How do I add everyone with whom I would like to have some sort of professional or personal relationship and who will first contact me in the future to my address book because we haven't met yet right now?
I suspect their employees know the "don't print me!" protection in PDF is trivial to bypass by the kind of people they sell to, and I haven't heard of them using it.
More than that, it's fundamentally wrong to use technology to impede fair use. Go ahead--print that ebook! (Putting it on a filesharing network is rude, however.)
I know of no one (but myself) who is capable of judging my tolerance threshold for me, and criminalizing certain types of marketing wholesale is nearly guaranteed to err on the wrong side of the line.
My threshold is simple: unsolicited commercial messages sent fradulently are spam. Unsolicited messages are not the problem. Commercial messages are not the problem. Fraud is the problem.
The good Star Trek has always been a platform for commentary about everything from the human condition to modern politics.
Oh wow... I get it now! That episode with the half-black, half-white man fighting the half-white, half-black man was really about international fiscal policy! Whoa!
I think we need to be honest: any beliefs we hold, even those regarding the epistemic respectability of science, eventually are justified by a dogma if you as the question "why?" with enough repetitions.
I live in the US. Our Constitution specifically mentions copyright as a specifically granted limited-time monopoly with legal enforcement. Our guiding philosophy also acknowledges the presence of certain (and unexhaustively enumerated) natural rights. I take this to mean that copyright is not a natural right.
Some people believe it's very silly, at best, to create artificial scarcity for things that cost effectively nothing to redistribute -- such as software.
Besides, isn't patent licensing part of the reason nVidia and Ati won't release fully OSS drivers?
I can't see how, unless someone's somehow managed to obtain patents that don't disclose information publicly and, as such, would suffer material harm in disclosing the patented ideas publicly by releasing source code.
In other words, any vendor that tells you that is lying.
I wish I had something more insightful to add than "I wish I'd said this" or "I'm a programmer as well as a writer. Natural language makes a terrible specification language." Excellent post.
I think I understand what you're saying, but I'd like to set up a hypothetical situation.
What would you do differently if you worked on features small enough to complete in a week, if your customer were capable of prioritizing features even as he devises new ones, and if you could deliver working software every week or two to the customer?
Would you still focus as much on long-term deadlines as a measure of project success?
My point is that the tools we have available for software design fall short of being able to implement complex applications for us.
That's a fair point. I agree.
My other point is that it is virtually impossible to design an application when there are more than a few people all wanting to 'help' design.
I don't see why that has to be the case. Certainly I don't trust more than a dozen people to agree on the fine points of any single non-trivial item, but I believe strongly in emergent design. If a dozen programmers can agree that approach X is reasonable and sufficient for the current features, and in presence of good development practices that encourage effective refactoring, I believe it's possible to produce software effectively.
... in an ideal world, I would be able to design an application without having to ever see a single line of source code, yet still have a finished product at the end of the process.
I've never seen visual design tools work in the general cases, and I've seen little evidence that they can produce a finished application to the satisfaction of their users. I remain skeptical.
If you mean however design tools that work on a specification language, then that becomes the source code, just as higher-level languages such as COBOL, Fortran, and Algol replaced assembly languages.
It seems we have a philosophical disagreement. That's also fair.
However, software development is currently at the stage where novel writing was before the advent of the printing press.
Nit: the novel didn't really exist until around 300 years after Gutenberg's printing press, but I'm not sure what you mean here anyway.
... large projects simply cannot afford to wait around until the designer (author) is able to laboriously code each and every feature to an acceptable standard.
Why is there only one designer? Why have you hired monkeys to transcribe the design into software? (Want to help your projects succeed? Don't hire monkeys.)
What The Source Code is the Design means is that you don't know for sure what you want to build or how it all fits together until you actually do it, at least for any project neither so trivial or so routine that you know exactly how to build it before you even write code.
Just as you don't take sentences from hallway conversations with your customer as the final word in design, I take this as saying that even complete requirements documents aren't the final word in design. Until you can actually get useful feedback from the customer using the program (or technical feedback on what's easy and what's difficult to program), I don't think you can have a complete design.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, truly free information does.
