Sorry but I'll have to be quick on this - I think we need to distinguish technical authors - i.e. those who could be recognised as an expert in their field and, say, make a living from seminars and training - against novelists / authors / songwriters / playwrights and other producers of art. I think art actually defines us as a civilization, just as technology enables us.
(Hollywood is a great example of why art by committee does not work. Beta software and customer feedback improves software quality - audience previews do not improve film)
I think art actually defines us as a civilization, just as technology enables us. Throwing out the ability of artists to live off their works to benefit the technocrats would be a mistake.
Copyright - as it stands in the UK - was originally introduced to protect authors (and their relatives) from publishers ripping them off - i.e. prior to copyright/IP publishers were free to rip off authors, and take profits from publishing books without paying for them to be written. Obviously the internet opens up a zero-cost distribution for authors, so they don't need publishers, but a complete absence of IP law would return us to this situation.
Personally - I think IP patents are evil, but authorial copyright is a good thing - although it probably needs weakening rather than strengthening, such that copyright cannot be transferred from an author to a business entity - only the rights to reproduce. And enforcement should not be by DRM but by public understanding - PC games could actually lead the way, having given up on DRM after trying for years.
Dare I say that copyright also protects the authors of novels, not just their publishers - and as yet, it seems that a committee of people writing for free doesn't result in a better book. Not all of us anticipate the future of only having blogs to read with relish - or 'ad subsidised novels' with product placement (which is what's happening in TV and software as other revenue streams dry up).
Re:Good read so far
on
Ajax in Action
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Mozilla hace already started implementing some parts of the next version of the ECMAScript spec into JavaScript, and it looks like ActionScript 3.0 has actually gone from being behind JavaScript to being ahead (support of packages and namespaces). The issue, of course, is with what IE and jScript bothers to do (probably nothing if it undermines the XAML/Windows Presentation layer thingy).
I still have that same alarm bell ringing, in that you're definitely using a spoon to slice a steak. The browser was never really designed for running dynamic applications, but we've ended up with a set of tools that just about allow it, and enough customer demand to make it worth the effort, but that still doesn't make it the right tool - it's just one millions of people already have.
The main plus-side, of course, is that point of 'no installation'. Then again, some Ajax pages are becoming absolute monsters to download that they may as well be apps.
So that makes me think of what else is out there that is better at dynamic applications - i.e. actually designed for developing them - and I ended up wondering how long it will be before we rediscover the Java Applet - there's got to be a good reason why Google are pushing rollout of the Sun JVM with the toolbar . . .
The CONNECT BY and equivalent extensions have been in most variants of SQL for at least a decade. CASE allows limited conditional functionality, and has also been in the standard for some time.
Most variants now support the idea of being able to order things and do things to the ordered set, which was once an abhorrence (once upon a time, the only time you could apply an order was to the final returned result set).
Of course this is a battle between the pragmatic needs of programmers using SQL, and the relational theorists who want to keep it mathematically clean - which is why the language so often races ahead of the standard, then they finally begrudgingly accept that if everyone has some version of CASE / DECODE / etc, then they'd better define an ANSI standard one.
How strongly can I agree. But then the same people - but I'd wager few of them are old enough to have worked with hierarchical D/B to understand why it was a complete pain in the neck and relational databases wiped the floor.
It's probably also the fact that developers can easily understand parsing a tree and recursion, but have far more difficulty working with the idea of sets - the temptation to recast all problems into the domain of your own expertise. (I do it myself after 13 years of SQL experience - use server side procedures to do something in a loop that could have been implemented directly in SQL).
I think the format is good, but Acrobat Reader definitely sucks - it doesn't play well with browsers and it takes half an hour to load..
However, there are some things where it's good to be able to send a 'read-only' file - they may be a 'pain in the ass to alter' but this is an advantage in some situations. I'm aware it's possible to hack a PDF, but it serves the purpose far better than Word, or sending everything as a Fax - example - sending a legal document to a customer that needs to be signed and returned in the post.
