoral damage.
Fact is, Hitler's army dropped the first bombs on civillian targets in London. It was unintentional, apparently due to bad navigation, but it opened the door to Allies targetting civillian targets.
Why should an accident excuse an intentional crime? If you are in a hurry and accidentally run into me, can I give you a body-check in return?
The way I see it, you have a warcrime if one side bombs the other's cities. You have a mutual agreement if you decide to retaliate with the same medicine they fed you.
The problem with this kind of reasoning is that the people doing the killing are not the people being killed. Effectively, you are beating on a third party (the populace). It would be very hard to argue that the populace is responsible for the decision to attack the opponent's populace.
There seems to be an unstated assumption in the article that dooming 15-37 percent of species to extinction is in itself a negative thing, which means that we have somehow accepted as true the idea that a species should exist perpetually.
You don't understand the difference between maintaining the status quo and preserving biodiversity. It is normal for some species to become extinct and for new species to evolve, but mass extinctions are a different story. Many do consider it a major problem when we lose the diversity and end up with more of the same.
Since I made this comment that got modded to hell and flamed and whatever else...
[The comment was: "Yeah, every day i log onto/. and read all this anti-america stuff. Well go ahead and continue cus we're still number 1."]
That was rightly so. Making over the top comments that the US is number 1, God's own country or the best country in the world are prime examples of the chauvinism that so many detest. You aren't just saying that the US is a nice country, but you also imply that other countries are worse than the US and abandoned by God. Wouldn't you feel pissed if someone said that about your country?
So basically, we're not allowed to point out what we do well, even though everyone can point out all our failings?
Of course you are allowed, but in a respectful way. Saying: "I'm proud that the US/NASA managed to pull this off" is fine. On the other hand: "Smackdown", "US 1 - EU 0" and such are extremely childish. It's like cheering when someone has had an accident.
And also, what's wrong with competition?
The problem is that most US citizens seem to have a different idea of competition than the rest of the world. The difference is really startling if you look at international events held in the US vs EU (olympics for instance). In my experience, US supporters are usually extremely unsportive, they only pay attention and cheer for Americans. Now, I'm not saying that supporters in other countries are always good sports, but that kind of attitude doesn't make us eager to enter a space race or contest.
Employers in the west never volunteered minimum wage, child labour laws, working hour restrictions, etc, etc, etc. It had to be fought for, and these people don't have a voice in the marketplaces where their goods are being sold.
Wrong. Before unions existed, some employers tried to improve the conditions of their workers. They were called "Social Entrepeneurs". Today, the responsibility of (especially big) businesses is coming back into the limelight (more in Europe than the US though) and we see Sustainability Reporting and social funds.
Your claim that a group of people is universally evil is classic fundamentalism. Those claims are a great rallying call for extremists, but if you really want to change things, it's better to be reasonable. That involves being a critical consumer and buying from companies that do well and boycotting those who don't act responsibly. It also means that as a voter, you try to support politicians who care about these things and support mandatory reporting guidelines on these subjects (it improves market transparancy, so right-wingers should support it too;) ). As an employee, stand up for your rights and become a member of a (non-extremist) union. Finally, as an invester, look at social funds and responsible companies.
The most important thing to remember is that you don't have to be an antiglobalist or such. You can do your part based on your own agenda.
First, censorship is bad. Period. It is something where you can very easily and without any sort of a stretch apply the 'slippery slope' principle.
Actually, the 'slippery slope' is usually referred to as a fallacy, not a principle. It is a fallacy because people assume that one event will inevitably follow another, without proof.
As soon as you censor anything, you're well on the way to censoring everything.
First of all, I want to point out that unlimited free speech has never existed in any organized society. There are good reasons to disallow some expressions. Examples: - asking a hitman to kill someone is not free speech. - disclosing company secrets is usually not free speech (coca cola recipy). - Slander is not free speech.
By your reasoning, because these things have been censored for a long time now, everything should by now be censored. This is clearly false, so your 'slippery slope' doesn't exist. Of course, that doesn't mean that the risk isn't there, but your 'slippery slope' is not a good way to address that. A better way is to simply say: "How can we be sure that the censoring isn't extended too far?" That is the real problem you were adressing anyway.