How do I add everyone with whom I would like to have some sort of professional or personal relationship and who will first contact me in the future to my address book because we haven't met yet right now?
More than that, it's fundamentally wrong to use technology to impede fair use. Go ahead--print that ebook! (Putting it on a filesharing network is rude, however.)
My threshold is simple: unsolicited commercial messages sent fradulently are spam. Unsolicited messages are not the problem. Commercial messages are not the problem. Fraud is the problem.
Oh wow... I get it now! That episode with the half-black, half-white man fighting the half-white, half-black man was really about international fiscal policy! Whoa!
Nice generalization. By "nice" I mean "gross".
Maybe a fundie isn't all that skeptical about epistemologic matters, but why wouldn't a theologian be just as rigorous as a scientist?
Funny, that. You'd almost think the empirical method didn't work for deciding historical questions.
That's a lovely point. I wish more people agreed.
Hey, that's almost Pascal's Wager!
Yes, actually. So was my mother. Doesn't make that empirically falsifiable either, though.
Those Sally Struthers adds didn't teach you much about Africa, did they?
Why, were you there when the earth formed?
No?
Well that's not very falsifiable, is it?
Who sets those standards? What happens when those standards don't match your own?
(Flamebait example: teaching abiogenesis in biology courses.)
That's why I chose not to buy their products. Instead, I bought a laptop from System 76 with Intel graphics and no Windows tax.
I live in the US. Our Constitution specifically mentions copyright as a specifically granted limited-time monopoly with legal enforcement. Our guiding philosophy also acknowledges the presence of certain (and unexhaustively enumerated) natural rights. I take this to mean that copyright is not a natural right.
Your political jurisdiction and views may differ.
No, copyright takes away freedom. The GPL gives some of it back.
Some people believe it's very silly, at best, to create artificial scarcity for things that cost effectively nothing to redistribute -- such as software.
Further, that patent is already public information. That's what a patent is.
One of them is, in comparison, trivial to study, modify, and redistribute in volume.
See Pragmatic Questions about Binary-Only Drivers.
I can't see how, unless someone's somehow managed to obtain patents that don't disclose information publicly and, as such, would suffer material harm in disclosing the patented ideas publicly by releasing source code.
In other words, any vendor that tells you that is lying.
I wish I had something more insightful to add than "I wish I'd said this" or "I'm a programmer as well as a writer. Natural language makes a terrible specification language." Excellent post.
I think I understand what you're saying, but I'd like to set up a hypothetical situation.
What would you do differently if you worked on features small enough to complete in a week, if your customer were capable of prioritizing features even as he devises new ones, and if you could deliver working software every week or two to the customer?
Would you still focus as much on long-term deadlines as a measure of project success?
That's a fair point. I agree.
I don't see why that has to be the case. Certainly I don't trust more than a dozen people to agree on the fine points of any single non-trivial item, but I believe strongly in emergent design. If a dozen programmers can agree that approach X is reasonable and sufficient for the current features, and in presence of good development practices that encourage effective refactoring, I believe it's possible to produce software effectively.
I've never seen visual design tools work in the general cases, and I've seen little evidence that they can produce a finished application to the satisfaction of their users. I remain skeptical.
If you mean however design tools that work on a specification language, then that becomes the source code, just as higher-level languages such as COBOL, Fortran, and Algol replaced assembly languages.
It seems we have a philosophical disagreement. That's also fair.
Nit: the novel didn't really exist until around 300 years after Gutenberg's printing press, but I'm not sure what you mean here anyway.
Why is there only one designer? Why have you hired monkeys to transcribe the design into software? (Want to help your projects succeed? Don't hire monkeys.)
What The Source Code is the Design means is that you don't know for sure what you want to build or how it all fits together until you actually do it, at least for any project neither so trivial or so routine that you know exactly how to build it before you even write code.
Just as you don't take sentences from hallway conversations with your customer as the final word in design, I take this as saying that even complete requirements documents aren't the final word in design. Until you can actually get useful feedback from the customer using the program (or technical feedback on what's easy and what's difficult to program), I don't think you can have a complete design.