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Comment Re:This is not being paranoid... (Score 1) 82

If the end result is indistinguishable (i.e., by humans in the target audience), then it won't matter where it came from, to most of those forking over the money to obtain the graphics. The one paying for the end result will choose the cheaper source every time. (Except of course for those few remaining people actually collecting real art specifically made solely by human beings.)

Comment Re:Adobe being disengenuine (Score 1) 82

You are correct that their work has less value than ever. And whether copyright law gets fixed won't make much difference. Art is being democratized, like many other areas surrounding art: printing on physical paper? You may no longer need a printer/job shop to do the final output. A good-enough camera? No need, as most have phones with plenty-good-enough cameras. Most artists will simply have to move elsewhere, as happens anytime there is a major shift in technology.

(And it's not like we're not swimming in graphics all the time anyway, most of it mediocre by definition.)

Comment Re:obvious.... (Score 1) 407

No. There is a clear moral distinction to be drawn between someone who initiates a (possible series of) harm(s), and one who throws a return punch, hopefully to quickly end the entire encounter.

So no, simply returning one punch clearly does not qualify one as a bully also. Further analysis at here.

Comment Interesting angle I had not heard before (Score 3, Interesting) 286

FWIW, in a section where Ross Anderson (Security Engineering, Ross Anderson, Third Edition, p. 329.) talks about military combat aircraft and IFF systems, he mentions how militaries hide their submarines’ top speeds and other capabilities, from other nations. So with aircraft, they have to do things to disguise their top speeds.

Then he drops this interesting tidbit:

"And as for air combat, some US radars won’t display the velocity of a US aircraft whose performance is classified, unless the operator has the appropriate clearance. When you read stories about F-16 pilots seeing an insanely fast UFO whose speed on their radar didn’t make any sense, you can put two and two together.

He seems to be saying that radar (possibly unbeknownst to the actual people monitoring the radar!) is doing strange things to disguise aircraft speed. This could explain a good sized fraction of UFO reports by the military--if it's all correct. If you know more about military radar than Ross Anderson, and just exactly how it can disguise aircraft speed, please let us know.

Comment Yes, all the above factors and more... (Score 1) 296

...contribute to the bloat that is 21st century code. But it is all of them together, not individually. We may be feeling pain from one particular factor, but it's all of the factors working together that make it impossible to fix.

What is most concerning is that it got this way without anyone consciously directing it this way. Market forces, management pressures, the desires/proclivities of younger developers with less background, experience and perspective, and so on, have simply taken us on an uncontrolled gradient descent path to...wherever it is we are going. We're farther from software being an engineering discipline than we ever were.

Comment Re:Agile is more religion than anything else (Score 1) 152

>hierarchical menus are still the sh**

Actually, hierarchical menus used to be quite well-organized and finding stuff was relatively easy. But you are very correct that UIs suck today: Functionality is hidden in places where nobody can find it, menus--where there are any at all--are a random mixture of nouns and verbs with no organization at all, there are no metaphors in use, and web apps (supposedly "Graphical" User Interfaces--ha) are little more than randomly-arranged blocks of text.

Comment Re:Agile is just a tool (Score 1) 152

But at the other extreme is the "architect" who has never written an application from scratch, and architects the Taj Mahal when all you need is a warehouse. In other words, the architect tells the carpenter, bricklayer, plumber etc., to build the house in a completely novel way that won't work in practice. Or that takes 3x as long to build. As the comments here all signify, this is a very difficult problem, made all the more difficult by people.

Comment Re:Can it guess requirements? (Score 1) 66

Well, it was no effort to "make" it work. It just worked very smoothly. No detours, nothing. Having said that, I repeat that I probably will never use it again. Agile or anything like it would have pulled me out of the groove I was working in, at least daily. No good. For this project, I would argue that waterfall was the best choice. As additional detail, I will mention that the project involved no communication with the end customer, and when it was delivered, they accepted it as-is. So the complete lack of immediate customer feedback was not a hindrance either. A rare set of circumstances, I will freely admit.

Comment Re:Can it guess requirements? (Score 1) 66

I have yet to see a software project type that is better handled with a waterfall-style process.

Since we're citing anecdotal evidence, I'll add mine. The most successful project I ever worked on was done via waterfall. The requirements were already in place when I began, and barely moved during development. One bug found during acceptance testing, and no bugs ever reported from the field. Development proceeded steadily with no bumps. All waterfall. It can work, and it can work quite well. Due to the nature of my present work, it probably won't see use again.

Comment Enough music already! (Score 1) 256

I have found a new music home in the 1940s and 50s. I still listen to my own era's music some (70s, 80s), but recently have discovered more enjoyable music from before I was born! (The sound quality isn't so over-produced and perfect, but who cares?) What has killed music is the same thing that killed the graphic arts: too much of it available and so everyone tries too hard to differentiate themselves from crowd. Our attention is spread too thin.

(This ties into the fact that everyone now has their own music; we have no cultural unity around music anymore, no shared songs that we sing in large groups which express any sort of societal cohesion. Oh sure, we have favorites with our closest friends (maybe), but nothing like generations past, where everybody in the country knew a set of songs, and group singing was done in many venues of life.)

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