The government must act now to save thousands of jobs and tens of billions in lost revenue!

All over the country, youths are going clothes shopping. Shockingly, before buying anything, they’re trying the clothes on. That’s right, wearing the clothes – for free!

Often, they try on clothes that they don’t buy. Sometimes, they wear clothes that they were never intending to purchase, just to see how they look!

I know, horrific isn’t it. Immoral and wrong. It’s tantamount to theft. They don’t own them, haven’t paid for them. And yet there they are, taunting the whole industry!

All those poor tailors, seamstresses, dyers, cutters – their jobs are in peril due to this blatant.. well.. fabric piracy!

Forget this digital britain nonsense – the real ‘lost money’ in our economy is in folks trying on clothes. Ban changing rooms now!

Last time I went shopping – let’s face it we’re all guilty in this – I tried on three pairs of trousers and bought one. If I’m in any way typical – well at 3:1 worn/bought ratio that’s $100bn of lost revenue right there!

You represent a terrible egotism – I want this now, therefore I’m allowed it now. You’re spoilt children, having silly tantrums over shiny things you can’t have.

But, right now, you’re being used; being used in a public policy ‘debate’, by ambitious politicians and business-blinded lobbyists. And, on balance, I dislike these people and their ends more.

This week saw the publishing of a report by SABIP claiming ‘a rise in economic losses sustained by unauthorised downloading’.

It’s actually a pretty good and thorough report – though it’s a review rather than original research, and undertaken with the usual economic/industry bias.

But the executive summary is much more apocalyptic and negative than the report as a whole – one might say ‘sexed up’. It makes chilling reading – £10 billion in monetary losses; 4,000 jobs; £12 billion stolen by the users of one small peer-to-peer network annually; who knows the figure for the whole of the internet! As the summary says “these figures are staggering”.

Yes they are. And also utter, utter nonsense. Maybe the figures aren’t supposed to be the kind that stand up to simple scrutiny. Perhaps they’re of the good-enough-for-a-powerpoint-slide-or-spreadsheet-or-press-release type.

But, even the most innumerate of us will wonder how 4,000 jobs relates to a £10bn loss – unless each of those potential employees earn/costs £2.5m a year.

Some of us will wonder further. When the summary says that a season of 24 is worth £5, wouldn’t that imply that 4.2 million years of content are being downloaded annually to make up this £12bn in stolen value.

To put it another way, with these numbers, even if every broadband-connected household in the UK was involved, some 48 hours of pirated content would be being watched by each of them online, every week.

And, further, we have to assume that if the content weren’t downloaded it would be paid for. Phew!

Indeed “these figures are staggering”. Staggeringly stupid and cherry-picked to get headlines, I’d say. The numbers imply a very odd world, one that I’m certain doesn’t really exist. (I’m being a little unfair by not splitting the numbers into UK v. world losses, but it’s not that clear in the report’s summary either).

Even given these ridiculous numbers, the report says that it’s going to get worse – 50mps broadband can deliver 10 hours of music in five minutes! Imagine how much more people will listen to when it can be downloaded so quickly! It will only take 12 minutes to download a whole 24hrs of music.

I’m guessing that the fear is that young folks find a way to consume more than 24 hours of content in a day – then we’ll be in trouble. Or not.

My favourite bit:

“The new generation of broadband access at 50mbs can deliver 200 mp3 music files in five minutes, the unauthorised DVD of “Star Wars” in three minutes, and the complete digitized works of Charles Dickens in less than ten.”

Now, leave aside the fact that Charles Dickens’ work is now out-of-copyright and perfectly right, proper and good to share. It’s some deep level of digital ignorance that thinks that in terms of file size the order goes music > video > text. Do these folks not use email? This is a soundbite drop-in: false but designed to be easily repeatable. And, I’d warrant, it must have been written by someone who is digitally illiterate – just the peeps you want setting digital policy.

It’s obviously too much to ask for a simple model of file-sharing activity – one in which the numbers add up and doesn’t point to some coming digital apocalypse. Because that’s not where we’re heading. There is a hard limit on how much digital content we can possibly consume – time.

