if even 50% of people who "share" something, then if they decide they like it, bought it, piracy probably would fall off of the radar.
Of course, part of the issues is people who download a movie, a game, or a piece of software, watch/play/use the shit out of it, then keep saying they didn't like it enough to pay for it.
I remember a friend who sat through a pirated version of FFXII long enough to do basically all side quests (we're talking in the league of 100-200 hours depending on how good you are and if you follow a walkthrough or not), yet still claim they didn't like it enough to buy it. Cracks me up everytime.
Meh, I'll stick to the good old commercial boat filled to brim with bluray discs. Best bandwith you can get (ok, so ping time suffers a -little-, but meh!)
Silverlight 2 was actually first, amusingly enough. It was called WPF/E (Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere), and was the original design behind silverlight. Since it was still some time before it could be ready, they pushed a gimped version, Silverlight 1, to start and gain mindshare. But MS didn't need to be motivated to make a managed version: it was the -original- intention. (Since XBAP applications, the "full" deal that has been around since.NET 3.0, is Windows only)
Thats because only the government related ones concern the public. This stuff happens all the time in the private sector. However, private companies can die, the government cannot (as much as some people around here would like it to)
No. For many people its more a choice between "Evil ISP XYZ, and Pigeon over IP and/or dial up".
That said, my ISP enrolled me in a "contract" without ever once mentionning it. (It -is- optional, and I never said I wanted it when I subscribed, and I didn't sign anything, but my bill states that I picked the contract option). Kind of amusing.
I'm not saying anything now because it is cheaper, I don't care even if I -was- on contract, and they wouldn't last very long in court if I ever changed my mind, but...
Yeah, I just don't think a 32 meg file in netbeans with svn and the change tracking in the margin will be a very efficient way of editing the file though, considering these features in most such IDEs tend to start choking after a few hundred kilobytes.
Thats not bad. Some however overdo it. For example, my bank's web site (TD) will ask you a security question if you do not login from the same computer as usual.
Now thats sweet. Except that the questions are things like mother's maiden name (not so bad), favorite food, name of the last school you went to, city of birth, whatever. And it is case sensitive. Whoops?
So for my favorite food let say... (these aren't real): is it Chicken, chicken, roasted chicken, Roasted chicken, what exactly?
That makes users want to take shortcuts, and thats a bad habit to make your users take.
yeah because SMS is a secure communication medium... A lot better is the password keychain thingnies as a second phase authentication. Nothing is transmitted after you obtain the keychain. Still not completly foolproof, but way better than silly SMS mechanism
I don't know how common these issues are, but i know my bank has in their contract when you open an account, that if you ever lose money because of a design flaw on their online banking service, they take full responsability.
So either A) it doesn't happen often at all, B) they SERIOUSLY trust their programmers C) They have balls.
I don't know... software patents were pretty silly, but intellectual property isn't completly silly... the meme "Someone stole my idea!" has been around almost since humans have been able to talk, so there has to be something to it beyond just silly laws paid for by big corporations.
Its not that bad actually. Most things in software that were TRULY worth patenting, are copyrightable. It was rarely about an algorythm, but usually about how that algorythm was integrated in the application. (Go ahead, reverse engineer -all- of the algorythms that make photoshop. Good luck making a photoshop clone after that without messing up with design copyright and trademarks).
99% of the time, software patents were only infringed by -accident-. The last one % is something that is worth losing to prevent all of the mess.
If software copyright was to be abolished (which a lot of people on this site seems to want too... especially a certain category of torrent fans), then the scenario you describe would become very very real.
A -lot- of companies are doing that (replacing desktop apps with web apps). Its just not the kind of company that will scream about it up the roof. Those apps stay internal, they work (well, often they don't, but thats an issue with the company =P ), and there's no point in telling anyone you did it. So you'll never hear about it, giving the feeling its rare. GWT and similar frameworks are used quite a lot... just not very big in public.
I'd argue that I'm not completly sure everyone should be entitled to -life- =P If we wiped out 2/3rd of earth's population, the rest would be quite better off... and a lot of people on earth do little more than suffer, yet a lot of money is pushed toward those (and I'm not completly sure it works on a large scale, either). Now the issue is who would go and who wouldn't, hehe.. Survival of the fittest? Probably wouldn't work.. a lot of the more useful people wouldn't last too long in a gun fight.
case by case basis. In a lot of countries where food and clothing is a general issue, said country is not even part of one of the group of nations that observe copyright, nevermind each other's copyright. Its enough to follow your own country's laws, screw off others (unless you do business on their land, obviously). Many countries have cross agreements though.
