When I was a kid, I was sometimes told off with the "I'm older than you so I know better" argument, and it would piss me off every single time. How can someone be right and not explain why they are right?!?
As you get older, you will come to realize that this argument is most often true. Age and experience counts for a lot.
However, on the flipside, as you get older, you forget that this argument is not always true, and sometimes the kids will actually be right even though your experience tells you they're not.
Workers in these countries do tend to have a better work ethic than Western programmers. That's because you look at the job with your eyes and your preconceptions. You have to look at it with the eyes of someone from the outsourcing country. What are their job options? Low-paid farming or factory work? There's usually none or very little service industry, and along comes a company from the rich west, they build a relatively fancy office with air condition and office chairs and desks and computers and internet. And if that wasn't enough, they announce that they're gonna PAY you for being in those shiny offices and work. You'll get PAID for using office equipment that is much better than what you could possibly afford to buy for yourself. And you'll even get paid better than any job offered by a local employer.
So if you have the skillset for that job, you would work VERY HARD to keep it, to prove that you're good enough to stay, because the alternatives are so much worse. But for us in the western world, if we lose our IT job, there's lots and lots of similar jobs, or we could move to another industry and still have a comfy workplace. We take it for granted.
On the flipside though, and this is something I learnt from Slashdot many years ago, is that those outsourced jobs also attract a lot of scammers since the company will typically hire a lot of people, fresh students etc, there's few ways of knowing if someone has the skills or not since there's no existing industry to get skilled employees from. And since the job is so comfortable compared to the local options, it's worth a shot to just land the job even though you are completely unqualified for it. It's also possible to use the language barrier and distance barrier to delay and obfuscate and cheat and mask the fact that you're totally unqualified.
There's a reason outsourced labour is cheap, the lack of established industry is one.
If you're good, you don't have to worry about being outsourced, you will still have work to do. There will always be a need for local IT talent. There is a tremendous value in having developers close to your office and close to your market, that understands the domain and can contribute above and beyond what you can write down in a specification.
As for the reason to outsource... I've yet to see a successful outsourcing up close, the projects I've seen always tended to drag out much longer than needed and consume lots of local resources to manage it.
I've seen projects where a local 3-man team of developers outperformed 20- or 40-man teams in the outsourcing location. Sure, the outsourced workers were 10 times cheaper but the whole thing ended up more costly because outsourcing still needs a lot of local resources.
I'm sure there are successful stories of outsourcing, I've yet to see one example up close, so I'm not worrying about my own job even though I've been outsourced once.:-)
Yeah, one up for Stardock, definitely. I love the way they treat their customers.
I bought Sins of a Solar Empire, was offered to download it immediately (which I did) and received my hardcopy in the mail a few days later. No DRM bullshit whatsoever. No treating me like a criminal. Just appreciation of business.
What about just the SIZE of the US? Every single time this kind of news pop up there's always someone crying "But the US is so laaaaarge!!! Bwaaaahhhh! Not fair!". And every single time this stupid argument is thoroughly rebutted. Have you never seen this? Are you new here?
There are countries that are less densely populated and more densely populated, there are countries that are more urbanized and less urbanized, and there are countries with more government subsidies and less government subsidies than the US, and every variation inbetween, that still beat the US on that list.
Even if you break it down and compare US states against comparable countries or US cities against comparable cities, the US still deserves its rating. Size, population density and urbanization are not the factors that cause the US to come in at 15th place, instead it is the lack of competition.
Funnily enough, your problems with throttling and censorship are also caused by the lack of competition, simply because your greedy ISPs can get away with it. They save money by throttling and monitoring, therefore they do it.
Over here, some ISPs market themselves saying that they will never throttle or monitor, and this means that the rest of the ISPs can't do that for fear of losing market share to those that don't.
In a healthy market consumers get what consumers want, which is cheap, fast and reliable internet. In a non-healthy market consumers get the least possible the monopoly can get away with providing. Are you getting what you want? No. Is your market healthy? No. There's the problem, not the size of your continent.
So you would rather waste developer's time, which costs actual money, to create a system where people would get back the same music, with the same ID3 tags and the same name, and where those files were somehow created from a digital library of music and a db of what the file looked like when the user uploaded it?