There is clearly no strict equivalence between the amount of content downloaded, the amount consumed and the amount that would otherwise have been bought. Refusing that is where these silly numbers come from. There is no secret ‘dark’ £10bn (or was it £12bn?), just waiting to be delivered to Bono and his mates, in trucks.

Sigh, but you can bet it’ll be the big numbers that are picked up by the media and repeated and exaggerated and the government set public internet policy off the back of them. Public internet policy that will be restrictive and designed to appease the industry lobbyists – ignorant of our individual rights and utterly disproportionate.

Just so others can find this post: the broken washing machine was a Siemens xlp1400 (or maybe xlp 1400), and the symptom was a flashing key symbol.

Turns out it wasn’t broken – the flashing key symbol meant that the child lock had been accidentally engaged. The fix, given by the friendly folks on the Siemens help-line: simply hold down the start button for two seconds. Bingo, the laundry cycle can crank up again. They also offered to send us a new manual for the machine. Which was nice.

Couldn’t find any information on the interweb of how to solve this – hence this post. After-sales service on the web becomes increasingly impossible through the spew of affiliate and review sites that vie daily to dominate the search results – to everyone’s disadvantage it seems. (Although, it would have been helpful if Siemens published their manuals online in a way that google could search them. Just saying).

This might be the most boring post I’ve ever written. And the most useful.

So, I searched for ‘plymouth terror arrests’ on Google news:

Yep. That’s 422 reports of the arrest, 10 of the release. Only 3 news organisations reported the releases, and all of them as local news.

See the problem?

You know, we could make this a story again if we all blog about it, tweet it, link to it on facebook. Please do.

Update: Paul has blogged about this and added it to Reddit. Please vote up if you think this deserves more coverage.

I’m sure there’s someone arguing that the release without charge of these five people should be plastered all over today’s newspapers. After all, their arrest under the Terrorism Act received blanket front page coverage.

I’m sure there’s a passionate journalist, right now, doorstepping the police officers involved and trying to tease out how the arrest of a 25-year-old man for spraying the grafito ‘Antifa’ lead to the unwarranted detention of 4 others under the Terrorism Act.

I’m sure there’s someone asking what it must be like to be a 16-year-old schoolboy wrongly arrested under the Terrorism Act.

I’m sure a feared editor is banging a table with angry fists and sending journalists scurrying to uncover the facts: to disclose the ‘information [the police] had at the time of the arrests’; to make public the evidence presented to the district judge that allowed their continued detention.

I’m sure the ‘material relating to political ideology’ is about to be revealed in an in-depth investigative report. We’ll soon know if we’re talking about tracts inciting revolution or copies of Thatcher’s autobiography.

I’m sure that one of those awful infographic timelines is being sketched out, describing what came to light between the initial Friday night arrest for simple criminal damage and the Sunday arrests of his associates.

It may well be that the police actions were proportionate and necessary – in good faith. But something smells wrong here – and has done from the initial reports of the action. Surely there’s a journalist or editor somewhere that’s pursuing this story?

So far, no evidence of said reporter has appeared.

Now the report does claim to be setting up a straw-man Rights Agency to spur discussion – but that seems to me more of a tactic by which they can ignore any real criticism, a tactic to gain what we might generously call wriggle-room.

The most interesting claim for me was their suggestion that a Digital Rights Agency should have ‘a commitment to explain to the public the consequences of unlawful use of copyright material. ‘

In the same paragraph, it’s clear what the report writers expect such an agency would say and to what effect: we will stop ‘engaging in piracy’ if we ‘understand the damage’ caused by infringement to artists.This agency would be set up not to ‘explain the consequences’ as such, but rather to unequivocally say that copyright infringement is bad. And I mean, really bad.

But, and here’s the rub, what if I disagree? What if I were to say that actually the unlawful use of copyright material sometimes and often has great value. If this new Digital Rights Agency took seriously the commitment to ‘explain to the public the consequences of unlawful use of copyright material’ I don’t know they would come down on the side of copyright at all.

