Under this law, no-one will be able to be completely sure they are not breaking the law. For example, the Bill even covers clips taken from mainstream films, so if someone decides that clip you have from "Mr and Mrs Smith" is disturbingly violent (because Angelina Jolie kills the man after whipping him) then you could be in trouble. Are we going to have a future full of laws that leave us in a state of fear and anxiety over whether we are criminals or not? It's amazing how they can find the time to pass ridiculous laws like this, but can't find the time for a full and independent inquiry into the Iraq War, or introducing Proportional Representation as they promised.
Of course, you could go and protest about this outside parliament, or a least you could before they made it an offence.
Here in the UK, there was a big fuss recently over the police bugging an MP while he visited one of his constituents in prison. In these kind of cases you have to assume you are being bugged too. That's not to say that covert communication is impossible. If a lawyer took a pad and pencil with him, they could communicate buy writing on that and keeping it close to their chest.
Well we didn't notice it at first because the scope rules of the language (and I guess most languages) were such that a locally declared "i" would override the global. It was a stupendously dumb thing to do though. I've seen all kinds of horrors. When I first joined the company, someone had coded a form using the user interface as the storage mechanism. So instead of having a variable called "percentage", they would just use the label on the form as the variable itself and the code would actually write to it and read from it during calculations.
yeah, I'm simplifying. the basic idea is that a physicist need not be a perfect coder, but avoiding certain egregious habits will help the refactor stage go faster and work better.
Well, I suppose I stopped being a Physicist when I went into software. People coming from University should be under no illusions that they can actually code in a business environment straight away.
i? Surely your company did code reviews?
Not at that stage. There was a lack of management from the top down. No-one was formally placed in charge. Eventually I became senior programmer and I changed everything, with code reviews etc. Even then, time pressure and multiple projects made it impractical to review all code. I pushed to have test driven development, but the extra time required resulted in my being overruled. It was all pretty shoddy really, but lots of small software houses are like that. Even some of the bigger ones too.
Actually the effects were "state of the art". Just that they were nearly 30 years ago.
No chance. "State of the art" at the time was moving the camera instead of having the flimsy spaceship models moving around on sticks. They clearly did not move the cameras, because that would be a very smooth gliding movement, not the horrible wobble you see in the series. Another thing that struck me was how awful some of the matte paintings were. There's a backdrop in "Voices From The Past" that looks like a 3-year old's finger painting. It was all down to the crappy BBC budget I suppose. It's a shame, because the design of the Liberator is very nice.
Part of the problem was the director/Editor I think because they seemed to keep mistakes in rather than do another take. You see Jenna fluffing her lines and looking at the camera quite a bit, but they keep it in!
They made a spoof a while back called "Blake's Junction 7", but I've never managed to find it anywhere. The series actually has a lot of potential. They need to make it gritty. e.g. Are they freedom fighters or terrorists? (think Aeon Flux, the Animation). It shouldn't be black and white. There could be a lot of excitement and intrigue with operations behind enemy lines etc. I suppose it all depends on the budget they get. Will there be enough money to make a decent series, or will it be wobbly spaceships again?
The worst thing they can do is aim it at kids, with Orac as a cute robot or something awful like that.
In your case, partnering with an engineer would help
When I first started out (years back), partnering with an experienced programmer would have helped, yes. Unfortunately everyone at the company was pretty clueless at the time. I taught myself over several years.
All you really need to do is avoid piles of global variables named aa..az.
Well, you need to do more than that. Globals themselves are to be avoided if possible since they potentially couple all of the code together in a horrible spaghetti mess. The company I worked for got some expensive contractors in to to some work once and they added a global variable called "i" into the code. Globals are bad enough, but naming one "i"? I still laugh when I think about it.
Rather than saying that programming is a discipline requiring a fair bit of intelligence, I tend to think that *good* programming requires a fair bit of sensitivity.
I'd rather have intelligent people working for me than sensitive people.
Any Joe Blow can get code to work. Usually they make a hash of it, but it usually works (mostly).
Yeah and then you have to pick up the pieces. That 500 line monster function chews up hours of another programmers time figuring out what it does and then rewriting it. If the people who were in charge of software companies were in charge of building houses, they would stop employing skilled craftsmen and instead grab anyone of the street. Given the task of providing a way into the house, the "builders" would just smash a hole in the wall. It would work, but it's awful and someone else has to fix it.