Beyond that, it depends on the case. Is the person truly that bad off? It is really a scale... there is a point where real theft (as in stealing actual physical goods) can be warrented. So obviously there are cases where I'd support pirated stuff. Though I have known a lot of people who would pirate stuff saying "Well, it is either that or no food and electricity next month!", then spend 200$ on a ticket for their favorite band's show. Those people can go fuck themselves.
Hungarian notation did start out pre-VB, but as a general rule, non-VB devs understand what it is, a convention that had advantages and drawbacks, and that often it is not a good idea to use it anymore. Most VB6 devs learned it as a rule at the same level as "no goto". A hard rule, that applies to programming as a whole, and is absolute. I recently had to explain to a former VB6 dev turned C# consultant that, and his reaction was literally like if I was telling him that the earth was flat. Looked at me like I was an alien.
As a secondary side note, the layers of business objects as you call em, don't come from MS either (actually, as a general rule, while it is in the MS textbooks, the Windows development community is incredibly resistant to it). It is more omni present in all "business" type development environment, in general to reduce the pain of maintenance 10 years down the road.
Now, if its overdone or not, I'll leave that to you =P
The fact that... I don't know... I'm the one who -made- the darn thing? And that in many cases, I wouldn't even have made it in the first place if not for these priviledges?
"Hmm, let see... I feel like spending 15 million dollars on making a PS3 game... but I can only sell it to ONE person, since once one copy is in the wild, everyone else will be getting it for free... STILL THAT SOUNDS LIKE A TOTALLY GREAT INVESTMENT! YEEEEEEEEEES"
prefixing UI components drive me fucking batshit insane. You have an entire codebase where hungarian is prohibited, then the same people start prefixing variables, which really aren't any different from any other.
If you're only using default Swing controls... ok, fine. Once you start mixing in 6 third party librairies, custom controls, etc, you seriously don't know what the fuck to name your UI components anymore.
(Making stuff up here to make a point), you have a Panel, a Scrolling Panel, an Update Panel, a Flipping Panel, a Whatever Panel, then a Grid, a SuperGrid, a CoolGrid, a ReallyCoolGrid, a FancyGrid, and so on... what the hell do you start prefixing these things? If you prefix all grids the same, then it kills the point...if you don't, you have to start getting seriously creative. Just name them in things that make sense, and stay consistant with the rest (if its no hungarian, its no hungarian, UI or not). Why txtLogin? Wouldn't LoginInput make more sense? Why btnOk? SubmitInput, SubmitButton, whatever you wish that makes sense in that context... wouldn't it be even better?
Like was already said too, in C#, the declaration for interfaces doens't easily allow to separate them, that why the I is there. It is an exception that I'm not sure should have been made, but now its there to stay... Though also keep in mind that in the.NET design guideline, you're never supposed to directly expose/return an interface in a public method or whatsnot... Always return an implementation. So interfaces will only be visible in the caller's code, or in parameters... in those cases, it is much less harmful.
Not all coding standards are aesthetic though. The vast majority has to do with public APIs, localization, exception checking, string handling, and such similar things. You can't easily automate that (you can however, easily automate the checking of it).
There's also code review that becomes troublesome if everyone use a different standard on their own machine. And depending on the language, code formatters do a lousy job (SQL for example).
Actually, infoq.com does it this way too. Drives me wacko (fortunately, if you select plain old text as the option before posting in slashdot, it behaves normally. I just wish I didnt have to select it every fucking time)
SourceSafe 2005 isn't SO bad... but its still bad (its just decent because its well integrated). Team Foundation Server 2008 (2005 had some rough edges) is quite good, but that can be too expensive for some...
Because of that (I actually have TFS, but that requires a box with Windows Server and crap, and I don't have the hardware), for personal projects, I've grown very, very fond of Visual SVN... it is a commercial plugin, but the server is free (its just SVN + Tomcat wrapped in a nice friendly installer, and integrated in the windows management console, so its a snap to configure and install), and the client plugin itself is very very cheap... Its a Visual Studio plugin that integrates with Tortoise SVN and stuff... it works amazingly well.
