I understand the criticism; I use (am forced/ am a grateful software platform slave to Windows boxes) at work...

But...to be fair...Apple figured out how to create a handheld/phone way the heck better than Microsoft did...at least for the last decade.

I would surely like that software setup (program) to do the same from my end to these lowlifes.

I'll totally dig on a future sport where cars all race themselves. They should also have robots to handle pit stops as well.

The prize goes to whoever has the best performing software and hardware.

I understand where you're coming from, but I stand by my previous posts.

Full disclosure, I never got professionally employed as a programmer / coder / software engineer. However, my Bachelors Degree was in CS, and I have many friends working in the field.

In the show Silicon Valley, Richard Hendriks is working for a large corporate entity but has an idea / personal project that he ends up spinning into a new company. He is trained as a software engineer (CS), NOT with any business or management background (MIS), yet he becomes sort of the de-facto boss / CEO (at least early in the show). He hires a small team to help him develop his product.

Given that scenario, I think the show portrays things very accurately or at least completely plausibly. He's a coder, not a manager. Programmers may understand the importance of formatting and style standards, but at least tend to not have the correct personality type to be comfortable with formally dictating those standards to a team (an activity which would generally be more in line with an MIS background).

Also, his company is small -- just a few other programmers. They are all specializing on different components of the product. So they generally aren't working on each other's code. Standards for function arguments / helper functions / etc. would have to be agreed upon to get their individual components to interact, but that is a separate issue from tabs vs spaces. It would be wise to set a style and naming convention standard and have everyone conform to it, I agree completely. But Richard isn't built for the manager / CEO position, so he either fails to recognize that or doesn't feel comfortable dictating standards to his team.

One more thing to consider is that he (Richard) essentially is the product. He's the keystone piece, the central figure. He's John Carmack, Linus Torvalds, or Steve Wozniak. Even in a very large team / corporate environment, I'd wager that more often than not the style standards that end up getting set tend to fall in line with whatever those key guys want them to be. Don't touch an id Software graphics engine without conforming to Carmack's way, or the Linux kernel without conforming to Torvald's standards. Especially if they are building something new from scratch -- which is again true in the Silicon Valley show scenario.

The show isn't a documentary on how to properly run a startup company in the real Silicon Valley, but it is generally accurate enough that it has a lot of nuances that people with a programming background can pick up on and be entertained by (even people that don't actually work professionally in the field like me). And more important, the general feel of the show can be entertaining even for people that know absolutely nothing about programming.

@lucky760 -
I still think Judge is actually presenting the situation pretty accurately. If you look up online forum posts about tabs vs spaces, the file size thing is brought up as a pro for tabs very regularly.

While it is technically true, you're right that it doesn't make much sense because the difference is *tiny*, so conforming to the standard of wherever you are working is vastly more important.

BUT, that doesn't stop individual programmers from being (irrationally) passionate in their preferences.

Another dynamic that is (correctly) displayed in the show in my opinion is the difference between a big corporate environment, working as an individual in a large team of programmers as compared with having a project that starts out as a the brainchild of one person and grows into a small team.

The show is about the latter. In that scenario, a programmer / software engineer ends up trying to also be a manager of a team, in spite of the fact that he isn't really built for it. In a big corporate environment, they are well aware that style issue conflicts can turn into big time wasters unless they set out guidelines clearly at the outset. But that sort of micro-managing is NOT what a pure engineer type is comfortable doing.

Basically, I think that tabs vs spaces is completely a personal preference issue if you're working alone OR on a small team that don't interact with each other's code much. And even on a large team, either choice is fine BUT it becomes important to conform to the standards of the team as a whole.

I thought it was pretty clear in the show that he knew she was using spaces instead of tabs because of the sound of her repeatedly hitting the spacebar at the beginning of each line (which depending in your editor/IDE might be done automatically).

They are in a small environment, (loosely?) collaborating on code. He's anal about tabs vs spaces, and can tell that she's using the "wrong" one because of the repetitive (and annoying from his perspective) sound.

Put programmers together in a confined space, and they'll grate on each other over style issues / noise levels / music / whatever. I find the show extremely accurate in portraying the general atmosphere or feel of software development, if occasionally accenting or misportraying some details in the interest of making it good TV.