And lastly, while Adobe's software is closed, the spec is open. Because of that there are a wide variety of open source tools for printing them. MacOS uses it as the native screen format (which means you can read most PDF without having to fire up Acrobat - definitely a blessing). Like any software you just need to understand what the purpose is - it's a method for making final versions of documents portable between machines.
I don't know, what are you arguing? To quote : >The price of making a CD with Windows XP, or any other piece of software on it, including packaging etc., can't be more than a dollar. Not the cost of >materials, the cost of manufacturing & distribution. I was presuming you're including the cost of development in the cost of manufacturing. If you're not, then I really don't see the point at all. I can assure you, that once you include development, the cost of making a CD with a piece of software on it is quite often more than a dollar, although of course it then enters into a calculation where you have to divide cost by sales, and will do one of those lovely logarhymtic curves.
And no, I said cost of materials, rather than plant, labour and materials because I'm lazy. But the point still stands that you get these ridiculous examples where people can just decide to write off 80% of costs to come up with a figure that is essentially meaningless outside of a very specific context - it may make sense if you wanted to compare the efficiency of AMD and Intel's manufacturing operation, but instead it gets used in the usual 'Intel CPUs cost $40 to make but they charge $400' / 'CDs only cost 50p' type stories.
I'm not disputing that people are being ripped off, but I do think it's stupid that people want to put a zero cost on the bit that actually makes a CD, DVD, chip, or book different from some other arbitrary combination of bits / letters.
Hmm. While I accept that generally speaking you can find software that is functionally equivalent and would continue to evolve, art is not functional, or democratic.
A book written for free by a number of authors working in their part time is not going to be equivalent to one Richard Brautigan novel. A John Martyn cover version is highly unlikely to be as great as the original. Inkscape will one day do everything Illustrator does, and will then start advancing at a faster rate.
And yes, sure, there are a lot of artists out there doing stuff because they're compelled to, for nothing or next to nothing (I've seen plenty of them, and I've more than enough in my record collection), and there are a lot of political reasons for supporting DIY culture over major label owned music, but the point is that no matter how great a piece of music is, it's not equivalent to another piece of music.
Personally speaking, I also think society benefits from the fact that authors can be full-time authors - the world has been a more interesting place since, rather than just being the preserve of the already rich.
Thanks - yes, I think that (cholestrol) is a very important distinction and way of phrasing it.
I would certainly agree on the spread of Windows and Office (which was the program I was thinking of specifically) - I'd agree that people seemed to run both on pirate in the 90s (usually a pirate Windows 95/97 upgrade). I'm just not sure whether it counts as a legitimate purchase when someone gets a copy of XP bundled with a PC - there's not really an easy comparison to make with 'blank' PCs.
However, in my experience, most of these people are still run pirated copies of Office (when they only want Word and Excel). Only a complete success for Microsoft DRM would make them look at an alternative - and most people only want free as in beer.
But I guess it does help keep the Office infrastructure rolling, and it's the business sales that make the real money.
I'll take the point with XP, but you know full well that it's an exception - both in the way it's sold, and in the volume of it's sales - it's only because the R&D can be divided across those huge forced sales that you can arrive at that figure. Nor does it counter the point that software, music, books, art, and even newspaper articles cost something (labour) to produce - a dollar is not zero.
At the end of the day, society needs some mechanism by which intellectual labour can be exchanged for physical labour (services or goods) - whether it's monetary or some lovely anarchist collective - if you want to argue for complete anarchism, fine by me, but this ridiculous idea that because you can copy something for free, it has therefore become 'free' to produce is sophistry.
And yes, there has been an analysis of Intel's costs that looked purely at the cost of plant, material and labour, even stating that R&D was excluded from the analysis, when any idiot knows that R&D is by far the largest cost of all tech industries.