There really isn't any reason to use SourceSafe anymore. (And I know you said "At the company I -used- to work for... i just figured it was as good a place to mention it as any =P )
I hear you on #6. I do enjoy automated documentation (like class diagram generators, API documentation tools, etc), but stuff that is done manually gets...ugh...fast...
Having a Wiki for the big stuff is a good idea, but beyond that? I'm currently working on some very very small apps (a lot of them, on a 2-3 weeks cycle per app), and when the QA or the customer points out a change request, I get scared to death.
Not because of the change itself... development tools have grown over the years, and even a significant change doesn't take me much time at all... But the documentation...oh god the documentation...
First you have to update the class diagrams and stick them somewhere on the network, then update the API doc (ok, those 2 are automated), then update the design document, then get it approved (I code during that time even though I'm not supposed to...if it gets rejected, I'll just roll it back, ugh...), then update the SRS because the analyst is too busy, get that approved too, then update the model diagram, then the screen prototypes, then....
Seriously, adding one textbox on a form requires the update of about 10 documents, approval of 2, syncing some with the others, THEN changing the code... The overhead is just crazy.
I feel a few automated tools (in the build system if possible), and a good Wiki is all you should need. If you need more than that (for the customer themselves for example), you hire technical writers who go back after the fact and document it...else you just get lost in the paperwork.
I actually know a lot of companies (mostly C++ shops) with hundreds of devs and no standard IDEs.
They swear by it, like the grand parent. However watching them set up their environment and all goof around is quite amusing. It takes days to get the environment set up for a new employee, because with everyone doing it differently, no one knows -exactly- how to do it (it is a very, very, very large application... think Oracle all editions and all related dev tools kind of large).
Then everyone have their own macros, their own little scripts, own little way of doing things... Sometimes they'll talk to each other and realise that someone across the company had a script/macro to do what another has been doing manually for 6 months, etc. What a mess.
One IDE, all of the macros/configs/whatever in a source control directory. Pull it up when someone comes in, big bang done.
Slashdot Mirror
if even 50% of people who "share" something, then if they decide they like it, bought it, piracy probably would fall off of the radar.
Of course, part of the issues is people who download a movie, a game, or a piece of software, watch/play/use the shit out of it, then keep saying they didn't like it enough to pay for it.
I remember a friend who sat through a pirated version of FFXII long enough to do basically all side quests (we're talking in the league of 100-200 hours depending on how good you are and if you follow a walkthrough or not), yet still claim they didn't like it enough to buy it. Cracks me up everytime.
Meh, I'll stick to the good old commercial boat filled to brim with bluray discs. Best bandwith you can get (ok, so ping time suffers a -little-, but meh!)
Silverlight 2 was actually first, amusingly enough. It was called WPF/E (Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere), and was the original design behind silverlight. Since it was still some time before it could be ready, they pushed a gimped version, Silverlight 1, to start and gain mindshare. But MS didn't need to be motivated to make a managed version: it was the -original- intention. (Since XBAP applications, the "full" deal that has been around since .NET 3.0, is Windows only)
Only one choice left. Vista.
Thats because only the government related ones concern the public. This stuff happens all the time in the private sector. However, private companies can die, the government cannot (as much as some people around here would like it to)
And good thing they didn't. Tom Cruise and "-above-" pretty much includes 95% of the human population.
No. For many people its more a choice between "Evil ISP XYZ, and Pigeon over IP and/or dial up".
That said, my ISP enrolled me in a "contract" without ever once mentionning it. (It -is- optional, and I never said I wanted it when I subscribed, and I didn't sign anything, but my bill states that I picked the contract option). Kind of amusing.
I'm not saying anything now because it is cheaper, I don't care even if I -was- on contract, and they wouldn't last very long in court if I ever changed my mind, but...
Yeah, I just don't think a 32 meg file in netbeans with svn and the change tracking in the margin will be a very efficient way of editing the file though, considering these features in most such IDEs tend to start choking after a few hundred kilobytes.
Thats not bad. Some however overdo it. For example, my bank's web site (TD) will ask you a security question if you do not login from the same computer as usual.
Now thats sweet. Except that the questions are things like mother's maiden name (not so bad), favorite food, name of the last school you went to, city of birth, whatever. And it is case sensitive. Whoops?