I valued the records I borrowed, and yes, taped when I was a bit younger. I enjoyed, with friends, watching pirate videotapes. I learnt how to play the guitar by playing songs that I didn’t write, without paying any royalties to the song-writer. Will the Digital Rights Agency also have a duty to explain the consequences of my piracy: my life-long love for music and film?

Even straightforward claims, like that of copyright encouraging production, have counter-evidence.

For example, Frederic Sherer’s recent paper on the emergence of copyright in Europe suggests that the evidence for a link is anything but clear: he argues that “Verdi, enriched by copyright protection, reduced his compositional effort” and he concludes that “the world would be full of glorious music even if copyright laws had not come into being.” (more discussion on TechDirt)

Will the agency have a duty to point to Sherer’s research?

Will the agency explain that copyright infringement may benefit music education, as music teacher Jane Underhill suggests?

What about the good of putting orphan works back into circulation? Out of print books online and read again? Sampling and remixing? Archiving for future generations? Photocopying a newspaper clipping and posting it to your grandparents?

You know, I’ve been selective here with the examples and research I’ve chosen to highlight. But I do think that the debate over the merits or otherwise of copyright is not well concluded. And that matters. We cannot have a government agency created of which the sole purpose may be to peddle a lie.

I felt a bit uncomfortable about the ‘British talent’ remark, and at first I wasn’t sure why it affected me so. On one level, it’s just not true – one of the winning entries was headed by a kiwi friend, but while his particular nose was put out-of-joint, that didn’t quite explain fully my unease with and surprise at the remark.

Now, I realise that I’m reading too much into an off-hand tweet, and I don’t think for a minute that Tom was trying to appropriate our efforts, or spin them in any way. In fact, that he took the time to thank us is much appreciated. But, that said, my discomfort is real and bears examining.

The more I think about it, there’s just a cognitive gap in my mind between what we were doing and any kind of nationalism or jingoism – even though in this case all the projects were around and about UK government.

I think the reason Tom’s remark seemed so out-of-place may have something to do with the social and no-border nature of open-source software.

The project I worked on used bits of technology that directly come from Denmark, the USA, Germany, Japan, Australia. Being largely open sourced it would have had contributors from just about every country I could find on a map; and likely some I couldn’t.

What’s more, software like everything else it seems has become social. I’ve met many of the people that built it, if not in person then on irc or on mailing lists (or, if you insist, on twitter). I have a different relationship with open-sourced tools than I do, for example, with the Japanese TV I own. The software is whoever built it, from wherever they come. British talent? I just don’t care.

If we had completed something useful on the day, we would have shared that code with whoever wanted it, of whatever nationality. I just don’t recognise national borders in this work. It wouldn’t have been British code, just code. And, the environment into which it would have been released is a pan-national one.

I remember, when I was CTO of a tech start-up, there were people whose code and libraries we used, that we would have liked to have employed, but who were on visas that either prevented it or that required them to earn a certain amount annually, or were only around for another couple of months on a time-limited visa. It always seemed a bureaucratic nonsense to me.

I don’t want to seem all Star Trek about this – what next, abolish money? – but I think I’m privileged to work in a no-borders industry. I like this world where software doesn’t get exported and imported. Software gets written and then used. And, tackling comments like Tom’s when they pop up is an important part of maintaining this good.

What if Tom had said ‘want to see open-source flourishing in Britain?’ Ooh. That would have been good.

(Wish I hadn’t mentioned export tariffs for software. Who knows what crackpot ideas this government will come up with next.)

Most of the discussion wasn’t actually about TDD. So, perhaps we’d best start by defining what we mean here – or at least, the way I think you should see TDD. Then perhaps, we can talk about its merits or otherwise in a rational way. And, along the way let’s try not to dig new foxholes that piss-poor developers can snipe from.

TDD is a practice, situated in a discipline called Extreme Programming (XP). TDD is the second worst-named term in programming, only worsted by Extreme Programming itself. Seeing the practice within the broader discipline is important though, as we’ll come to see.

The reason it’s poorly named is that there’s really a two-step process that should be at work when practising TDD – test and code together and relentlessly refactor.