Hmm. It also makes the classic assertion that because you can copy software perfectly, then you should be allowed to do what you want with it (rather than 'what is reasonable') - in fact it goes as far as implying the software is free (because there is no unit cost) - which of course is false economics, much as you get people who say 'the materials that make a CPU cost 30p so why are they so expensive' or even dullards that think restaurant food should cost the same as the ingredients would in a supermarket.
If the question was rephrased as 'if I copy a banknote and give it to you, you have a banknote and I have a banknote - who gets harmed' people can start seeing the problem, and that it's not really a new one. We've long been able to deal with the concept of things having a value that is different from the material value.
Also, I think it swept a broad number of things together - personally I'm absolutely against patenting software, business process or genes, along with the DRM to rnforce it, but I still fully support the idea of authorial copyright, and the right of an author / songwriter or programmer to sell that copyright on to others. I think copyright has generally been a good thing - it allowed the novel to flourish. As for enforcing it - use the law, not technology. That too has worked for long enough.
Oh, and a few unsupported assertions like 'most pirate sales turn into real software sales'. Erm, no they don't. I've never bought a game I pirated. I've bought LPs I taped, but software has a shelflife.
I remember the surprise of someone (female) at University that I was studying CS. 'I thought you did English'. Which just goes to show how enlightened and un-stereotypical arts graduates can be - 'my god, it's an impostor from the world of science'.
Mind you, the current copy of our local 'lifestyle' magazine actually does has a cover article called 'Geeks Are Cool' - aimed at gold-diggers - 'How to find your geek'. It does actually make some positive points - that geeks are passionate about their interests = individuality. But yes, they do mean the 'trendy haircut and expensive glasses' type (preferably doing something creative) rather than the beard and Pink Floyd/Iron Maiden T-shirt which was actually the CS uniform when I was at Uni.
Which is why we would say : 1) Don't use variable names like x, use something that indicates the meaning of the variable - so maybe in this case lErrorStatus 2) Don't hardcode magic values, use a meaningful constant - which also means only one point in code needs to be changed if we switch CPU and find there is a different on-fire code
Then we get
if lErrorStatus == CPU_ON_FIRE then
Which I think is pretty self-explanatory.
One thing that isn't clear yet is whether this bit of code is sitting in a little function or part of a big block - i.e. what it's going to do on the 'then'. Now at some future point we might find ourselves needing to check CPU_GETTING_QUITE_HOT. So we will still have to impact all occurrences of lErrorStatus == CPU_ON_FIRE to add an extra test. This leads to
3) Encapsulate tests in meaningfully named BOOLEAN functions.
I'd say it is swings and roundabouts as to whether (3) is worth the effort.
If the _cpu_on_fire(ErrorStatus) test is just done once, then we've had to go to a lot of effort to encapsulate a single line of code (as the expression is already boolean). If it is used >1 times it is definitely worth wrapping, ditto if the expression is complex - just to make sure developers get into the habit, as much as to protect against any change. (I think it's better to get into a slightly more time-consuming habit of doing the right thing and break it occasionally, than into the habit of doing the quickest thing and having to think to do the right thing).
The other principle that points to (3) is the one that blocks of code should be 'readable' and if possible a block should fit on one page - i.e. when you have an if . . then . ..else . . end structure and the bodies of all the elements are large then each should be a procedure/method itself. Again, _cpu_on_fire(ErrorStatus) isn't a good example as we'd be replacing one line with one line.
However, if you have a standard logging mechanism (say log4j), and template code for functions/methods, you can use this encapsulation to record the fact that the test occurred, input and output values, rather than leaving it to the individual developer to remember to add logging before their 'if' and on each conditional path.
Most 'economically disavantaged' PC owners I know (and a few who aren't) just run pirated versions of Office (if not their whole Windows system).