Yeah, great idea. Call me old-fashioned, but complex solutions to non-problems are bad. Storage is so cheap now that it's practicaly free. Think of it as free, and stop wasting resources that are actually scarce to save space.
From TFA:
MySQL had said it would release 5.1 in the first quarter, which ended March 31, and some developers have been getting impatient for the new release. What?!? I've been running 5.1 on a production server for almost a year now.
Probably, we should have called it 6.0, because there's so much stuff in there and we've been working on it for a couple of years. What?!? The 6.0 alpha has been available for half a year, it's already in developement, OF COURSE you can't call 5.1 6.0 since both are in development. What the hell is this guy on?
the thing is, if you tell a less-capable programmer that he doesn't have to worry about memory, he'll think christmas has come early and he will stop worrying about memory... as a result his code will become poorer, resource consumption will increase dramatically, performance will tank and scalability will be non-existent. And his code will become even less maintainable.
Now make him program in a language where he is punished for cocking things up, he will *have* to become a better programmer or nothing he does will get released. That's a rather elitist and not very constructive standpoint. You want higher barriers of entry to programming so that YOUR job gets easier, but the problem is that you would get much fewer applications done that way, and that in turn means that you wouldn't have that much work to do, and then you'd be fired.:)
I'm a big fan of low barriers of entry. Yes, you will get five million schmucks producing five billion memory-leaking resource-hogging maintenance nightmares, but you have to remember that those corporate applications are created to make something easier, to save work, and they usually do that, despite being the horrors they are. Also, some of those "programmers" rise to the task and become real programmers, and if not for the low barrier of entry, they might not ever have done so. We need future generations of good programmers as well, and if you say "It's C++ or NOTHING" you'll scare away a lot of presumtive programmers for no good reason other than to satisfy your own elitism.
Computers have gotten so fast and powerful that there's no need to optimize code anymore. This explains why everyone's programming in Java and.NET. I was with you up until the above. What? No, no. Java and.Net are popular because you get the power and flexibility of C++ and other compiled OO languages, but you get the increased productivity that managed code gives you. It is a *lot* easier to create an application in Java or.Net that is good enough, runs fast enough, and has no memory leaks, than it is to create the same application in C++.
There is a bunch of stuff where C++ is a much, much better choice than Java or.Net, but for the majority of corporate applications, it is overkill.
That people create stupid applications and don't know the basics of efficient algorithms isn't something you can blame managed languages for, if those people had to do their stuff in C++, it would still be horribly inefficient, only now with more memory leaks.
I highly recommend not teaching CS students Java as their first language... Me neither, Lisp is a much better choice.
Well, come to Northern Europe and you can see for yourself what it's like.
It's so easy to forget how incredibly secular we are here, and how incredibly religious the rest of the world are in comparison. However, all studies show that people are becoming more and more secular. Religiosity drops ~10% per generation, you in the US are just a few generations behind us in Europe, but you'll be at our position soon, and then you won't really have this problem anymore.
I'm a CS major, but I can't think of a better way to teach programming than the way it was done at my university.
Our first language was Scheme. It's a simpler variant of lisp, it has a super-simple syntax, and it is very easy to demonstrate algorithms without being bogged down by syntax. The second language was C, it has more syntax, and it introdcues concepts such as compiling and linking which is part of most useful languages.:-) Some time after that we did assembler, and we even had a hardware class where we built our own microprocessor, designed an instruction set for it, and made a program using our instruction set. We also did Smalltalk and Java for object orientation.
So all in all my university gave me an education that spanned the entire length from hardware to high-level languages, and to me it has been invaluable for realising what you trade off at each level, and what you gain.
The only important thing to know about SQL is that it is a declarative language, i.e. in the same family as Prolog. Common to them is that you state how you would want the world to look like, and let the language runtime figure out how to actually do it. This is totally contrary to imperative languages which is a series of explicit instructions, i.e. "first do this, then do that." In SQL you simply state "I wish to have the data that satisfies these criteria. Give it to me. Now."
