The concept of fair is unfair... no really!

Think about fairness for a moment.. I'll start with an example:

5 people goto the funfair. Whilst everyone is having a go, John wishes to have another ride, but everyone else wishes to move on.

Everyone else says:

"It's unfair for John to have another ride, it means he has had two rides when everyone else will only get one. It is unfair on the rest of us."

However, John has never been to the funfair before, and is very poor and unlikely to be able to afford to go again (everyone else went last year). All the other people have had (in total) many more rides than John.

John explains that:

"Infact to be truely fair, he should have another ride."

However, John is so poor because he has been idle, whilst the others have worked hard. The others have earned an extra ride. So what a third person may know is whats really fair is that 2 out of the 5 have extra rides. Then again, someone aware of still more facts, knows thats what would truely be fair is that they should all go home and pay attention to their relatively abandoned families.. and so on.. and so on... and so on...

What becomes clear, if you think long enough, is that all fairness is based on a point of view, an oppinion and a chosen set of facts / information to back that oppinion.

Fairness is almost always a "personal" thing, or a group thing, or a community thing, or a nation thing. In other words, fairness is usually a political tool to sway the views of others by choosing some facts they feel others will also see and relate to which suggest that other viewpoints are "invalid" or "unfair".

There is one kind variety of unfairness which does matter though, and that is better thought of as being unethical than unfair. Most everything is both fair and unfair, depending on things considered and personal perspective and priorities. 

If something is found to be unfair from very many involved viewpoints then it might well be something unethical.

My advice is to forget about fairness, if you try to deal in fair and unfair you will just be puppeted around by the people most able to provide reasons why what you want is unfair and able to show what they want to be fair.

If you start feeling something is unfair, ask "Why is that unfair?" unwrap the unfairness down to a set of facts which are true for you and why it matters that you want changes. Then debate it from there and look for a resolution to the core of the cause of the feeling of unfairness. Sometimes you may even discover, you are the one getting infact extra-fair treatment (which applied to the entire first-world).

Just thought I'd share the musing with the everyone.

Microsoft Visual (Studio) Joke 2010

I've been using VS2010 for a while now. At first I was very impressed, but at the end of several months I'm just plain depressed at the time its wasted.

I'll list a few of the "jokes on you" / "waste hours of Dev time while Microsoft lol" features.

1) inline (the ability to force code to be compiled directly into the function rather than existing as a called piece of code) does not in fact exist, even though there like 3 keywords for it. At least, it does not exist in any useful way. It exists in the same way a cloud exists, its nice to see but doesn't help.

We have:

inline,
__inline,
__forceinline

If you read the documentation (and you can, or would be best just ignoring this waste of your life force). To save you the wasted effort, here are the only two lines which matter.. first the line which offers hope:

"Even with __forceinline, the compiler cannot inline code in all circumstances."

Right at this point I was optimistic. Then I read the next salient line:
"The function or its caller is compiled with /Ob0 (the default option for debug builds)."

So, inline is completely f**king useless to everyone. To retell this in more human terms, its like a friend who says "Sure, I'll help with the washing.. just give me a call and if I'm free ill help..." and that friends pretty much never free, or if he is its basically when he was having to have helped anyway. Therefore entirely at the discretion of that friend and your "words" don't change it. I guess if you DEVELOP your code in release build you might be ok >.<. If I f**king bother to type the word inline I WANT it to appear inline (regardless of you knowing any better... because you DON'T know better your just a damn tool *vents at VS2010*).

2) Non-Cancellable search, and search which isn't reliable.

So, if I dare to mistype what I'm looking for I am forced to wait for 2/3 seconds watching the hour glass equivalent and / VS go to a hung window. The positive side of this is it is damn well forcing me to avoid typos and remember more.

Yes. I am just peeved xD.

VS2010 is in fact a reasonably good engine. Its just screwed over by some dodgy decisions to take control away from the developer.

Who else is tired of the crap that software companies pull these days?

Here is the list of "crimes against customers" some of these companies perpertrate:

• Requiring an Internet Connection for game which can be played offline
• Taking over control of our PC's (in a manor which says "I now own your PC. Oh sure, I could give you control back of your own computer, but then you can't play our game :P").
• Installing "hidden" program elements (see cmdlineext.dll).
• Creating inaccessible registry keys (see SecuROM)
• Cloud (aka wring money out of a player) computing. aka, they own everything, we are "lucky" to get to play, we can't possibly play without agreeing to their every demand.

Here is a list of the shamed:

• Valve (aka Steam)
• Sony (search RootKit and Sony)

Thank god theres still the independent development community, producing software for everyone to be bought, and owned (not licensed and rented).

Though, its a sad fact that once some idependants become known, many buy-in to the "customer is to be controlled" mentality.

As a final note, there can be a case made for protecting investment in the face of unscruplous copying. I am not against copy protection, I am against software facsism (seeking to resolve societys issues by forcing behaviour and control, as appose to freedom, understanding, advice, direction, nuturing and assistance then finally, if absolutely neccessary, policing).