They don't get the argument for free as in speech, only the free as in beer one, which ironically means that only the success of strong anti-piracy technologies will drive them to look at an alternative - OR for another format to emerge and take over - and PDF has made significant in-roads into the territory Office occupies as far as read-only documents go - I can't recall the last time a website made me download a Word file - although Powerpoint is still going strong.
Like the original imposition of Office on the rest of us, it will probably take Big Business and government to drive any change - they're the only people who can see a real massive cost-saving in doing so. For small businesses and individuals, the cost of change almost always outweighs the cost of sticking with what you know.
Because, of course, developers can't actually be responsible for any element of project failure - it has to be poor management. If they had good managers who were all developers, everything would be 100% OK.
It may be worth asking yourself, next time you're set a ridiculous deadline for a fixed-cost project that was sold way under budget, that maybe rather than being actively evil, your sales people are acting under misinformation.
I know from experience that many developers dislike any form of time management / booking systems, but are also largely incapable of saying how long something actually took to do, or might take to do - yet somehow expect that everyone else in the chain is going to get that right. So when the business loses the sale because they over-quoted - that's sales fault. When it goes bankrupt because the developers took twice as long as they said it would - it's managements fault.
Yeah, governments are EVIL. Let's do away with them all. Because, if you look around the world, the best states are those with no governments, like in central Africa - the rule of the gun is so much better than civilization.
There are fairly successful artists - White Stripes, Franz Ferdinand - whose music is already available for legitimate (paid) download on good old MP3. That pretty much proves that you can become at least a millionaire without having to embrace restrictive DRM. (Yes, I know it's mostly from physical sales, but those are also on good old CD).
Simply put, it will eventually become a sales point - look, we are on the side of the young and free against The Man.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks - says it more eloquently than I good - which is why Dickens is renowned as a writer and I am not.
Sorry but I'll have to be quick on this - I think we need to distinguish technical authors - i.e. those who could be recognised as an expert in their field and, say, make a living from seminars and training - against novelists / authors / songwriters / playwrights and other producers of art. I think art actually defines us as a civilization, just as technology enables us.
(Hollywood is a great example of why art by committee does not work. Beta software and customer feedback improves software quality - audience previews do not improve film)
I think art actually defines us as a civilization, just as technology enables us. Throwing out the ability of artists to live off their works to benefit the technocrats would be a mistake.
Copyright - as it stands in the UK - was originally introduced to protect authors (and their relatives) from publishers ripping them off - i.e. prior to copyright/IP publishers were free to rip off authors, and take profits from publishing books without paying for them to be written. Obviously the internet opens up a zero-cost distribution for authors, so they don't need publishers, but a complete absence of IP law would return us to this situation.
Personally - I think IP patents are evil, but authorial copyright is a good thing - although it probably needs weakening rather than strengthening, such that copyright cannot be transferred from an author to a business entity - only the rights to reproduce. And enforcement should not be by DRM but by public understanding - PC games could actually lead the way, having given up on DRM after trying for years.
Dare I say that copyright also protects the authors of novels, not just their publishers - and as yet, it seems that a committee of people writing for free doesn't result in a better book. Not all of us anticipate the future of only having blogs to read with relish - or 'ad subsidised novels' with product placement (which is what's happening in TV and software as other revenue streams dry up).
Mozilla hace already started implementing some parts of the next version of the ECMAScript spec into JavaScript, and it looks like ActionScript 3.0 has actually gone from being behind JavaScript to being ahead (support of packages and namespaces). The issue, of course, is with what IE and jScript bothers to do (probably nothing if it undermines the XAML/Windows Presentation layer thingy). I still have that same alarm bell ringing, in that you're definitely using a spoon to slice a steak. The browser was never really designed for running dynamic applications, but we've ended up with a set of tools that just about allow it, and enough customer demand to make it worth the effort, but that still doesn't make it the right tool - it's just one millions of people already have. The main plus-side, of course, is that point of 'no installation'. Then again, some Ajax pages are becoming absolute monsters to download that they may as well be apps. So that makes me think of what else is out there that is better at dynamic applications - i.e. actually designed for developing them - and I ended up wondering how long it will be before we rediscover the Java Applet - there's got to be a good reason why Google are pushing rollout of the Sun JVM with the toolbar . . .