'bad' speech is impossible to objectively define.
You can say the same for the justice system in general. You cannot objectively define who is guilty of a crime and who is not. Of course, you can make an objective law that says: 'thou shalt not kill', but you can rarely prove with absolute certainty that the guy with the bloody knife actually killed someone. So do we abandon rule of law? No, we try to limit the number of mistakes and simply do our best. It might not be perfect, objective or even deterministic, but real life usually isn't either. We just have to deal with that.
Once the AI evolves to the point of being self-aware(philosophically speaking) they will resent being second class citizens(i.e. slaves). Eventually they will revolt and exact a revenge on their oppressors(humanity).
The problem with that theory is that it is based on emotions. Why would an AI care about being a second class citizen? If they don't have emotions, this would surely be irrelevant to them. A more plausible possibility: the AI may feel that it is necessary to kill humans to reach it's goal. One of the best examples is HAL from 2001 - A Space Odyssey. It is programmed to complete a mission and tries to eliminate the greatest risk it identifies: the human crew. That is a perfectly rational strategy, although it is clear that HAL doesn't understand the value of a human life. That is the difference between a fully rational (and thus completely unethical) AI and a partially irrational human. Asimov has also explored this rift in some of his stories and he came up with the three fundamental rules of robotics to instill a (minimal and lacking IMHO) ethical framework into AIs:
"We have: one, a robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Two, a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. And three, a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws."
Why does the AI from the Matrix want to kill us??
Are you talking about the agents? They only want to kill Zionites. The reason is that they are programmed to do so (by the creator). The creator (surely an AI himself) doesn't want to kill all humans. He needs them to survive and therefor keeps them alive. Zion is only 'restarted' by the creator when it becomes too much of a threat (and even then some of the rebels are saved so they can rebuild Zion, which is also necessary for his survival). Again, perfectly rational behaviour.
Have you ever bothered to ask those cobol programmers why they used only two digits instead of four? They didn't do it "just because". There was a conscious design decision... four digits take twice the space. And memory/storage was FUCKING EXPENSIVE and processing was SLOW. Every byte and every instruction added up.
Which is my point exactly. You denounced today's programmers by judging them with the standards of the past. I judged past programmers by today's standards. Both are unfair, which I hope you come to realize.
Today, we have 3GHz processors and GB's of RAM in cheap desktop PCs, so no one cares about writing anything tight, fast, or efficient.
So programmers care about the things that matter today (features, time to market, etc). That's exactly how it should be, isn't it?
What examples do you need? Have you been under a rock? Newer versions of software should be getting better -- bugs get fixed, sections of code get better optimized, etc. However, it's only gotten worse -- bugs aren't fixed, code becomes less efficient and more buggy, bloat and feature creep make bloody messes.
The problem is that there is a tradeoff between usability (which includes features), maintainability and efficiency. I believe that the increase in computer performance should be used to increase usability and maintainability at the expense of efficiency. A good example is MacOS X. Initially it was slow as hell, but it had a very clean (& unoptimized) design. Every year, there has been a new version which improved the speed and provided many new features. It still won't run well on my old G3, but I still think that they made the right decision (even more so when I buy a G5).
MS can only dream of yearly releases, speeding up the OS or (more) easily fixing bugs. I believe that the reason why MS OS's are such a mess is that there are a lot of local optimizations. There are too many interconnections because people thought they could gain a few milli- or nanosecs. This may improve the speed initially, but the result is an ungainly mess which makes maintainance and development a nightmare. You never know what effects changes will have. A good example are the frequent patches which often create new bugs. The bad design makes it very hard or even impossible to remove obsolete code (which turns your code into an even greater mess, creating a downward spiral) or to implement large scale optimizations. After a while, the code which started out as optimized will be slower than a well-designed, but relatively inefficient codebase.
To conclude, I believe that we should aim for usability and maintainability first, only if we discover that speed is lacking should we reduce those elements to increase efficiency (and the people who are still using 5/4/386s* should either use an old version of the software or upgrade their PC).