The problem with saying that programming requires intelligence is that it implies that "programming talent" is something your are born with and that you can't improve yourself.
Whatever your level of intelligence, you can certainly get better at programming, yes. It's still requires intelligence though, and frankly the more, the better. I think greater intelligence helps in identifying the generalities and patterns that tend to pop up in programming. Seeing the bigger picture can save a company a lot of money.
I feel the reason we have so few good programmers is not for lack of intelligence, but for lack of good instruction and training. Almost all jobs are "sink or swim". So the naturally good barely survive and the not so good hide their work.
That's true, particularly in smaller software houses. I never received any on the job training when I first started. The other programmers weren't exactly Yoda figures, so I had to do a lot of reading and I went through several leaps of skill as I learned new concepts (e.g. Design Patterns, Test Driven software). A few years into the job we had some new people come in and I made sure I passed my skills onto them as quickly as possible. I remembered all the misconceptions and problems I had when I started and sure enough, they pretty much matched the issues the new guys had.
This is complicated by the fact that the vast majority of Universities (which train most of the programmers, unfortunately) do not have experienced programmers on staff. So at no point in their careers do most programmers get anything like appropriate training.
Well I did physics, and we weren't really taught how to program. We just did it and solved some Physics problems in Fortran. Most of us went through the whole of university writing programs (on and off) without even knowing the difference between passing by value or by reference. In Computer Science degrees, I trust things are better, but even then, the code they write is probably far removed from the shear volume and inter-relational complexity of business software.
The other problem is that by the time people become really skilled, they feel like it's time to move on.
When you look at all of the costs in the supply chain, textbooks updates (new proofs, spelling, questions, pictures, etc.) orders received, manufacturing and distribution costs, merchandising, etc. And while not all aspects of that example may apply; I believe yes, there is some justification for the price.
Surely the marked increase in the price of hardback books vs paperbacks gives you some clue that the pricing is a tad arbitrary. It goes above and beyond any increase in costs. It's worth looking at Rip-off 101, which was a recent study about practices in the publishing industry.
If your a professor, you have no guarantee that all of students in the course will purchase the book
What does that have to do with a book being made available electronically? If the books are physical there is no guarantee everyone will have a copy either. In fact if a book was available electronically, it's more likely that everyone would have a copy, not less.
While some students will probably donate, more than likely most will not.
I wouldn't be so sure. Radiohead's recent experiment with the "pay what you want" model worked pretty well.
Again, one does not (or at least should not) invest time and effort without due compensation (most professor's salary is not due compensation).
Do you hold that as a general principle? If everyone followed that philosophy, amazingly useful things like Linux would never have been created.
Lastly, making it available electronically, will more than likely have the effect of (especially without a DRM system) everybody copying the book, in which the professor can kiss his "donations" right out the window.
The ease of copying information electronically is precisely why you would adopt a donation/Pay Want you want model. Carting tonnes of text books around is something that should be a historical curiosity by now. Just consider all the pointless transportation costs (with the environmental impact) that physical books create. The cost of publishing electronically is lower, the environmental impact is lower, they are searchable, and it's more convenient in terms of carrying your books with you.
Or worse, some pissed off student decides he doesn't like the professor, so he "modifies" the electronic copy (similar to Wikipedia), so that students no longer have a "clean" copy. Granted, the professor will have a clean copy, but after a while it will get old, re-uploading the correct copy, over and over again.
This would not occur if people were downloading the book from the official source, and even if they got it through other means, it's trivial to check your version is correct. Remember this is electronic information, not ink on paper. If there are any mistakes in the book, students from around the world will point them out quite quickly and because the information and distribution is electronic, the update can happen very quickly. With a solid physical book, there really is no way to update it, other than getting everyone to buy a new revised copy.
I do (even though I get them for free through my university) because I believe that information is a chargeable asset and not a commodity.
Not all information should be chargeable. Should you really have to pay £25 ($50) for each volume of the Feynman Lectures? He's been dead since 1988 so getting paid is not going to be an incentive for him to write any more books. A lot of the books you need for courses tend to be classics and their authors are often dead. Publishing houses make a mint out of these classic books, especially when they are only available in hardback (the cardboard must be made from very rare trees or something).