The CONNECT BY and equivalent extensions have been in most variants of SQL for at least a decade.
CASE allows limited conditional functionality, and has also been in the standard for some time.
Most variants now support the idea of being able to order things and do things to the ordered set, which was once an abhorrence (once upon a time, the only time you could apply an order was to the final returned result set).
Of course this is a battle between the pragmatic needs of programmers using SQL, and the relational theorists who want to keep it mathematically clean - which is why the language so often races ahead of the standard, then they finally begrudgingly accept that if everyone has some version of CASE / DECODE / etc, then they'd better define an ANSI standard one.
How strongly can I agree. But then the same people - but I'd wager few of them are old enough to have worked with hierarchical D/B to understand why it was a complete pain in the neck and relational databases wiped the floor.
It's probably also the fact that developers can easily understand parsing a tree and recursion, but have far more difficulty working with the idea of sets - the temptation to recast all problems into the domain of your own expertise. (I do it myself after 13 years of SQL experience - use server side procedures to do something in a loop that could have been implemented directly in SQL).
Great isn't it - everyone will have to migrate to Office 12 to save their existing documents in the new open formats!
I think the format is good, but Acrobat Reader definitely sucks - it doesn't play well with browsers and it takes half an hour to load..
However, there are some things where it's good to be able to send a 'read-only' file - they may be a 'pain in the ass to alter' but this is an advantage in some situations. I'm aware it's possible to hack a PDF, but it serves the purpose far better than Word, or sending everything as a Fax - example - sending a legal document to a customer that needs to be signed and returned in the post.
And lastly, while Adobe's software is closed, the spec is open. Because of that there are a wide variety of open source tools for printing them.
MacOS uses it as the native screen format (which means you can read most PDF without having to fire up Acrobat - definitely a blessing).
Like any software you just need to understand what the purpose is - it's a method for making final versions of documents portable between machines.
I don't know, what are you arguing? To quote :
>The price of making a CD with Windows XP, or any other piece of software on it, including packaging etc., can't be more than a dollar. Not the cost of >materials, the cost of manufacturing & distribution.
I was presuming you're including the cost of development in the cost of manufacturing. If you're not, then I really don't see the point at all.
I can assure you, that once you include development, the cost of making a CD with a piece of software on it is quite often more than a dollar, although of course it then enters into a calculation where you have to divide cost by sales, and will do one of those lovely logarhymtic curves.
And no, I said cost of materials, rather than plant, labour and materials because I'm lazy. But the point still stands that you get these ridiculous examples where people can just decide to write off 80% of costs to come up with a figure that is essentially meaningless outside of a very specific context - it may make sense if you wanted to compare the efficiency of AMD and Intel's manufacturing operation, but instead it gets used in the usual 'Intel CPUs cost $40 to make but they charge $400' / 'CDs only cost 50p' type stories.
I'm not disputing that people are being ripped off, but I do think it's stupid that people want to put a zero cost on the bit that actually makes a CD, DVD, chip, or book different from some other arbitrary combination of bits / letters.
Hmm. While I accept that generally speaking you can find software that is functionally equivalent and would continue to evolve, art is not functional, or democratic.
A book written for free by a number of authors working in their part time is not going to be equivalent to one Richard Brautigan novel. A John Martyn cover version is highly unlikely to be as great as the original. Inkscape will one day do everything Illustrator does, and will then start advancing at a faster rate.
And yes, sure, there are a lot of artists out there doing stuff because they're compelled to, for nothing or next to nothing (I've seen plenty of them, and I've more than enough in my record collection), and there are a lot of political reasons for supporting DIY culture over major label owned music, but the point is that no matter how great a piece of music is, it's not equivalent to another piece of music.