I have been in this spot with other viruses.

This is a big deal for medical manufactures.

In the US even if I was handed a fix It can not be installed. It has to go through all the regulations and deemed "safe" by all the agencies involved in getting an product to market. Then the manufactures can release it.


To be clear it is the facility responsibility to have a "safe" network because of the above reasons.

My only recourse is to reload the software, which will still have this security hole until a fix is officially released by the manufacture.

*dead -- "'Real meaning of Chota packe...' This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Aiplex Software Pvt Ltd..."

*ban self link and spam http://updatesee.com/sales-rains-cloud-technology-arm-launches-contact-center-software-apayaa/

It's not that easy. It's pretty simple economics. If there are jobs in an area, the people have more money, therefore the house prices go up.

If you move away, you're faced with the prospect of either not working or having a commute that is both a time and money vacuum.

@TheFreak, "work from home" isn't always a solution either. I'm a software developer... I should be the poster child for work from home, and after the earthquakes in 2011, I did for a year while we had no offices. But after a while, we realised that with all the technology in the world, there's no substitute for being in a room with other people to discuss things.

I don't have any beefs with my credit card - I just don't like how having a decent credit rating is basically forced on society to get - a job (in some cases like my job working at a software company), to rent a home to sleep in (instead of your friends couch or the street). They got your balls on this - real "free" Amerikkka, real free....

There are a lot of parallels between advertising and copyright. Buy wholeheartedly in to either, and you end up sort of failing to accept the reality of their flaws.

Advertisers think they have a big problem whenever someone circumvents their ads. They panicked when VCRs came around and allowed people to record shows and fast-forward through ads. They panicked when DVRs came out and let people digitally skip through ads. And they are panicking now, with more and more people getting fed up and putting ad-blocking software on their computers or devices.

Copyright holders think they have a big problem when someone tries to circumvent their system, too. They worried about libraries giving people free access to books; but at least a physical book is pretty much limited to one person at a time. They freaked out about cassette tapes being easily copied with a dual cassette deck. They freaked out about people sharing MP3 music over the internet. They freaked out when DVDs came out with CSS protection which was circumvented almost immediately. They continue to freak out by pushing for ever more and more drastic DRM schemes, that are generally circumvented quite rapidly.

The general theme in both advertising and copyright is escalation; a sort of arms race. The problem is that that solution doesn't actually improve things for anyone, in either case. Ads get more and more offensive and annoying, more and more people block/skip them. Copyright gets more and more locked-down, more and more people circumvent it. In both cases, as the "legitimate" side squeezes harder, it ends up making the user experience better for those who circumvent it "illegitimately". See, for example, this good old comic from The Oatmeal:
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones

The web with adblock software is a massively better experience than the web without it. A pirated 1080p movie or TV show lets you skip the previews/commercials that are often unskippable on a DVD. And on and on.

This arms race doesn't have a good future. Creators and distributors must start wracking their brains to come up with whole new ideas, or at least variants of the old ones, that break that cycle and ensure that "illegitimate" users/viewers don't have a better experience than legitimate ones. I'm sure not holding my breath though.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

After reading up - it appears like it could be a defect in the current branch of the Chrome release.

Have you tried the Chrome beta? (beta software has its own risks of course).
https://www.google.com.au/chrome/browser/beta.html

While I'm in no position to buy from Monsanto, and don't know enough to advocate for or against them, the troubling impression I have of them is their business practices. This is why I had a quick look through that contract analysis.

It reminded me of something I am familiar with: software. You often have clauses that prohibit analysis or reverse engineering of software. Like the farmer doing the Monsanto contract analysis I [almost always] have no interest in doing that reverse engineering, but I definitely want others to be able to so they can look for things like security holes.

Having the attitude of 'this contract is fine because it doesn't restrict me from anything I want or would expect to do' is completely understandable, but can hide some of the real issues.

I love the Kurzgesagt videos, and again here they impress me by mentioning the issues with these companies, while completely separating it from the issue being analysed.

Viruses? The only alarm it set off for me was my bullshit alarm. Did your AV software say what kind? Dammit, now I gotta run a sweep. Although I am running Firefox with Adblock and NoScript, so maybe that made the difference.