For more current books, perhaps lecturers should just make their books available electronically and bypass the publishing houses completely. They'd probably make more money by having a "donate" button on their website.
Back in the mid 90s when I was at Uni, there was a lot of complaining over the price of books, e.g. £25 for each volume of the Feynman Lectures on Physics. There was also a lot of anger towards copyrights. I remember a sign in the college Library with a cartoon cat warning students not to photocopy sheet music, and people had written underneath "Music is not just for fat cats to make a profit".
If we could have magically just duplicated our books, we would have been handing them around to everyone and spending the money on beer instead. I'm not saying it's right, but we definitely would have done it. Today that "Magic Duplication" is very easy to do since I'm sure most books have been scanned in by somebody. I can imagine DVD's with thousands of books on them being passed around colleges all over the world.
Not all programmers are uber-elite, and many are only slightly better than not being there at all.
I don't think there's anything elite about writing short concise functions and breaking things up. The problem is when people first go into programming, they make these kinds of mistakes unless there are proper code reviews/training (things which often don't happen). When you are at university, the programs you write tend to be quite short and because of that, you don't realise how bad a programmer you actually are at that stage. It's only when you leap into the workplace and start writing a lot that your inadequacies become evident.
To me, programming is a discipline requiring a fair bit of intelligence, but all to often companies hire programmers like they are just hiring shelf-stackers or something. I think there is a lot more professionalism in Open Source projects than in many software houses.
Pray god I never have to work on code written by these fictitious "most people".
I'd kill any colleague of mine who wrote such a vacuous comment. With a golf club, in front of its cow-orkers to drive the lesson home,
That sort of comment is often written by programmers who put far too much in one function. So much so that the top of the while loop is miles off the screen, so that they actually need the "//end while" to remind them what was going on. I've spent many an hour coming across such monster functions and refactoring them into digestible and reusable pieces.
I once had to remote support a customer in another country and they sent us a little card-sized gadget that displayed a random code that changed every few minutes. It was synchronised (by the clock being pretty accurate I suppose, or possibly by radio signal) to an identical random code list at their site. So whenever we wanted to log in we just looked at the current code on the card, typed it in and at their end the code was checked against the current code.
This sort of set-up could be very useful for people who frequently use public terminals. Your code can still be compromised but the crooks would only have a few minutes to retrieve and use it. Maybe you could even have it so that when you use a code once, the central code verification server invalidates it, so no-one else can log in, even if they do get the code quickly.
I don't believe anything like this exists for the average person wanting to use normal email accounts though. Anyway,
none of this changes the possibility that there are screenshots being taken every few seconds so that all of your private emails will be viewed later anyway.
The service was great while my ISP was Blueyonder, but then the "Bearded Demon" (Richard Branson) and his hooded Virgin Media hordes took them over. Now I can't download a single TV program from ITunes without being throttled into oblivion. What's the point of broadband when you just get throttled when you use it?
...in a human-size robot. We've already seen the amazing Big Dog from Boston Dynamics. How long before we see a human-sized bipedal robot that walks in a fairly human way? This record breaking walking robot just doesn't have the "ooo" factor that Big Dog has.
Up until now, the only reason to develop them for the home market has been VR games, and none of the manufacturers seem to have been interested. Now mobile video is taking off, it may lead to better video glasses. The indicube should be released soon which is a mobile video player with video glasses. They have a resolution of 800x600 and a field of view about equivalent to a 17 inch monitor on your desk. It's not great but I think it may get the public excited about video glasses and prompt the creation of better HMDs. That's what I'm hoping anyway.
Field of view is in many ways more important for immersion that stereovision, because your 3D vision breaks down quite quickly over distance. So its the field of view I really want to see improved. There's little point in having a VR headset if you're just going to get tunnel vision. I look forward to the day when I can walk around some virtual environment and actually look up at a tall building by tilting my head back. Simple things like that will make you feel small, like you are really there. I think it's crazy that with all the processing power we have today, our virtual environments are still stuck behind a little screen.
I'd settle for a decent Head Mounted Display
on
Ready for a CyberWalk?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I've been waiting for one with full human field of view (or as near as possible) with good resolution for the last 20 years. I still can't go to the shops and buy one. Even the ones that cost $20,000 are not that great in terms of Field of view. We have the computer power for some very impressive virtual environments yet the visual hardware is completely lacking. I only hope the popularity of mobile video spurs the development of better video glasses technology. Immersive (at least visually) virtual reality is long overdue now.