So for my favorite food let say... (these aren't real): is it Chicken, chicken, roasted chicken, Roasted chicken, what exactly?
That makes users want to take shortcuts, and thats a bad habit to make your users take.
yeah because SMS is a secure communication medium... A lot better is the password keychain thingnies as a second phase authentication. Nothing is transmitted after you obtain the keychain. Still not completly foolproof, but way better than silly SMS mechanism
I don't know how common these issues are, but i know my bank has in their contract when you open an account, that if you ever lose money because of a design flaw on their online banking service, they take full responsability.
So either A) it doesn't happen often at all, B) they SERIOUSLY trust their programmers C) They have balls.
I don't know... software patents were pretty silly, but intellectual property isn't completly silly... the meme "Someone stole my idea!" has been around almost since humans have been able to talk, so there has to be something to it beyond just silly laws paid for by big corporations.
Its not that bad actually. Most things in software that were TRULY worth patenting, are copyrightable. It was rarely about an algorythm, but usually about how that algorythm was integrated in the application. (Go ahead, reverse engineer -all- of the algorythms that make photoshop. Good luck making a photoshop clone after that without messing up with design copyright and trademarks).
99% of the time, software patents were only infringed by -accident-. The last one % is something that is worth losing to prevent all of the mess.
If software copyright was to be abolished (which a lot of people on this site seems to want too... especially a certain category of torrent fans), then the scenario you describe would become very very real.
A -lot- of companies are doing that (replacing desktop apps with web apps). Its just not the kind of company that will scream about it up the roof. Those apps stay internal, they work (well, often they don't, but thats an issue with the company =P ), and there's no point in telling anyone you did it. So you'll never hear about it, giving the feeling its rare. GWT and similar frameworks are used quite a lot... just not very big in public.
I'd argue that I'm not completly sure everyone should be entitled to -life- =P If we wiped out 2/3rd of earth's population, the rest would be quite better off... and a lot of people on earth do little more than suffer, yet a lot of money is pushed toward those (and I'm not completly sure it works on a large scale, either). Now the issue is who would go and who wouldn't, hehe.. Survival of the fittest? Probably wouldn't work.. a lot of the more useful people wouldn't last too long in a gun fight.
case by case basis. In a lot of countries where food and clothing is a general issue, said country is not even part of one of the group of nations that observe copyright, nevermind each other's copyright. Its enough to follow your own country's laws, screw off others (unless you do business on their land, obviously). Many countries have cross agreements though.
Beyond that, it depends on the case. Is the person truly that bad off? It is really a scale... there is a point where real theft (as in stealing actual physical goods) can be warrented. So obviously there are cases where I'd support pirated stuff. Though I have known a lot of people who would pirate stuff saying "Well, it is either that or no food and electricity next month!", then spend 200$ on a ticket for their favorite band's show. Those people can go fuck themselves.
Hungarian notation did start out pre-VB, but as a general rule, non-VB devs understand what it is, a convention that had advantages and drawbacks, and that often it is not a good idea to use it anymore. Most VB6 devs learned it as a rule at the same level as "no goto". A hard rule, that applies to programming as a whole, and is absolute. I recently had to explain to a former VB6 dev turned C# consultant that, and his reaction was literally like if I was telling him that the earth was flat. Looked at me like I was an alien.
As a secondary side note, the layers of business objects as you call em, don't come from MS either (actually, as a general rule, while it is in the MS textbooks, the Windows development community is incredibly resistant to it). It is more omni present in all "business" type development environment, in general to reduce the pain of maintenance 10 years down the road.
Now, if its overdone or not, I'll leave that to you =P
Wohoo, now that I can be even more efficient at being inefficient! Thanks!
The fact that... I don't know... I'm the one who -made- the darn thing? And that in many cases, I wouldn't even have made it in the first place if not for these priviledges?
"Hmm, let see... I feel like spending 15 million dollars on making a PS3 game... but I can only sell it to ONE person, since once one copy is in the wild, everyone else will be getting it for free... STILL THAT SOUNDS LIKE A TOTALLY GREAT INVESTMENT! YEEEEEEEEEES"
prefixing UI components drive me fucking batshit insane. You have an entire codebase where hungarian is prohibited, then the same people start prefixing variables, which really aren't any different from any other.