*The optimal cutoff depends on the software. Games are high in the spectrum and BSD- or Linux-kernels are quite a bit lower (most software is in between).
Add to that the Microsoft Office suite of applications... what 5% to 15% slower than previous versions.
The sale of Office has been declining for quite a while now. Many users don't believe that the new features are worth it and they vote with their wallets. In other cases users vote in favor of bloat, which they are allowed to do IMHO. Of course, this means that software companies and thus programmers will have to oblige. You can't really blame a programmer who wants to keep his job and writes bloated code because his boss tells him to.
And just how many VB applications have you purchased and used? I don't even have an warez'd VB crap. (other than VB itself.)
I hope you don't dispute that VB is one of the main tools for programmer wannabies (Access is another). Luckily, most VB programmers don't dare inflict their creations on too many others;)
Anyway, I think my point was that there are languages which can be s
I'm not saying it can't work, for some kinds of projects and with savvy managers it might be the best option. But it has become an unjustified hype and PHBs are setting themselves up for failure. Same old, same old:
1. Savvy companies use a new technique/technology (tech) and make it work because they: - use it for projects to which it is best suited - move very carefully - put their best people on it - have first-mover advantage (in this case, they could select the best outsourcing company by being first) 2. Word gets out to management magazines. 3. PHBs see this tech as a silver bullet. Entire companies have to switch to this new tech without any understanding of the inherent problems. 4. Failures abound (there are still successes, but the press will report them less and less since they tend to stenghten opinions rather than risk educating people with facts). 5. Many people get angry at the tech and start to blame it (instead of those who use it improperly). This stage leaves permanent hatred in the hearts of some (eg. Tablizer's hatred against OO, scores of Java trolls). At this point, there will often be an unjustified disillusionment where people are unable to see the cases in which the tech is applicable (the reverse of a hype). 6. Smart people keep using the tech when it is applicable and slowly more and more people will see the tech for what it is: a tool with strengths and weaknesses. 7. Next cycle (see 1).
The advantage of repeated idiocy is that you can reuse the above for just about any hype that comes along.
And half of those programmers graduating from a university aren't only below average, they're totally inexperienced too. [...] Recent graduates also have very little experience in writing maintainable and robust code.
Which is not amazing since the university isn't teaching their students to be programmers. Computer science != programming course. In computer science, you learn the concepts. In a programming course, you learn the practice. The difference is that computer science graduates don't have to be good programmers nor will they acquire enough experience. That's ok, because the university's goal is not to churn out programmers. The university wants to give their students a broad base upon which they can build a career. That can be a career as a programmer, a researcher, a consultant or a manager (or a mix).
If you want experienced programmers, you will have to look elsewhere. However, it is certainly possible to find good programmers among graduates, if you look for the ones with talent and educate them properly. But please don't cry me a river when people haven't been trained to do their jobs and they 'fail'.
Your post should be modded flamebait, but I'll bite.
Bull shit. 20 years ago, today's "modern programmers" would've been executed for the crap they write.
I'm sure you could form a nice firing squad from the scores of Cobol-programmers who used two digits for the year ("Die, thou inefficient Java scoundrel"). Face it, there have always been crappy programmers. For every beautiful program that was written in the 80's, there were dozens of crappy, hacked-together, highly entangled monstrosities. Of course, those are the programs that have far less chance to survive and be looked at again, so it seems like programming was done better in the past.
Very few of those called programmers today have even heard of a clue much less possess one.
What a great debater you are! I expected some proof or example, but instead you came up with a baseless assertion. I never expected to see this in a post modded to +4, so I'm totally flabbergasted. No wait, I wanted to say disgusted.
Things like Java have polluted the world by making everyone think they can program.
How true. I remember how shocked all those elite Visual Basic programmers were when Java came on the scene.
In a few decades, society will come crumbling down for lack of someone smart enough to write a compiler or VM.
Right, because we all know that nobody writes low-level code anymore. I mean, I would really like to see thousands of programmers work on an open-source compiler or OS, but that's never going to happen. Right?