It still fails to cover Guitar Hero, because claim 1a says:
a musical instrument, the musical instrument generating an instrument audio signal at an instrument audio output, That, and all the variants of it, consistently mention that the device you use for participation is something which itself produces audio, and that the entire system somehow intercepts this audio to change the experience. The Guitar Hero controller does not create audio output (other than irritating clicking noises:) ) and I think that that might be enough to claim that they are not violating the patent.
So far, I haven't seen any technological solutions to this? Why? Isn't this Slashdot?:)
Something I'd like to see is boarding passes as devices. You check in, and you get a token, a gadget, which has a little battery, a little display, some simple flashing lights, and wifi connectivity to the airport system.
So you need to get through security, and you're a bit late, and you have no idea who in front of you is more late than you, or if it's ok to skip the line. But if the airport has these boarding passes, you can build in a priority tracking system. Is your boarding pass blinking green? If so, skip the line to security. Is it not blinking? Fuck off, stand in line like everyone else. Big signs at security saying that you should let people through with blinking tokens.
Ok, you didn't get a gate number at check-in, so you have to stand around looking at the monitors in the airport. You can't go anywhere else, because the gate you need to be at might be far away, so no dawdling. If the boarding passes are connected, they can be updated in real-time, make a little beep, and display your gate on itself.
Also, passengers that are late or forgot their departure time and hold up the flight (graaoorrrgghh!!) could have their boarding pass remind them about where they should be. Make the pass beep and blink more, the more late the passenger is. No more relying on people listening to the speakers, which they don't.
Finally, boarding. So, making people board in the right order is hard. With a little blinkenlights it'll be easier. Is your pass blinking green? Then go board. Is it red? Fuck off, wait until your turn. No more big groups of boarding (passengers on row 44 to 28, please board, bla bla bla), you can individually signal each passenger that he or she should board, making sure to fill the plane up from the rear.
I don't care about the faith, but the church is a greedy money-grabbing, brain-washing, isolationist, self-perpetuating and destructive movement. Reading about how former members are harassed makes my skin crawl. Reading how former members are still scarred by it many years afterwards make me really sad. Reading about how the church uses its accumulated wealth to shield itself from everything makes me angry.
No, it is my business to stop the church. I will not stand idly by.
No, it's about showing the world that if enough people stand up against the church of scientology, they can't harm you. The church's policy of harassing and silencing critics only works against small groups, it's totally ineffective against large groups, so you need to show everyone that large groups are willing to stand up against them.
Just because you found your comfort-zone at the level C is at, doesn't mean that everyone will be comfortable there, or will achieve maximum productivity.
A higher-level programming language will always be higher in productivity, i.e. it's faster to write code in it, given that the language is capable of solving the task at hand. This means that for the absolute majority of programming jobs out there, Java or equivalent is the best tool for the job. I'm so tired of old farts like you who do not understand this and always whine about THEIR comfort-zone and absolutely cannot realize why other programmers are comfortable elsewhere.
If you program in assembler, you are one step above the hardware, and you have to trust others to have done their job properly, you have to trust the hardware designers.
If you program in C, you take one more step up. You gain in productivity by getting data types and a syntax that makes it easier to follow what a program does, but you have to trust that the compiler writers did their job properly. You obviously have no problem doing this, since you advocate C.
If you program in C++, you take one more step up. You gain in productivity by getting encapsulation and object orientation, but you have to trust that the compiler writers did their job properly. You seem to have no problem doing this.
If you program in Java or C#, you take one more step up. You gain in productivity by getting memory management and class libraries, but you have to trust that the compiler writers and VM writers did their job properly. This you seem unable to do.
As programming advances, we will have higher and higher levels of programming languages, that rely on bigger and bigger foundations, but are faster to program in, that give people a higher productivity by removing boring/unnecessary/tedious tasks to the foundation.
A good CS program will teach its students the entire height of languages, you should learn to do something at every level of programming. But advocating that the best language would somehow always be in the middle of that stack is pretty stupid.
Then again, in 10 years time we will have old Java farts whining about whatever languages and paradigms have appeared above it, and they will argue that you should learn a bit of everything, but that all languages after Java is a waste of time...