Slashdot Mirror
Under this law, no-one will be able to be completely sure they are not breaking the law. For example, the Bill even covers clips taken from mainstream films, so if someone decides that clip you have from "Mr and Mrs Smith" is disturbingly violent (because Angelina Jolie kills the man after whipping him) then you could be in trouble. Are we going to have a future full of laws that leave us in a state of fear and anxiety over whether we are criminals or not? It's amazing how they can find the time to pass ridiculous laws like this, but can't find the time for a full and independent inquiry into the Iraq War, or introducing Proportional Representation as they promised.
Of course, you could go and protest about this outside parliament, or a least you could before they made it an offence.
Here in the UK, there was a big fuss recently over the police bugging an MP while he visited one of his constituents in prison. In these kind of cases you have to assume you are being bugged too. That's not to say that covert communication is impossible. If a lawyer took a pad and pencil with him, they could communicate buy writing on that and keeping it close to their chest.
That's true (at least in the UK where I am). Even if the windows were smothered in fingerprints, they wouldn't bother taking them.
Well we didn't notice it at first because the scope rules of the language (and I guess most languages) were such that a locally declared "i" would override the global. It was a stupendously dumb thing to do though. I've seen all kinds of horrors. When I first joined the company, someone had coded a form using the user interface as the storage mechanism. So instead of having a variable called "percentage", they would just use the label on the form as the variable itself and the code would actually write to it and read from it during calculations.
Well, I suppose I stopped being a Physicist when I went into software. People coming from University should be under no illusions that they can actually code in a business environment straight away.
i? Surely your company did code reviews?
Not at that stage. There was a lack of management from the top down. No-one was formally placed in charge. Eventually I became senior programmer and I changed everything, with code reviews etc. Even then, time pressure and multiple projects made it impractical to review all code. I pushed to have test driven development, but the extra time required resulted in my being overruled. It was all pretty shoddy really, but lots of small software houses are like that. Even some of the bigger ones too.
No chance. "State of the art" at the time was moving the camera instead of having the flimsy spaceship models moving around on sticks. They clearly did not move the cameras, because that would be a very smooth gliding movement, not the horrible wobble you see in the series. Another thing that struck me was how awful some of the matte paintings were. There's a backdrop in "Voices From The Past" that looks like a 3-year old's finger painting. It was all down to the crappy BBC budget I suppose. It's a shame, because the design of the Liberator is very nice.
Part of the problem was the director/Editor I think because they seemed to keep mistakes in rather than do another take. You see Jenna fluffing her lines and looking at the camera quite a bit, but they keep it in!
Avon (Paul Darrow) did a very good job I thought.
They made a spoof a while back called "Blake's Junction 7", but I've never managed to find it anywhere. The series actually has a lot of potential. They need to make it gritty. e.g. Are they freedom fighters or terrorists? (think Aeon Flux, the Animation). It shouldn't be black and white. There could be a lot of excitement and intrigue with operations behind enemy lines etc. I suppose it all depends on the budget they get. Will there be enough money to make a decent series, or will it be wobbly spaceships again?
The worst thing they can do is aim it at kids, with Orac as a cute robot or something awful like that.
When I first started out (years back), partnering with an experienced programmer would have helped, yes. Unfortunately everyone at the company was pretty clueless at the time. I taught myself over several years.
All you really need to do is avoid piles of global variables named aa..az.
Well, you need to do more than that. Globals themselves are to be avoided if possible since they potentially couple all of the code together in a horrible spaghetti mess. The company I worked for got some expensive contractors in to to some work once and they added a global variable called "i" into the code. Globals are bad enough, but naming one "i"? I still laugh when I think about it.
I'd rather have intelligent people working for me than sensitive people.
Any Joe Blow can get code to work. Usually they make a hash of it, but it usually works (mostly).
Yeah and then you have to pick up the pieces. That 500 line monster function chews up hours of another programmers time figuring out what it does and then rewriting it. If the people who were in charge of software companies were in charge of building houses, they would stop employing skilled craftsmen and instead grab anyone of the street. Given the task of providing a way into the house, the "builders" would just smash a hole in the wall. It would work, but it's awful and someone else has to fix it.