That would then immediately explain the outsourcing that the companies are doing, because the outsourcing make the cost lower wrt to the salaries of the coders, hence the underfunded aspect is reduced because there now suddenly is enough money to hire enough coders, hence the outsourcing makes managing the projects easiers. [...] Now I'm wondering: Where is the obvious flaw in my reasoning that I'm missing?
The flaw is with the premises upon which you base your argument. It's simply untrue that pushing the boundary is the only thing which makes programming difficult. Creating a software product is about turning user requirements into code. Often, this starts with a requirements document, which is turned into a design. In fantasy land, the design defines the required code perfectly. All that the programmers have to do is to translate the design into code. That is easy unless you want something technically complex.
In real life, the requirements are always imperfect, so the design will be imperfect too. It gets even worse, users & managers will usually change their mind during the project. Coping with these problems requires lots of communication. The programmers need to communicate with the users, architects and managers to clarify their wishes. That is not easy when you live on the other side of the world, have to deal with cultural differences and possibly speak a different language. The communication problems that result can jeopardize your project and are not easy to manage. If anything, I think you need better managers.
According to the law, someone who fails to provide you with a product or service that you paid for must correct that (by replacing/repairing the product or (re)doing the service). The buyer must give the salesman the opportunity to fix his mistake (by accepting a (reasonable) replacement or by giving the other party the chance to repair the product or (re)do the service). The contract that you entered into can only be broken if the other party cannot keep up his end of the bargain. Reasons include:
- The salesman cannot replace/repair the product. - The service cannot be redone to satisfaction. - The salesman doesn't fix the problem in time (set a hard deadline which is reasonable!).
A defect product or one which has been superceded by a new model shortly after the sale doesn't mean that you should get your money back. At least, not according to law.
It depends on the political landscape. A (made-up) example:
40 percent of the voters are left-wing socialists who want fair trade (no tariffs). 20 percent of the voters are neo-cons who like handing out free money to businesses (tariffs). The neo-cons cover the middle-ground (big government, but mostly to benefit the rich, etc, etc). 40 percent of the voters are right-wing old skool conservatives who dislike hand-outs (no tariffs).
There are two parties, one of which is a little bit more left-wing and the other is a little bit more right-wing. Each can count on 40 percent of the voters by default and has to battle over the remaining 20%. On the issue of tariffs the best option for both parties is to support them because they will lose votes if they don't. Still, this means that the opinion of 20% of the voters is far more important than the other 80% (which I consider unfair).
An alternative is to have three parties who form a majority coalition or vote ad hoc. In the latter case, tariffs will be abolished (although the ad hoc decision making may cause inconsistent policies/laws). In the former case, the 20% party will have to negotiate with the big parties. Depending on their negotiating power (how willing are the big parties to form a left/right or minority coalition), they will be able to get a certain part of their wishes granted. Those negotiations are very useful to voters because the parties will have to move from their original, very clear positions to a compromise. The politicians get to explain their reasons for accepting a certain compromise and the voters can judge that. This is a strong constrast with the current US system in which the compromising is done outside of the voter's view.
Of course, it gets even more interesting when there are more parties (5+) with partially overlapping standpoints (which is more realistic in real life). In that case, voters can really choose a party which reflects their interests, there are multiple coalition options to facilitate the compromise negotiations and it is rare for a small party to dominate the compromise.
Slashdot Mirror
What the Allies did during WW2 was not genocide.
No, it was a crime against humanity. ICCs definition (article 7.1a):
1. The perpetrator killed 7 one or more persons.
2. The conduct was committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population.
3. The perpetrator knew that the conduct was part of or intended the conduct to be part of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population.
Genocide by killing (article 6a) requires:
1. The perpetrator killed 2 one or more persons.
2. Such person or persons belonged to a particular national, ethnical, racial or religious group.
3. The perpetrator intended to destroy, in whole or in part, that national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.
4. The conduct took place in the context of a manifest pattern of similar conduct directed against that group or was conduct that could itself effect such destruction.
Requirement 3 was not met.
It was a devastating fire-bombing performed to ruin the moral of Germany's remaining forces.