Like I said, it falls deaf ears. If you think modern IDEs are useless "click-click and dialog boxes" and that they are smart tools that guide people, you are mistaken. Emacs and Vi have no semantic understanding of your code. They can't tell two variables apart that have the same name but are in different scopes. They can't show you where a variable was defined. They can't show you where a variable was used. They can't help you rename a variable in its scope. They can't tell you when the interface you are inheriting from changed so that your class now needs to implement one more function. When you read through others' code, you need to read all of it and build a map of it in your head.
Modern IDEs like Visual Studio and Eclipse are tools that help you with all of the above. You still need to know how to program, you still need to know how to structure your programs, but for navigating, changing, and reading code, they help you a lot more than a mere text editor can do.
But you will never realize this, because you are stuck in your comfort zone, you think your text editor has everything in the world one could ask for, and that people who use IDEs are point and click morons who can't really program. I'm so sorry for you. I hope I won't end up like you when something better than IDEs appear.
There is a large amount of programmers who found their comfort zone in certain loosely-typed languages, typically they did a lot of C, moved on to Perl and realized that they were much more productive in Perl, but not really realizing why, only thinking that Perl must be some holy grail. They are programmers who have never used Visual Studio or Eclipse or similar IDEs for strongly typed languages, they have *no* *idea* what refactoring is, and what it can do for your productivity, or how easy it makes your job of reading other's code with functions like "find usage".
They're used to getting no help from their editors, they're used to manual search and replace, and they're used to small-team projects where that kind of tools actually work. And since they're stuck in that comfort-zone with those languages where you *cannot* make tools like VS or Eclipse, they will never learn their power.
The lesson here is that we who use modern IDEs, we will get bypassed by something in the future, and we will be stuck in our comfort zones. Will we move on?
The GPL, and all other licenses based in copyrights, only kick in when you perform the actual copying. Say, for example, that you modify MySQL somehow. If you acquired MySQL under the GPL, and you wish to DISTRIBUTE this modified version, you have to abide by the GPL, and give out the source-code for your modifications alongside. This is the only way the GPL can kick in currently, when someone wishes to distribute modifications of GPL software.
But say that instead of modifying MySQL and making a downloadable application that runs on the user's computer, I make a web application. I still use MySQL on my server, and I use my code for the actual web application, and this combined essentially forms a derived work of MySQL, and if I were to distribute this application, I would also have to give out the source-code for my web app for free. But I'm not distributing it, I'm only making it available through my website, and because GPL only kicks in during distribution, I'm free to use as much GPL software as I possibly want for my web application without ever releasing any source code.
This is what this AGPL wants to stop. If MySQL was distributed under it, then everyone who built a web app using MySQL, would also have to give away the source code for their web app, if they make it available to users.
Needless to say, this is not going to be very popular with companies. I can't imagine Google or Facebook or MySpace or similar websites ever wanting to give away their source-code, since it contains all the trade secrets, everything that gives them the edge over the competition. I work for a small company and we have our own web application that is backed by some GPL software, but we would never want to give away the code we made ourselves, that would be suicide for us as a company.
Slashdot Mirror
When I was a kid, I was sometimes told off with the "I'm older than you so I know better" argument, and it would piss me off every single time. How can someone be right and not explain why they are right?!?
As you get older, you will come to realize that this argument is most often true. Age and experience counts for a lot.
However, on the flipside, as you get older, you forget that this argument is not always true, and sometimes the kids will actually be right even though your experience tells you they're not.
So if you have the skillset for that job, you would work VERY HARD to keep it, to prove that you're good enough to stay, because the alternatives are so much worse. But for us in the western world, if we lose our IT job, there's lots and lots of similar jobs, or we could move to another industry and still have a comfy workplace. We take it for granted.
On the flipside though, and this is something I learnt from Slashdot many years ago, is that those outsourced jobs also attract a lot of scammers since the company will typically hire a lot of people, fresh students etc, there's few ways of knowing if someone has the skills or not since there's no existing industry to get skilled employees from. And since the job is so comfortable compared to the local options, it's worth a shot to just land the job even though you are completely unqualified for it. It's also possible to use the language barrier and distance barrier to delay and obfuscate and cheat and mask the fact that you're totally unqualified.