If you're only using default Swing controls... ok, fine. Once you start mixing in 6 third party librairies, custom controls, etc, you seriously don't know what the fuck to name your UI components anymore.
(Making stuff up here to make a point), you have a Panel, a Scrolling Panel, an Update Panel, a Flipping Panel, a Whatever Panel, then a Grid, a SuperGrid, a CoolGrid, a ReallyCoolGrid, a FancyGrid, and so on... what the hell do you start prefixing these things? If you prefix all grids the same, then it kills the point...if you don't, you have to start getting seriously creative. Just name them in things that make sense, and stay consistant with the rest (if its no hungarian, its no hungarian, UI or not). Why txtLogin? Wouldn't LoginInput make more sense? Why btnOk? SubmitInput, SubmitButton, whatever you wish that makes sense in that context... wouldn't it be even better?
Like was already said too, in C#, the declaration for interfaces doens't easily allow to separate them, that why the I is there. It is an exception that I'm not sure should have been made, but now its there to stay... Though also keep in mind that in the .NET design guideline, you're never supposed to directly expose/return an interface in a public method or whatsnot... Always return an implementation. So interfaces will only be visible in the caller's code, or in parameters... in those cases, it is much less harmful.
Not all coding standards are aesthetic though. The vast majority has to do with public APIs, localization, exception checking, string handling, and such similar things. You can't easily automate that (you can however, easily automate the checking of it).
There's also code review that becomes troublesome if everyone use a different standard on their own machine. And depending on the language, code formatters do a lousy job (SQL for example).
Actually, infoq.com does it this way too. Drives me wacko (fortunately, if you select plain old text as the option before posting in slashdot, it behaves normally. I just wish I didnt have to select it every fucking time)
SourceSafe 2005 isn't SO bad... but its still bad (its just decent because its well integrated). Team Foundation Server 2008 (2005 had some rough edges) is quite good, but that can be too expensive for some...
Because of that (I actually have TFS, but that requires a box with Windows Server and crap, and I don't have the hardware), for personal projects, I've grown very, very fond of Visual SVN... it is a commercial plugin, but the server is free (its just SVN + Tomcat wrapped in a nice friendly installer, and integrated in the windows management console, so its a snap to configure and install), and the client plugin itself is very very cheap... Its a Visual Studio plugin that integrates with Tortoise SVN and stuff... it works amazingly well.
There really isn't any reason to use SourceSafe anymore. (And I know you said "At the company I -used- to work for... i just figured it was as good a place to mention it as any =P )
I hear you on #6. I do enjoy automated documentation (like class diagram generators, API documentation tools, etc), but stuff that is done manually gets...ugh...fast...
Having a Wiki for the big stuff is a good idea, but beyond that? I'm currently working on some very very small apps (a lot of them, on a 2-3 weeks cycle per app), and when the QA or the customer points out a change request, I get scared to death.
Not because of the change itself... development tools have grown over the years, and even a significant change doesn't take me much time at all... But the documentation...oh god the documentation...
First you have to update the class diagrams and stick them somewhere on the network, then update the API doc (ok, those 2 are automated), then update the design document, then get it approved (I code during that time even though I'm not supposed to...if it gets rejected, I'll just roll it back, ugh...), then update the SRS because the analyst is too busy, get that approved too, then update the model diagram, then the screen prototypes, then....
Seriously, adding one textbox on a form requires the update of about 10 documents, approval of 2, syncing some with the others, THEN changing the code... The overhead is just crazy.
I feel a few automated tools (in the build system if possible), and a good Wiki is all you should need. If you need more than that (for the customer themselves for example), you hire technical writers who go back after the fact and document it...else you just get lost in the paperwork.
I actually know a lot of companies (mostly C++ shops) with hundreds of devs and no standard IDEs.
They swear by it, like the grand parent. However watching them set up their environment and all goof around is quite amusing. It takes days to get the environment set up for a new employee, because with everyone doing it differently, no one knows -exactly- how to do it (it is a very, very, very large application... think Oracle all editions and all related dev tools kind of large).
Then everyone have their own macros, their own little scripts, own little way of doing things... Sometimes they'll talk to each other and realise that someone across the company had a script/macro to do what another has been doing manually for 6 months, etc. What a mess.
One IDE, all of the macros/configs/whatever in a source control directory. Pull it up when someone comes in, big bang done.