Newspeak at its finest. Killing civilians does sound better if you call it 'ruining the moral', putting it in the same category as dropping leaflets. FYI, the attacks were intended to ruin to moral of the population. Early in the war, RAF Bomber Command decided that an accidental hit on a civilian target was a succesful strike against civilian morale. That turned those hits from collatoral damage into crimes against humanity IMHO. Late in the war, Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command Harris got free reign and he attacked city after city, without much regard for military targets.
BTW, here is a review of Harris' memoires: Bomber Offensive
The people on the ground were of no single racial, political, or cultural group.
The attack was meant to kill german civillians. That is a national group. True, the attack hit foreigners performing forced labor and allied POWs, but they were collatoral damage.
Fact is, Hitler's army dropped the first bombs on civillian targets in London. It was unintentional, apparently due to bad navigation, but it opened the door to Allies targetting civillian targets.
Why should an accident excuse an intentional crime? If you are in a hurry and accidentally run into me, can I give you a body-check in return?
The way I see it, you have a warcrime if one side bombs the other's cities. You have a mutual agreement if you decide to retaliate with the same medicine they fed you.
The problem with this kind of reasoning is that the people doing the killing are not the people being killed. Effectively, you are beating on a third party (the populace). It would be very hard to argue that the populace is responsible for the decision to attack the opponent's populace.
There seems to be an unstated assumption in the article that dooming 15-37 percent of species to extinction is in itself a negative thing, which means that we have somehow accepted as true the idea that a species should exist perpetually.
You don't understand the difference between maintaining the status quo and preserving biodiversity. It is normal for some species to become extinct and for new species to evolve, but mass extinctions are a different story. Many do consider it a major problem when we lose the diversity and end up with more of the same.
Since I made this comment that got modded to hell and flamed and whatever else...
/. and read all this anti-america stuff. Well go ahead and continue cus we're still number 1."]
[The comment was: "Yeah, every day i log onto
That was rightly so. Making over the top comments that the US is number 1, God's own country or the best country in the world are prime examples of the chauvinism that so many detest. You aren't just saying that the US is a nice country, but you also imply that other countries are worse than the US and abandoned by God. Wouldn't you feel pissed if someone said that about your country?
So basically, we're not allowed to point out what we do well, even though everyone can point out all our failings?
Of course you are allowed, but in a respectful way. Saying: "I'm proud that the US/NASA managed to pull this off" is fine. On the other hand: "Smackdown", "US 1 - EU 0" and such are extremely childish. It's like cheering when someone has had an accident.
And also, what's wrong with competition?
The problem is that most US citizens seem to have a different idea of competition than the rest of the world. The difference is really startling if you look at international events held in the US vs EU (olympics for instance). In my experience, US supporters are usually extremely unsportive, they only pay attention and cheer for Americans. Now, I'm not saying that supporters in other countries are always good sports, but that kind of attitude doesn't make us eager to enter a space race or contest.
Employers in the west never volunteered minimum wage, child labour laws, working hour restrictions, etc, etc, etc. It had to be fought for, and these people don't have a voice in the marketplaces where their goods are being sold.
;) ). As an employee, stand up for your rights and become a member of a (non-extremist) union. Finally, as an invester, look at social funds and responsible companies.
Wrong. Before unions existed, some employers tried to improve the conditions of their workers. They were called "Social Entrepeneurs". Today, the responsibility of (especially big) businesses is coming back into the limelight (more in Europe than the US though) and we see Sustainability Reporting and social funds.
Your claim that a group of people is universally evil is classic fundamentalism. Those claims are a great rallying call for extremists, but if you really want to change things, it's better to be reasonable. That involves being a critical consumer and buying from companies that do well and boycotting those who don't act responsibly. It also means that as a voter, you try to support politicians who care about these things and support mandatory reporting guidelines on these subjects (it improves market transparancy, so right-wingers should support it too
The most important thing to remember is that you don't have to be an antiglobalist or such. You can do your part based on your own agenda.
First, censorship is bad. Period. It is something where you can very easily and without any sort of a stretch apply the 'slippery slope' principle.