There's a reason outsourced labour is cheap, the lack of established industry is one.
If you're good, you don't have to worry about being outsourced, you will still have work to do. There will always be a need for local IT talent. There is a tremendous value in having developers close to your office and close to your market, that understands the domain and can contribute above and beyond what you can write down in a specification.
:-)
As for the reason to outsource... I've yet to see a successful outsourcing up close, the projects I've seen always tended to drag out much longer than needed and consume lots of local resources to manage it.
I've seen projects where a local 3-man team of developers outperformed 20- or 40-man teams in the outsourcing location. Sure, the outsourced workers were 10 times cheaper but the whole thing ended up more costly because outsourcing still needs a lot of local resources.
I'm sure there are successful stories of outsourcing, I've yet to see one example up close, so I'm not worrying about my own job even though I've been outsourced once.
Yeah, one up for Stardock, definitely. I love the way they treat their customers.
I bought Sins of a Solar Empire, was offered to download it immediately (which I did) and received my hardcopy in the mail a few days later. No DRM bullshit whatsoever. No treating me like a criminal. Just appreciation of business.
There are countries that are less densely populated and more densely populated, there are countries that are more urbanized and less urbanized, and there are countries with more government subsidies and less government subsidies than the US, and every variation inbetween, that still beat the US on that list.
Even if you break it down and compare US states against comparable countries or US cities against comparable cities, the US still deserves its rating. Size, population density and urbanization are not the factors that cause the US to come in at 15th place, instead it is the lack of competition.
Funnily enough, your problems with throttling and censorship are also caused by the lack of competition, simply because your greedy ISPs can get away with it. They save money by throttling and monitoring, therefore they do it.
Over here, some ISPs market themselves saying that they will never throttle or monitor, and this means that the rest of the ISPs can't do that for fear of losing market share to those that don't.
In a healthy market consumers get what consumers want, which is cheap, fast and reliable internet. In a non-healthy market consumers get the least possible the monopoly can get away with providing. Are you getting what you want? No. Is your market healthy? No. There's the problem, not the size of your continent.
So you would rather waste developer's time, which costs actual money, to create a system where people would get back the same music, with the same ID3 tags and the same name, and where those files were somehow created from a digital library of music and a db of what the file looked like when the user uploaded it?
Yeah, great idea. Call me old-fashioned, but complex solutions to non-problems are bad. Storage is so cheap now that it's practicaly free. Think of it as free, and stop wasting resources that are actually scarce to save space.
Now make him program in a language where he is punished for cocking things up, he will *have* to become a better programmer or nothing he does will get released. That's a rather elitist and not very constructive standpoint. You want higher barriers of entry to programming so that YOUR job gets easier, but the problem is that you would get much fewer applications done that way, and that in turn means that you wouldn't have that much work to do, and then you'd be fired.
I'm a big fan of low barriers of entry. Yes, you will get five million schmucks producing five billion memory-leaking resource-hogging maintenance nightmares, but you have to remember that those corporate applications are created to make something easier, to save work, and they usually do that, despite being the horrors they are. Also, some of those "programmers" rise to the task and become real programmers, and if not for the low barrier of entry, they might not ever have done so. We need future generations of good programmers as well, and if you say "It's C++ or NOTHING" you'll scare away a lot of presumtive programmers for no good reason other than to satisfy your own elitism.
And that's bad in the long run.
There is a bunch of stuff where C++ is a much, much better choice than Java or
That people create stupid applications and don't know the basics of efficient algorithms isn't something you can blame managed languages for, if those people had to do their stuff in C++, it would still be horribly inefficient, only now with more memory leaks. I highly recommend not teaching CS students Java as their first language... Me neither, Lisp is a much better choice.
Well, come to Northern Europe and you can see for yourself what it's like.
It's so easy to forget how incredibly secular we are here, and how incredibly religious the rest of the world are in comparison. However, all studies show that people are becoming more and more secular. Religiosity drops ~10% per generation, you in the US are just a few generations behind us in Europe, but you'll be at our position soon, and then you won't really have this problem anymore.
I'm a CS major, but I can't think of a better way to teach programming than the way it was done at my university.