Personally speaking, I also think society benefits from the fact that authors can be full-time authors - the world has been a more interesting place since, rather than just being the preserve of the already rich.
Thanks - yes, I think that (cholestrol) is a very important distinction and way of phrasing it.
I would certainly agree on the spread of Windows and Office (which was the program I was thinking of specifically) - I'd agree that people seemed to run both on pirate in the 90s (usually a pirate Windows 95/97 upgrade). I'm just not sure whether it counts as a legitimate purchase when someone gets a copy of XP bundled with a PC - there's not really an easy comparison to make with 'blank' PCs.
However, in my experience, most of these people are still run pirated copies of Office (when they only want Word and Excel). Only a complete success for Microsoft DRM would make them look at an alternative - and most people only want free as in beer.
But I guess it does help keep the Office infrastructure rolling, and it's the business sales that make the real money.
Why thank you, you're a charmer yourself.
I'll take the point with XP, but you know full well that it's an exception - both in the way it's sold, and in the volume of it's sales - it's only because the R&D can be divided across those huge forced sales that you can arrive at that figure. Nor does it counter the point that software, music, books, art, and even newspaper articles cost something (labour) to produce - a dollar is not zero.
At the end of the day, society needs some mechanism by which intellectual labour can be exchanged for physical labour (services or goods) - whether it's monetary or some lovely anarchist collective - if you want to argue for complete anarchism, fine by me, but this ridiculous idea that because you can copy something for free, it has therefore become 'free' to produce is sophistry.
And yes, there has been an analysis of Intel's costs that looked purely at the cost of plant, material and labour, even stating that R&D was excluded from the analysis, when any idiot knows that R&D is by far the largest cost of all tech industries.
Probably because the rest of them are busy working, rather than writing speculative columns for a living.
Hmm. It also makes the classic assertion that because you can copy software perfectly, then you should be allowed to do what you want with it (rather than 'what is reasonable') - in fact it goes as far as implying the software is free (because there is no unit cost) - which of course is false economics, much as you get people who say 'the materials that make a CPU cost 30p so why are they so expensive' or even dullards that think restaurant food should cost the same as the ingredients would in a supermarket.
If the question was rephrased as 'if I copy a banknote and give it to you, you have a banknote and I have a banknote - who gets harmed' people can start seeing the problem, and that it's not really a new one. We've long been able to deal with the concept of things having a value that is different from the material value.
Also, I think it swept a broad number of things together - personally I'm absolutely against patenting software, business process or genes, along with the DRM to rnforce it, but I still fully support the idea of authorial copyright, and the right of an author / songwriter or programmer to sell that copyright on to others. I think copyright has generally been a good thing - it allowed the novel to flourish. As for enforcing it - use the law, not technology. That too has worked for long enough.
Oh, and a few unsupported assertions like 'most pirate sales turn into real software sales'. Erm, no they don't. I've never bought a game I pirated. I've bought LPs I taped, but software has a shelflife.
I remember the surprise of someone (female) at University that I was studying CS. 'I thought you did English'. Which just goes to show how enlightened and un-stereotypical arts graduates can be - 'my god, it's an impostor from the world of science'.
Mind you, the current copy of our local 'lifestyle' magazine actually does has a cover article called 'Geeks Are Cool' - aimed at gold-diggers - 'How to find your geek'. It does actually make some positive points - that geeks are passionate about their interests = individuality. But yes, they do mean the 'trendy haircut and expensive glasses' type (preferably doing something creative) rather than the beard and Pink Floyd/Iron Maiden T-shirt which was actually the CS uniform when I was at Uni.
Could just be losing interest in where you work / the product you're working on. When you're young, you just go elsewhere that's interesting.
I mean, what do you do if you're Bill Gates and you're fed up with working at Microsoft?
Which is why we would say :
.else . . end structure and the bodies of all the elements are large then each should be a procedure/method itself.