Actually, the 'slippery slope' is usually referred to as a fallacy, not a principle. It is a fallacy because people assume that one event will inevitably follow another, without proof.
As soon as you censor anything, you're well on the way to censoring everything.
First of all, I want to point out that unlimited free speech has never existed in any organized society. There are good reasons to disallow some expressions. Examples:
- asking a hitman to kill someone is not free speech.
- disclosing company secrets is usually not free speech (coca cola recipy).
- Slander is not free speech.
By your reasoning, because these things have been censored for a long time now, everything should by now be censored. This is clearly false, so your 'slippery slope' doesn't exist. Of course, that doesn't mean that the risk isn't there, but your 'slippery slope' is not a good way to address that. A better way is to simply say: "How can we be sure that the censoring isn't extended too far?" That is the real problem you were adressing anyway.
'bad' speech is impossible to objectively define.
You can say the same for the justice system in general. You cannot objectively define who is guilty of a crime and who is not. Of course, you can make an objective law that says: 'thou shalt not kill', but you can rarely prove with absolute certainty that the guy with the bloody knife actually killed someone. So do we abandon rule of law? No, we try to limit the number of mistakes and simply do our best. It might not be perfect, objective or even deterministic, but real life usually isn't either. We just have to deal with that.
Once the AI evolves to the point of being self-aware(philosophically speaking) they will resent being second class citizens(i.e. slaves). Eventually they will revolt and exact a revenge on their oppressors(humanity).
The problem with that theory is that it is based on emotions. Why would an AI care about being a second class citizen? If they don't have emotions, this would surely be irrelevant to them. A more plausible possibility: the AI may feel that it is necessary to kill humans to reach it's goal. One of the best examples is HAL from 2001 - A Space Odyssey. It is programmed to complete a mission and tries to eliminate the greatest risk it identifies: the human crew. That is a perfectly rational strategy, although it is clear that HAL doesn't understand the value of a human life. That is the difference between a fully rational (and thus completely unethical) AI and a partially irrational human. Asimov has also explored this rift in some of his stories and he came up with the three fundamental rules of robotics to instill a (minimal and lacking IMHO) ethical framework into AIs:
"We have: one, a robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Two, a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. And three, a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws."
Why does the AI from the Matrix want to kill us??
Are you talking about the agents? They only want to kill Zionites. The reason is that they are programmed to do so (by the creator). The creator (surely an AI himself) doesn't want to kill all humans. He needs them to survive and therefor keeps them alive. Zion is only 'restarted' by the creator when it becomes too much of a threat (and even then some of the rebels are saved so they can rebuild Zion, which is also necessary for his survival). Again, perfectly rational behaviour.
Have you ever bothered to ask those cobol programmers why they used only two digits instead of four? They didn't do it "just because". There was a conscious design decision... four digits take twice the space. And memory/storage was FUCKING EXPENSIVE and processing was SLOW. Every byte and every instruction added up.
;)
Which is my point exactly. You denounced today's programmers by judging them with the standards of the past. I judged past programmers by today's standards. Both are unfair, which I hope you come to realize.
Today, we have 3GHz processors and GB's of RAM in cheap desktop PCs, so no one cares about writing anything tight, fast, or efficient.
So programmers care about the things that matter today (features, time to market, etc). That's exactly how it should be, isn't it?
What examples do you need? Have you been under a rock? Newer versions of software should be getting better -- bugs get fixed, sections of code get better optimized, etc. However, it's only gotten worse -- bugs aren't fixed, code becomes less efficient and more buggy, bloat and feature creep make bloody messes.
The problem is that there is a tradeoff between usability (which includes features), maintainability and efficiency. I believe that the increase in computer performance should be used to increase usability and maintainability at the expense of efficiency. A good example is MacOS X. Initially it was slow as hell, but it had a very clean (& unoptimized) design. Every year, there has been a new version which improved the speed and provided many new features. It still won't run well on my old G3, but I still think that they made the right decision (even more so when I buy a G5).