:-) Some time after that we did assembler, and we even had a hardware class where we built our own microprocessor, designed an instruction set for it, and made a program using our instruction set. We also did Smalltalk and Java for object orientation.
Our first language was Scheme. It's a simpler variant of lisp, it has a super-simple syntax, and it is very easy to demonstrate algorithms without being bogged down by syntax. The second language was C, it has more syntax, and it introdcues concepts such as compiling and linking which is part of most useful languages.
So all in all my university gave me an education that spanned the entire length from hardware to high-level languages, and to me it has been invaluable for realising what you trade off at each level, and what you gain.
The only important thing to know about SQL is that it is a declarative language, i.e. in the same family as Prolog. Common to them is that you state how you would want the world to look like, and let the language runtime figure out how to actually do it. This is totally contrary to imperative languages which is a series of explicit instructions, i.e. "first do this, then do that." In SQL you simply state "I wish to have the data that satisfies these criteria. Give it to me. Now."
So far, I haven't seen any technological solutions to this? Why? Isn't this Slashdot? :)
Something I'd like to see is boarding passes as devices. You check in, and you get a token, a gadget, which has a little battery, a little display, some simple flashing lights, and wifi connectivity to the airport system.
So you need to get through security, and you're a bit late, and you have no idea who in front of you is more late than you, or if it's ok to skip the line. But if the airport has these boarding passes, you can build in a priority tracking system. Is your boarding pass blinking green? If so, skip the line to security. Is it not blinking? Fuck off, stand in line like everyone else. Big signs at security saying that you should let people through with blinking tokens.
Ok, you didn't get a gate number at check-in, so you have to stand around looking at the monitors in the airport. You can't go anywhere else, because the gate you need to be at might be far away, so no dawdling. If the boarding passes are connected, they can be updated in real-time, make a little beep, and display your gate on itself.
Also, passengers that are late or forgot their departure time and hold up the flight (graaoorrrgghh!!) could have their boarding pass remind them about where they should be. Make the pass beep and blink more, the more late the passenger is. No more relying on people listening to the speakers, which they don't.
Finally, boarding. So, making people board in the right order is hard. With a little blinkenlights it'll be easier. Is your pass blinking green? Then go board. Is it red? Fuck off, wait until your turn. No more big groups of boarding (passengers on row 44 to 28, please board, bla bla bla), you can individually signal each passenger that he or she should board, making sure to fill the plane up from the rear.
It was called the Coleco Vision, and it was CLEARLY inferior to the FANTASTIC Intellivision console! :-)
I don't care about the faith, but the church is a greedy money-grabbing, brain-washing, isolationist, self-perpetuating and destructive movement. Reading about how former members are harassed makes my skin crawl. Reading how former members are still scarred by it many years afterwards make me really sad. Reading about how the church uses its accumulated wealth to shield itself from everything makes me angry.
No, it is my business to stop the church. I will not stand idly by.
No, it's about showing the world that if enough people stand up against the church of scientology, they can't harm you. The church's policy of harassing and silencing critics only works against small groups, it's totally ineffective against large groups, so you need to show everyone that large groups are willing to stand up against them.
Thank you.
Oh, I type a few letters of that and then ctrl-space to let my IDE fill in the rest for me, including giving good suggestions for variable names. :-)
Just because you found your comfort-zone at the level C is at, doesn't mean that everyone will be comfortable there, or will achieve maximum productivity.
A higher-level programming language will always be higher in productivity, i.e. it's faster to write code in it, given that the language is capable of solving the task at hand. This means that for the absolute majority of programming jobs out there, Java or equivalent is the best tool for the job. I'm so tired of old farts like you who do not understand this and always whine about THEIR comfort-zone and absolutely cannot realize why other programmers are comfortable elsewhere.
If you program in assembler, you are one step above the hardware, and you have to trust others to have done their job properly, you have to trust the hardware designers.
If you program in C, you take one more step up. You gain in productivity by getting data types and a syntax that makes it easier to follow what a program does, but you have to trust that the compiler writers did their job properly. You obviously have no problem doing this, since you advocate C.
