When an agile approach fails, then remember rule #0: No dogmas.
Agile is all about being non-dogmatic. If a rule doesn’t work in your case, find something that works.
You need UML? Use it. UML only slows you down? Drop it. UML might have some value for you in some specific cases? Apply it in a smart way.
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Posted by digulla
I’m one of those unhappy gamers (like many, many, many others) but until this video, I didn’t know why. It’s a bit hidden in the message but ultimately, it boils down to: ME 3 isn’t an RPG. It’s an ego shooter.
The main reason is that your decisions in the game don’t count. Just like Bioware ignoring the outrage of gamers, whatever you do in the game has no consequences whatsoever: After the game, everyone is dead (or will soon be dead for lack of food), the galaxy is devastated, the citadel is gone (no place to meet anymore, so no galactic council), no travel between civilizations, the fleets who came to protect Earth are now stranded – a planet pummeled by the reapers for months. Good luck finding anything there but death.
And that’s why it’s not an RPG. In an RPG (and ME 1 and 2), Shepard was my character. I made decisions and my decisions mattered. In ME3, when the dialog options come up (if they come up at all), I often just get two ways to say the same thing. There is no choice anymore. Oh yes, I can decide to trick the Krogans or the Salarians in the early game. But in the end, all is moot.
A lot of effort went into making the fights harder. That worked; I was getting killed so often that I finally gave up on the game. But in ME2, my decisions mattered. I was Shepard. In ME3, I was just a remote controlled drone of the EA’s marketing department (“Give us all your money!”).
Leave a Comment » | Game | Tagged: Bioware, Mass Effect 3 | Permalink
Posted by digulla
Michael Risch wrote a longer piece on software patents and why we should try to make software patents work: Curing the Problem of Software Patents
Here is my answer:
I think the main problem with the patent system isn’t the ideas behind but that some people have started to abuse it. And those who didn’t are being driven to join the brawl for no other reason than protect themselves.
You quoted “Software is hardware in every sense that matters for patents.” Let’s have a deeper look at that. Software is a formalized way to write recipes (as in cooking). Software development is a translation process (as in language interpreter). We take ideas from customers and turn them into detailed instructions to be executed by a moron. A human could do it but since it would be boring, we use a computer. Note that software isn’t mathematics – it’s language (as in English). It’s very limited (because the computer is so very dumb) but we’re more authors than mathematicians.
Now, my questions are:
My answers:
#1: No. The process of translating something is a craft. Crafts as such are not patentable.
#2: Since the interpreter doesn’t add anything of value to the input (they should stay true to what is given them), the output can’t be more or less than the input. It’s the input in another form but by itself, it doesn’t make the input more or less patentable.
#3 This leads to the question: Can you patent a recipe?
And the answer here is, sadly, yes. Which leads to the question: Can you patent any recipe?
No: The recipe has to be, well, “outstanding” in some way. Unfortunately, there is no universal standard what “outstanding” means. When I teach a newbie, they will think my methods are outstanding but they are just by relative comparison of what they know and what I know.
Since “outstanding” doesn’t seem to be a good tool to make a decision, what else do we have?
Damage. One of the roots of patent law is the idea to bring more justice to the world. It was invented for the specific purpose to protect the work of “helpless” inventors so they wouldn’t be ripped off all the time.
This makes sense if you, say, develop a new medicine. As of today, you need to spend around one billion dollars for a new medicine. Without patent law, it simply wouldn’t make sense for corporations to take the involved risks, so it makes sense to apply it here.
But software patents are in a completely different league. They cost $20’000 or less to produce and they can cause hundreds of billions of damage when they are used as a weapon – which is the sole and main purpose of software patents.
Since software patents are used solely to damage society as a whole (forcing companies to invest in them, costs of defending yourself against a lawsuit no matter if it’s justified or not, costs of canceling abusive patents, costs in lost revenue when you can’t sell your product because a competitor wants more market share), they need to be outlawed.
If you fail in this task, then no new computer related products will be sold in the USA by … well … 2013 because everyone will be suing everyone and all money will flow into courts and to patent lawyers. No more software development will happen because it’s just too expensive/dangerous. Maybe someone will find a patent to “display text remotely” and take down Google or the whole Internet (at least the part that runs in the USA).
The lawsuits between Apple and Samsung should be a warning shot. These only exist to give one company a bigger market share in a saturated market. Better product doesn’t count nor how “inventive” it is. It’s just the logical, inevitable conclusion what happens when all players follow the rules that we made.
Or Oracle vs. Google. Oracle came in demanding several billion dollars and got nothing. But if they had a different judge, the outcome could have been completely different. Is that what we want?
This seems to damage companies like Swype (see “An Example” in his post). But does it really?