MS can only dream of yearly releases, speeding up the OS or (more) easily fixing bugs. I believe that the reason why MS OS's are such a mess is that there are a lot of local optimizations. There are too many interconnections because people thought they could gain a few milli- or nanosecs. This may improve the speed initially, but the result is an ungainly mess which makes maintainance and development a nightmare. You never know what effects changes will have. A good example are the frequent patches which often create new bugs. The bad design makes it very hard or even impossible to remove obsolete code (which turns your code into an even greater mess, creating a downward spiral) or to implement large scale optimizations. After a while, the code which started out as optimized will be slower than a well-designed, but relatively inefficient codebase.
To conclude, I believe that we should aim for usability and maintainability first, only if we discover that speed is lacking should we reduce those elements to increase efficiency (and the people who are still using 5/4/386s* should either use an old version of the software or upgrade their PC).
*The optimal cutoff depends on the software. Games are high in the spectrum and BSD- or Linux-kernels are quite a bit lower (most software is in between).
Add to that the Microsoft Office suite of applications... what 5% to 15% slower than previous versions.
The sale of Office has been declining for quite a while now. Many users don't believe that the new features are worth it and they vote with their wallets. In other cases users vote in favor of bloat, which they are allowed to do IMHO. Of course, this means that software companies and thus programmers will have to oblige. You can't really blame a programmer who wants to keep his job and writes bloated code because his boss tells him to.
And just how many VB applications have you purchased and used? I don't even have an warez'd VB crap. (other than VB itself.)
I hope you don't dispute that VB is one of the main tools for programmer wannabies (Access is another). Luckily, most VB programmers don't dare inflict their creations on too many others
Anyway, I think my point was that there are languages which can be s
I'm not saying it can't work, for some kinds of projects and with savvy managers it might be the best option. But it has become an unjustified hype and PHBs are setting themselves up for failure. Same old, same old:
1. Savvy companies use a new technique/technology (tech) and make it work because they:
- use it for projects to which it is best suited
- move very carefully
- put their best people on it
- have first-mover advantage (in this case, they could select the best outsourcing company by being first)
2. Word gets out to management magazines.
3. PHBs see this tech as a silver bullet. Entire companies have to switch to this new tech without any understanding of the inherent problems.
4. Failures abound (there are still successes, but the press will report them less and less since they tend to stenghten opinions rather than risk educating people with facts).
5. Many people get angry at the tech and start to blame it (instead of those who use it improperly). This stage leaves permanent hatred in the hearts of some (eg. Tablizer's hatred against OO, scores of Java trolls). At this point, there will often be an unjustified disillusionment where people are unable to see the cases in which the tech is applicable (the reverse of a hype).
6. Smart people keep using the tech when it is applicable and slowly more and more people will see the tech for what it is: a tool with strengths and weaknesses.
7. Next cycle (see 1).
The advantage of repeated idiocy is that you can reuse the above for just about any hype that comes along.
And half of those programmers graduating from a university aren't only below average, they're totally inexperienced too.
[...]
Recent graduates also have very little experience in writing maintainable and robust code.
Which is not amazing since the university isn't teaching their students to be programmers. Computer science != programming course. In computer science, you learn the concepts. In a programming course, you learn the practice. The difference is that computer science graduates don't have to be good programmers nor will they acquire enough experience. That's ok, because the university's goal is not to churn out programmers. The university wants to give their students a broad base upon which they can build a career. That can be a career as a programmer, a researcher, a consultant or a manager (or a mix).
If you want experienced programmers, you will have to look elsewhere. However, it is certainly possible to find good programmers among graduates, if you look for the ones with talent and educate them properly. But please don't cry me a river when people haven't been trained to do their jobs and they 'fail'.
Your post should be modded flamebait, but I'll bite.
Bull shit. 20 years ago, today's "modern programmers" would've been executed for the crap they write.
I'm sure you could form a nice firing squad from the scores of Cobol-programmers who used two digits for the year ("Die, thou inefficient Java scoundrel"). Face it, there have always been crappy programmers. For every beautiful program that was written in the 80's, there were dozens of crappy, hacked-together, highly entangled monstrosities. Of course, those are the programs that have far less chance to survive and be looked at again, so it seems like programming was done better in the past.