If you program in C++, you take one more step up. You gain in productivity by getting encapsulation and object orientation, but you have to trust that the compiler writers did their job properly. You seem to have no problem doing this.
If you program in Java or C#, you take one more step up. You gain in productivity by getting memory management and class libraries, but you have to trust that the compiler writers and VM writers did their job properly. This you seem unable to do.
As programming advances, we will have higher and higher levels of programming languages, that rely on bigger and bigger foundations, but are faster to program in, that give people a higher productivity by removing boring/unnecessary/tedious tasks to the foundation.
A good CS program will teach its students the entire height of languages, you should learn to do something at every level of programming. But advocating that the best language would somehow always be in the middle of that stack is pretty stupid.
Then again, in 10 years time we will have old Java farts whining about whatever languages and paradigms have appeared above it, and they will argue that you should learn a bit of everything, but that all languages after Java is a waste of time...
Like I said, it falls deaf ears. If you think modern IDEs are useless "click-click and dialog boxes" and that they are smart tools that guide people, you are mistaken. Emacs and Vi have no semantic understanding of your code. They can't tell two variables apart that have the same name but are in different scopes. They can't show you where a variable was defined. They can't show you where a variable was used. They can't help you rename a variable in its scope. They can't tell you when the interface you are inheriting from changed so that your class now needs to implement one more function. When you read through others' code, you need to read all of it and build a map of it in your head.
Modern IDEs like Visual Studio and Eclipse are tools that help you with all of the above. You still need to know how to program, you still need to know how to structure your programs, but for navigating, changing, and reading code, they help you a lot more than a mere text editor can do.
But you will never realize this, because you are stuck in your comfort zone, you think your text editor has everything in the world one could ask for, and that people who use IDEs are point and click morons who can't really program. I'm so sorry for you. I hope I won't end up like you when something better than IDEs appear.
You are, sadly, wasting your breath. :-(
There is a large amount of programmers who found their comfort zone in certain loosely-typed languages, typically they did a lot of C, moved on to Perl and realized that they were much more productive in Perl, but not really realizing why, only thinking that Perl must be some holy grail. They are programmers who have never used Visual Studio or Eclipse or similar IDEs for strongly typed languages, they have *no* *idea* what refactoring is, and what it can do for your productivity, or how easy it makes your job of reading other's code with functions like "find usage".
They're used to getting no help from their editors, they're used to manual search and replace, and they're used to small-team projects where that kind of tools actually work. And since they're stuck in that comfort-zone with those languages where you *cannot* make tools like VS or Eclipse, they will never learn their power.
The lesson here is that we who use modern IDEs, we will get bypassed by something in the future, and we will be stuck in our comfort zones. Will we move on?
No, no, no, you've completely misunderstood it.
The GPL, and all other licenses based in copyrights, only kick in when you perform the actual copying. Say, for example, that you modify MySQL somehow. If you acquired MySQL under the GPL, and you wish to DISTRIBUTE this modified version, you have to abide by the GPL, and give out the source-code for your modifications alongside. This is the only way the GPL can kick in currently, when someone wishes to distribute modifications of GPL software.
But say that instead of modifying MySQL and making a downloadable application that runs on the user's computer, I make a web application. I still use MySQL on my server, and I use my code for the actual web application, and this combined essentially forms a derived work of MySQL, and if I were to distribute this application, I would also have to give out the source-code for my web app for free. But I'm not distributing it, I'm only making it available through my website, and because GPL only kicks in during distribution, I'm free to use as much GPL software as I possibly want for my web application without ever releasing any source code.
This is what this AGPL wants to stop. If MySQL was distributed under it, then everyone who built a web app using MySQL, would also have to give away the source code for their web app, if they make it available to users.
Needless to say, this is not going to be very popular with companies. I can't imagine Google or Facebook or MySpace or similar websites ever wanting to give away their source-code, since it contains all the trade secrets, everything that gives them the edge over the competition. I work for a small company and we have our own web application that is backed by some GPL software, but we would never want to give away the code we made ourselves, that would be suicide for us as a company.
It's "lego" not "legos" you stupid colonials.
Why vote for the lesser evil? Cthluhu for president '08!
NO MORE YEARS!