The problem with saying that programming requires intelligence is that it implies that "programming talent" is something your are born with and that you can't improve yourself.
Whatever your level of intelligence, you can certainly get better at programming, yes. It's still requires intelligence though, and frankly the more, the better. I think greater intelligence helps in identifying the generalities and patterns that tend to pop up in programming. Seeing the bigger picture can save a company a lot of money.
I feel the reason we have so few good programmers is not for lack of intelligence, but for lack of good instruction and training. Almost all jobs are "sink or swim". So the naturally good barely survive and the not so good hide their work.
That's true, particularly in smaller software houses. I never received any on the job training when I first started. The other programmers weren't exactly Yoda figures, so I had to do a lot of reading and I went through several leaps of skill as I learned new concepts (e.g. Design Patterns, Test Driven software). A few years into the job we had some new people come in and I made sure I passed my skills onto them as quickly as possible. I remembered all the misconceptions and problems I had when I started and sure enough, they pretty much matched the issues the new guys had.
This is complicated by the fact that the vast majority of Universities (which train most of the programmers, unfortunately) do not have experienced programmers on staff. So at no point in their careers do most programmers get anything like appropriate training.
Well I did physics, and we weren't really taught how to program. We just did it and solved some Physics problems in Fortran. Most of us went through the whole of university writing programs (on and off) without even knowing the difference between passing by value or by reference. In Computer Science degrees, I trust things are better, but even then, the code they write is probably far removed from the shear volume and inter-relational complexity of business software.
The other problem is that by the time people become really skilled, they feel like it's time to move on.
Surely the marked increase in the price of hardback books vs paperbacks gives you some clue that the pricing is a tad arbitrary. It goes above and beyond any increase in costs. It's worth looking at Rip-off 101, which was a recent study about practices in the publishing industry.
If your a professor, you have no guarantee that all of students in the course will purchase the book
What does that have to do with a book being made available electronically? If the books are physical there is no guarantee everyone will have a copy either. In fact if a book was available electronically, it's more likely that everyone would have a copy, not less.
While some students will probably donate, more than likely most will not.
I wouldn't be so sure. Radiohead's recent experiment with the "pay what you want" model worked pretty well.
Again, one does not (or at least should not) invest time and effort without due compensation (most professor's salary is not due compensation).
Do you hold that as a general principle? If everyone followed that philosophy, amazingly useful things like Linux would never have been created.
Lastly, making it available electronically, will more than likely have the effect of (especially without a DRM system) everybody copying the book, in which the professor can kiss his "donations" right out the window.
The ease of copying information electronically is precisely why you would adopt a donation/Pay Want you want model. Carting tonnes of text books around is something that should be a historical curiosity by now. Just consider all the pointless transportation costs (with the environmental impact) that physical books create. The cost of publishing electronically is lower, the environmental impact is lower, they are searchable, and it's more convenient in terms of carrying your books with you.
Or worse, some pissed off student decides he doesn't like the professor, so he "modifies" the electronic copy (similar to Wikipedia), so that students no longer have a "clean" copy. Granted, the professor will have a clean copy, but after a while it will get old, re-uploading the correct copy, over and over again.
This would not occur if people were downloading the book from the official source, and even if they got it through other means, it's trivial to check your version is correct. Remember this is electronic information, not ink on paper. If there are any mistakes in the book, students from around the world will point them out quite quickly and because the information and distribution is electronic, the update can happen very quickly. With a solid physical book, there really is no way to update it, other than getting everyone to buy a new revised copy.
Not all information should be chargeable. Should you really have to pay £25 ($50) for each volume of the Feynman Lectures? He's been dead since 1988 so getting paid is not going to be an incentive for him to write any more books. A lot of the books you need for courses tend to be classics and their authors are often dead. Publishing houses make a mint out of these classic books, especially when they are only available in hardback (the cardboard must be made from very rare trees or something).
For more current books, perhaps lecturers should just make their books available electronically and bypass the publishing houses completely. They'd probably make more money by having a "donate" button on their website.
Back in the mid 90s when I was at Uni, there was a lot of complaining over the price of books, e.g. £25 for each volume of the Feynman Lectures on Physics. There was also a lot of anger towards copyrights. I remember a sign in the college Library with a cartoon cat warning students not to photocopy sheet music, and people had written underneath "Music is not just for fat cats to make a profit".