This is the first place where XP asserts itself. XP requires programming in the concrete, that our goal should be working software – indeed, that software only has value when it’s working. You can take this on many levels, but one I find enlightening is the pith of ‘code is abstract, working software concrete’. If you program all day (or in my past experience, for months at a time) without ever running your code, without making it concrete, then you have not been in the business of producing working software. You are making software that might, not software that does.

Most people agree at some level with this, although some still suggest that code readthroughs are the way to assert working software; some even suggest that thorough documentation is the answer. They may suggest this, even strongly defend it, but in practice those same people usually try to run the code before releasing it. Of course, XP does assert that code is best written in dialogue with other programmers, hence the practice of pair programming. This is, at most, a distraction from arguments about TDD.

As practitioners of TDD, we run our code all the time. We build harnesses to exercise our code all of the time – we call these harnesses tests. And we keep them around when we’re done with them. I think we’d say that we call them tests because they don’t just run the code, they check it too. But the reality is we call them tests because they’ve always been called tests and it was easier to sneak the practice into the typical IT shop.

(Another blog post waiting to be written here about BDD – why are we moving these harnesses away from code and towards documentation? It’s going the wrong way.)

I always find that this far, it’s easy to take most developers along with me. Nothing too controversial to this point, usually the naysayers here are people defending their own poor practices, and they know it. From this point in the real disagreements start…

The first thing the nodders add to this process is what I’ve snarkily called ‘the golden age before code’. This is some bizarre time before we start writing code where design is done and things are clarified. This is, according to some programmers whom I wouldn’t employ, where the real work is done. Factories are built and mouldings designed. Whoops, wrong industry. I mean, blueprints are drawn up and steelwork ordered. Whoops, wrong industry again.

What exactly is being designed in the golden age? The best answer seems to be code, not working software. In the golden age we are two steps removed from working software. We, as TDD zealots, reject this way of working – choosing to make code the level at which we design, not documents and diagrams. We don’t test our designs by coding them, we test our code by running it. This is an important point. TDD says we don’t stray far from the concrete world of running, working software – and crucially that we start in that world.

No API written without a client using it; no class interface without a instantiator; no method without a caller. Again, we call these second clients tests, and they’re part of the not-so-secret TDD magic that leads to better code. We try to keep them simple and precise, and we let the act of making the code run instruct us on how it should be written.

We find out early when interfaces are awkward, when classes have too many responsibilities, when methods aren’t needed and interfaces are bloated. We find this out by writing code, not by reading paper or drawing lines on whiteboards. And, us TDD folks say that this is the best way to do so. Because concrete working software is what we’re building. And because no plan survives the reality of battle. We know we don’t have all the answers when stood at the whiteboard drawing pictures; we know that our experience is pretty narrow when it comes down to it; and if we knew how to do it already, someone would have already done it. This humility is why TDD practitioners get a bad name for being arrogant. No, I don’t understand that either.

When coaching on this point in the past, I’ve used some pithy comment about how whiteboard ink was cheap. Then I found out how much those pens actually cost…

We’re nearly done defining TDD – and I haven’t even mentioned correctness or validation yet. Perhaps I won’t. It’s not that important in my understanding of TDD. Working software. That’s a better way to put it.

The final bit of TDD, refactoring, is really important and the one that gets mentioned the least. Again it has to do with the limits of our pre-cognition and a relentless prioritisation of the concrete over the abstract.

Refactoring is the process by which the code becomes more abstracted and better for it. That is, with TDD, we’ve seen that we don’t start with an abstract idea of what the software should be, untested and in a parallel medium. We start with working code. Refactoring is how we pull, pry and tease abstractions out of the code to make it cleaner, more pliable and more self-explanatory.

While we pull and pry these latent ideas and perspectives out of the code, we keep turning the code into working software by running our tests. We assert that the code duplication is the smell of these latent abstractions and we often start by trying to remove it. At this point, too, we care about naming and how the code expresses its intentions.

To my mind, this is where the smart folk shine. When people say that testing is hard, my response is often ‘yeah. But refactoring is the bitch.’ That’s one of the reasons you’ll find more written on testing than on refactoring, many more testing frameworks than refactoring tools. I don’t know why it gets so ignored in TDD discussions though, maybe we should change the name.