First of all, someone could copy their idea. But customers would only buy the copy when it was better for most of them. Do we really want to protect something that most people think worse?
Copying an idea usually leads to a new, very similar but still different idea. The “thief” adds his own wisdom to it. We call that process “learning”. Isn’t that something that we should support?
If Swype can’t patent their idea, they can still make a product and sell it. If they fail, some money will be lost. But if they succeed, no other company can sue them for billions of dollars for no other reason than to slow them down. Isn’t that better than the other way around?
We say that the Internet Year is only three months. New ideas spring up so quickly by now that the old, sluggish patent system can never keep up. Do we want to slow down progress (might be a good idea) *and* feed the trolls? How much is an idea worth protecting if it’s outdated in 9 months?
How much more money will we make/safe if software patents are outlawed and all this money goes back into R&D?
Related:
4 Comments | Software | Tagged: Intellectual property, Michael Risch, Patent | Permalink
Posted by digulla
On the internet,
you can be
anything you want.
It’s strange that
so many people
choose to be stupid.
(source)
Leave a Comment » | Fun, Philosophy | Tagged: Fun | Permalink
Posted by digulla
Think about this: How could you improve a toothbrush?
And I’m not talking about the electronic kind; just a plan plastic toothbrush. No idea? How about adding a fountain so you don’t have to crawl into your sink!
Source: Rinsing Toothbrush WIN
Leave a Comment » | Fun | Tagged: Fun, Invention, Toothbrush | Permalink
Posted by digulla
Education is expensive but there is an upper limit how much you can spend on it – eventually, you will run out of books to buy and teachers to pay. Blunders caused by ignorance, on the other hand, have no such limitations and there is no way to tell when they will happen. Examples: The 2007-2012 global financial crisis.
Related articles:
Leave a Comment » | Philosophy | Permalink
Posted by digulla
Archimedes is long dead but we know about him because he left books and other people wrote about him. In William Noel’s TED talk about how a team recovered the Archimedes Palimpsest, William made some very important points (starting at @11:20):
Now, all this data that we collected, all the images, all the raw images, all the transcriptions that we made and that sort of thing, have been put online under a Creative Commons license for anyone to use for any commercial purpose.
Why did the owner of the manuscript do this? He did this because he understands data as well as books. Now, the thing to do with books, if you want to ensure their long term utility, is to hide them away in closets and let very few people look at them. The thing to do with data, if you want it to survive, is to let it out and have everyone have it with as little control on that data as possible. And that’s what he did.
And institutions can learn from this. Because institutions at the moment confine their data with copyright restrictions and that sort of thing. And if you want to look at Medieval manuscripts on the web, at the moment, you have to go to National Library of Wise Site[?] or the Universal Library of Access Site[?] which is about the most boring way in which you can deal with digital data.
What you want to do is to aggregate it all together. Because the Web of ancient manuscripts of the future isn’t going to be built by institutions. It’s going to be built by users … people who just want to curate their own glorious selection of beautiful things.
This really explains the dilemma we find ourselves in today. Artists want to share their data (if not, why would they write books, songs, plays in the first place?) But with non-digital media, sharing means wear. Books get damaged by opening them.
Data, on the other hand, gets damaged by not copying it. The NASA almost lost data tapes from the Apollo missions (see Sticky Moondust) – if they hadn’t shared a copy with Australia. Companies around the globe struggle with data stored in legacy formats that no one can read anymore because the software refuses to work on modern PCs.
The old copyright made sense when the media was valuable. Today, the media costs nothing. No company or country in the world would be able to found Wikipedia. Just think of the legal issues they’d have to clear. Struggles over who “owns” what. Power games over control.
Leave a Comment » | Philosophy | Tagged: Archimedes, Archimedes Palimpsest, Copyright, Creative Commons, TED, William Noel | Permalink
Posted by digulla
The marine prefers non-swimmers – they’ll defend their ships longer.
Leave a Comment » | Fun | Tagged: Fun, Military | Permalink
Posted by digulla
Ruining our privacy wasn’t enough – now they’re after our money, too!
Leave a Comment » | Fun | Tagged: Facebook, Fun | Permalink
Posted by digulla
If you’re interested in the conflicts between software and documentation, Alex Lagarde wrote a great post about that: Intent Discovery – Part 1 : the intents behind softwares.
It explains what the different (and conflicting) goals are between the “technical space” (source code), “model space” (design and architecture) and “document space” (what people need to use the software successfully). And he promises some solutions with the new Eclipse project “Intent” (and the second post in the series).
2 Comments | Software | Tagged: Documentation, Eclipse, Software, Software Development | Permalink
Posted by digulla
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