If we could have magically just duplicated our books, we would have been handing them around to everyone and spending the money on beer instead. I'm not saying it's right, but we definitely would have done it. Today that "Magic Duplication" is very easy to do since I'm sure most books have been scanned in by somebody. I can imagine DVD's with thousands of books on them being passed around colleges all over the world.
I don't think there's anything elite about writing short concise functions and breaking things up. The problem is when people first go into programming, they make these kinds of mistakes unless there are proper code reviews/training (things which often don't happen). When you are at university, the programs you write tend to be quite short and because of that, you don't realise how bad a programmer you actually are at that stage. It's only when you leap into the workplace and start writing a lot that your inadequacies become evident.
To me, programming is a discipline requiring a fair bit of intelligence, but all to often companies hire programmers like they are just hiring shelf-stackers or something. I think there is a lot more professionalism in Open Source projects than in many software houses.
That sort of comment is often written by programmers who put far too much in one function. So much so that the top of the while loop is miles off the screen, so that they actually need the "//end while" to remind them what was going on. I've spent many an hour coming across such monster functions and refactoring them into digestible and reusable pieces.
Mmmm, tangy
I once had to remote support a customer in another country and they sent us a little card-sized gadget that displayed a random code that changed every few minutes. It was synchronised (by the clock being pretty accurate I suppose, or possibly by radio signal) to an identical random code list at their site. So whenever we wanted to log in we just looked at the current code on the card, typed it in and at their end the code was checked against the current code.
This sort of set-up could be very useful for people who frequently use public terminals. Your code can still be compromised but the crooks would only have a few minutes to retrieve and use it. Maybe you could even have it so that when you use a code once, the central code verification server invalidates it, so no-one else can log in, even if they do get the code quickly.
I don't believe anything like this exists for the average person wanting to use normal email accounts though. Anyway, none of this changes the possibility that there are screenshots being taken every few seconds so that all of your private emails will be viewed later anyway.
Please!
After the unreliable Virgin trains, it has to be his dumbest move. What next? Virgin logos on anti-personnel mines and cluster bomblets?
Perhaps the Bearded Demon himself could redeem himself by coming out and publicly supporting net neutrality.
Do you mean this guy? http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/88/Astronaut-EVA.jpg/600px-Astronaut-EVA.jpg
He probably knows quite a bit
The service was great while my ISP was Blueyonder, but then the "Bearded Demon" (Richard Branson) and his hooded Virgin Media hordes took them over. Now I can't download a single TV program from ITunes without being throttled into oblivion. What's the point of broadband when you just get throttled when you use it?
...in a human-size robot. We've already seen the amazing Big Dog from Boston Dynamics. How long before we see a human-sized bipedal robot that walks in a fairly human way? This record breaking walking robot just doesn't have the "ooo" factor that Big Dog has.
Oh I don't know. I am sure dogs would love to play VR games such as "Slow Limping Cats 2".
Up until now, the only reason to develop them for the home market has been VR games, and none of the manufacturers seem to have been interested. Now mobile video is taking off, it may lead to better video glasses. The indicube should be released soon which is a mobile video player with video glasses. They have a resolution of 800x600 and a field of view about equivalent to a 17 inch monitor on your desk. It's not great but I think it may get the public excited about video glasses and prompt the creation of better HMDs. That's what I'm hoping anyway.
Field of view is in many ways more important for immersion that stereovision, because your 3D vision breaks down quite quickly over distance. So its the field of view I really want to see improved. There's little point in having a VR headset if you're just going to get tunnel vision. I look forward to the day when I can walk around some virtual environment and actually look up at a tall building by tilting my head back. Simple things like that will make you feel small, like you are really there. I think it's crazy that with all the processing power we have today, our virtual environments are still stuck behind a little screen.
I've been waiting for one with full human field of view (or as near as possible) with good resolution for the last 20 years. I still can't go to the shops and buy one. Even the ones that cost $20,000 are not that great in terms of Field of view. We have the computer power for some very impressive virtual environments yet the visual hardware is completely lacking. I only hope the popularity of mobile video spurs the development of better video glasses technology. Immersive (at least visually) virtual reality is long overdue now.