I understand your frustration but I think pre-orders are important for them to understand how many units to manufacture. What if they produce too many, and people don't buy them ? what if too little and they can't cope with the demand ?
> It's not your data, just because it's about you.
sure, I agree.
In this case I think the mistake was made by the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs who didn't understand the consequences of publishing one person's sensitive information on the internet. In my utopia though, the newspaper would have asked (and forcefully obtained in this case thanks to the Ministry authority) permission to Mr Gonzalez to access his sensitive information, only for the amount of time required by the bidding process.
A distributed social network would be probably part of it but still doesn't successfully describe my idea (utopia might be a better term..). I would like any service to ask permissions for any piece of data that I control. For example my bank wants to see my last payslip ? sure ask for the proper permission and for how long you need it. Dentist require a proof of my address ? no problems. It will allow me to change my address or phone number for example without having to notify all services (electricity company, bank, doctors, amazon, etc..). I'm actually in the process of moving house again and this is so annoying, why do I have to notify everybody to update the data they have about me ? Wouldn't it be better if they could just ask me about my data at the time they need it ?
that's not what I meant. For example when using a mobile app, you can give access to your contact list, your position, your pictures etc...All data is stored on your phone and each application must get permission to access your data. What I would like is to extend this model to the web, so that any service that require some information from me will have to ask permission to get it rather than having me store a copy on their database.
The biggest issue is that we don't own our data. It's stored in Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.. servers. It should work the other way around, every individual should keep his own data and provide permissions to external services and other people to access it. Is there any project looking into this direction ? How do we reverse this situation ?
I think it's dangerous to rely solely on a unit test suite to guarantee the correctness of your program. Each unit-tested component may pass its own tests, but that doesn't guarantee that by interacting with other (present and future) components it won't exhibit any bug.
I guess immutability would go a long way forward in realizing this guarantee, but I've never had the pleasure of working on a software where each component was truly immutable and independent of each other.
If you are testing a single function, why would you care whether the data comes from the database, the network or from a mock ? All you need is to verify that the given function produces the expected output given the right (and wrong) inputs. Being able to test this way also makes easy to keep the components in your software decoupled.
My philosophy is to use mocks for unit tests and the real thing for integration tests.
>> I am baffled as to why you'd build your castle atop a crumbling foundation
I think you're using a wrong metaphor. Facebook foundations can't be crumbling just because they're made in PHP. There wouldn't be Facebook as we know it today otherwise. You might say they used a "low quality" material to build them. I see Hack more as a better material, that can also bind with the previous one and make it stronger.
I understand that for the author of the article the goal is to make a product that people use and that entails a financial return.
I just want to say that building a software from scratch, even if doesn't end up used by millions of people, is worth doing for the process itself. Not just for the fun of it, but especially because you learn a lot during the process. I don't consider learning a waste of time nor a fool somebody that is motivated more by learning than by fame and money.