So that’s all really. TDD means something more than testing, and it pisses me off that we bog ourselves down in the kind of discussions that appeared on LRUG. If you want to have a pop at it, learn what it is first.

Now, we TDD-nuts believe that this ends up giving a better, less leaky, sharper design than we could have come up with on paper or at a whiteboard. You may not be able to accept that. But, as Tarantino might have said if he were a developer: that’s pride fucking with you. Fuck pride. Pride only hurts, it never helps.

In challenging TDD, I think you have to start by asking whether a process that goes from the concrete business of writing working software to an abstracted design is better than a process that goes the other way. I think it is, in fact I’m sure of it. An ex-colleague used to say ‘code doesn’t mind if it looks simple, but architects want to look clever.’ I think he had a point.

You can argue a hybrid model with some design (of boxes, on whiteboards) up-front has merits. I haven’t found, in my career, the results of that compromise to be useful. And I’m not sure the downsides of this approach, which tends towards over-engineering, are worth risking.

Anyway, the point of this post, which is longer and more abstract than I initially wanted was to describe what TDD is, why it’s a good thing, and to show that most of the criticisms I hear aren’t really talking about TDD at all.

I was pretty sure that I wanted to do something with numbers, specifically with the big monetary numbers that have been littering every article since the economy tanked: £300bn for Bank of Scotland here, £140bn for Northern Rock there, £1bn bail-out for the Post Office, £6million a year for Jonathan Ross. It’s all too much.

So, I wrote a script that lets you see what this money could buy if we weren’t throwing it at second-rate comedians or third-rate bankers. What if we spent it on schools, or teachers, or wispas instead? My script lets you see that by altering the text of Guardian articles as you browse.

Look! A picture where you can see the fruits of my labours in a fetching burgundy colour:

To use the script, you’ll need to be using Firefox and have the GreaseMonkey add-on installed. Once you have them, click here to install the script and then visit any article on the Guardian site and click an alternative unit from the ‘Swap numbers’ floating menu.

Yes, it’s a bit silly and I’ve left a lot unpolished, but that’s not the point of a 24-hour hacking competition.

What surprised me is how useful alternative monetary amounts may be as a navigation pivot. We’re used to jumping around sites using tags or other text-based navigation, from finance, say, to education stories. I’ve not seen it done with numbers. And, well, someone should. Now. In fact, I just might.

Anyway, I came second in the X-factor vote, and the Guardian said my hack was ‘quite brilliant’ which completely made up for rest of the shitty week I had last week.

Please, Guardian folk, invite me to the next one!

We need to stop describing ad-supported things as ‘free’. Their might be no exchange of cash but there’s an exchange of attention and cognition. The marketing business justifies a lot of crap on the basis that it’s giving things away for free. If we paused and recognised that they’re not actually free then we might think harder about whether it’s the right thing to do. We might do smarter, better things if we recognise the cost we’re imposing on people without their permission.

I agree that advertising is not free – it’s a cost in terms of our attention, our time. But there’s a further aspect in which advertising costs us. The more relevant advertising becomes, the more likely it is to tell us things that we already know – relevancy here is more likely repetition. The more it tells us about things we were going to take advantage of anyway, the more it’s just a cost transferred directly from its medium to the good or service we purchase. Advertising, done best, directly makes things more expensive.

Quick example: when I buy a newspaper, I’m likely to see adverts for things I’m not going to buy anyway. I don’t drive, but there are plenty of car adverts in the papers. The car companies will never see the money they’ve spent on advertising from my wallet.

That portion of the newspaper revenue that the car adverts support is funded by someone else and effectively donated to me through the paper’s lower cover price. But as the adverts become more relevant, this dynamic changes and subsequently the newspaper, or more likely website, becomes less free to me.

And in between lick and split, in between the car makers and the journalists are the advertising folk’s overheads that I’m funding too.

If the internet works its disintermediating magic then advertising will eat itself. That’s good. Ok?

But go read Russell’s post anyway, it’s dead good.