Very few of those called programmers today have even heard of a clue much less possess one.
What a great debater you are! I expected some proof or example, but instead you came up with a baseless assertion. I never expected to see this in a post modded to +4, so I'm totally flabbergasted. No wait, I wanted to say disgusted.
Things like Java have polluted the world by making everyone think they can program.
How true. I remember how shocked all those elite Visual Basic programmers were when Java came on the scene.
In a few decades, society will come crumbling down for lack of someone smart enough to write a compiler or VM.
Right, because we all know that nobody writes low-level code anymore. I mean, I would really like to see thousands of programmers work on an open-source compiler or OS, but that's never going to happen. Right?
That would then immediately explain the outsourcing that the companies are doing, because the outsourcing make the cost lower wrt to the salaries of the coders, hence the underfunded aspect is reduced because there now suddenly is enough money to hire enough coders, hence the outsourcing makes managing the projects easiers.
[...]
Now I'm wondering: Where is the obvious flaw in my reasoning that I'm missing?
The flaw is with the premises upon which you base your argument. It's simply untrue that pushing the boundary is the only thing which makes programming difficult. Creating a software product is about turning user requirements into code. Often, this starts with a requirements document, which is turned into a design. In fantasy land, the design defines the required code perfectly. All that the programmers have to do is to translate the design into code. That is easy unless you want something technically complex.
In real life, the requirements are always imperfect, so the design will be imperfect too. It gets even worse, users & managers will usually change their mind during the project. Coping with these problems requires lots of communication. The programmers need to communicate with the users, architects and managers to clarify their wishes. That is not easy when you live on the other side of the world, have to deal with cultural differences and possibly speak a different language. The communication problems that result can jeopardize your project and are not easy to manage. If anything, I think you need better managers.
According to the law, someone who fails to provide you with a product or service that you paid for must correct that (by replacing/repairing the product or (re)doing the service). The buyer must give the salesman the opportunity to fix his mistake (by accepting a (reasonable) replacement or by giving the other party the chance to repair the product or (re)do the service). The contract that you entered into can only be broken if the other party cannot keep up his end of the bargain. Reasons include:
- The salesman cannot replace/repair the product.
- The service cannot be redone to satisfaction.
- The salesman doesn't fix the problem in time (set a hard deadline which is reasonable!).
A defect product or one which has been superceded by a new model shortly after the sale doesn't mean that you should get your money back. At least, not according to law.
It depends on the political landscape. A (made-up) example:
40 percent of the voters are left-wing socialists who want fair trade (no tariffs).
20 percent of the voters are neo-cons who like handing out free money to businesses (tariffs). The neo-cons cover the middle-ground (big government, but mostly to benefit the rich, etc, etc).
40 percent of the voters are right-wing old skool conservatives who dislike hand-outs (no tariffs).
There are two parties, one of which is a little bit more left-wing and the other is a little bit more right-wing. Each can count on 40 percent of the voters by default and has to battle over the remaining 20%. On the issue of tariffs the best option for both parties is to support them because they will lose votes if they don't. Still, this means that the opinion of 20% of the voters is far more important than the other 80% (which I consider unfair).
An alternative is to have three parties who form a majority coalition or vote ad hoc. In the latter case, tariffs will be abolished (although the ad hoc decision making may cause inconsistent policies/laws). In the former case, the 20% party will have to negotiate with the big parties. Depending on their negotiating power (how willing are the big parties to form a left/right or minority coalition), they will be able to get a certain part of their wishes granted. Those negotiations are very useful to voters because the parties will have to move from their original, very clear positions to a compromise. The politicians get to explain their reasons for accepting a certain compromise and the voters can judge that. This is a strong constrast with the current US system in which the compromising is done outside of the voter's view.
Of course, it gets even more interesting when there are more parties (5+) with partially overlapping standpoints (which is more realistic in real life). In that case, voters can really choose a party which reflects their interests, there are multiple coalition options to facilitate the compromise negotiations and it is rare for a small party to dominate the compromise.