1) Don't use variable names like x, use something that indicates the meaning of the variable - so maybe in this case lErrorStatus
2) Don't hardcode magic values, use a meaningful constant - which also means only one point in code needs to be changed if we switch CPU and find there is a different on-fire code
Then we get
if lErrorStatus == CPU_ON_FIRE then
Which I think is pretty self-explanatory.
One thing that isn't clear yet is whether this bit of code is sitting in a little function or part of a big block - i.e. what it's going to do on the 'then'.
Now at some future point we might find ourselves needing to check CPU_GETTING_QUITE_HOT. So we will still have to impact all occurrences of
lErrorStatus == CPU_ON_FIRE to add an extra test.
This leads to
3) Encapsulate tests in meaningfully named BOOLEAN functions.
I'd say it is swings and roundabouts as to whether (3) is worth the effort.
If the _cpu_on_fire(ErrorStatus) test is just done once, then we've had to go to a lot of effort to encapsulate a single line of code (as the expression is already boolean). If it is used >1 times it is definitely worth wrapping, ditto if the expression is complex - just to make sure developers get into the habit, as much as to protect against any change. (I think it's better to get into a slightly more time-consuming habit of doing the right thing and break it occasionally, than into the habit of doing the quickest thing and having to think to do the right thing).
The other principle that points to (3) is the one that blocks of code should be 'readable' and if possible a block should fit on one page - i.e. when you have an
if . . then . .
Again, _cpu_on_fire(ErrorStatus) isn't a good example as we'd be replacing one line with one line.
However, if you have a standard logging mechanism (say log4j), and template code for functions/methods, you can use this encapsulation to record the fact that the test occurred, input and output values, rather than leaving it to the individual developer to remember to add logging before their 'if' and on each conditional path.
You're absolutely correct on the second point.
Most 'economically disavantaged' PC owners I know (and a few who aren't) just run pirated versions of Office (if not their whole Windows system).
They don't get the argument for free as in speech, only the free as in beer one, which ironically means that only the success of strong anti-piracy technologies will drive them to look at an alternative - OR for another format to emerge and take over - and PDF has made significant in-roads into the territory Office occupies as far as read-only documents go - I can't recall the last time a website made me download a Word file - although Powerpoint is still going strong.
Like the original imposition of Office on the rest of us, it will probably take Big Business and government to drive any change - they're the only people who can see a real massive cost-saving in doing so. For small businesses and individuals, the cost of change almost always outweighs the cost of sticking with what you know.
Hey, that sounds like a great idea for a film.
Because, of course, developers can't actually be responsible for any element of project failure - it has to be poor management. If they had good managers who were all developers, everything would be 100% OK.
It may be worth asking yourself, next time you're set a ridiculous deadline for a fixed-cost project that was sold way under budget, that maybe rather than being actively evil, your sales people are acting under misinformation.
I know from experience that many developers dislike any form of time management / booking systems, but are also largely incapable of saying how long something actually took to do, or might take to do - yet somehow expect that everyone else in the chain is going to get that right. So when the business loses the sale because they over-quoted - that's sales fault. When it goes bankrupt because the developers took twice as long as they said it would - it's managements fault.
Yeah, governments are EVIL. Let's do away with them all. Because, if you look around the world, the best states are those with no governments, like in central Africa - the rule of the gun is so much better than civilization.
This is obviously the main reason for the lack of successful time machine companies - we need stronger time-travel proof patent laws.
Yes, that's why the racks are full of Midi cover albums of well known hits.
Oh, sorry, it was Moog cover albums - wrong decade!
Yes.
There are fairly successful artists - White Stripes, Franz Ferdinand - whose music is already available for legitimate (paid) download on good old MP3. That pretty much proves that you can become at least a millionaire without having to embrace restrictive DRM. (Yes, I know it's mostly from physical sales, but those are also on good old CD).
Simply put, it will eventually become a sales point - look, we are on the side of the young and free against The Man.