I suspect that SE's have accomplished as much in the area of computer vision as CS's have. Parallelism? I'm not sure. Given the underwhelming accomplishments of AI, I don't think anybody would want to claim that.
I'll bet a lot of people get a CS degree and then do what you describe as SE work. There's not a lot of profit in strictly theoretical work and where's there's little profit, there are few jobs.
As for the latter, as a guy who has been in industry for many, many years I can tell you that a lot of the advanced math I took was never used by me or any of my colleagues. Depending on the specific course, it might as you say "have a ton to do with programming" and still have nothing to do with the day-to-day work programmers actually do.
It's also important to realize that colleges and universities don't base the requirements for a particular major solely on the what's good for the student. Many courses (both in humanities and technical areas) are inappropriately required simply because there are aren't enough students who legitimately need the course to justify it's existence.
ClosedSource: It's not possible to create a large software product that is 100% unexploitable. Schraegstrichpunkt: Nonsense. You're only saying that because no one ever has.
Yes, I'm putting words in your mouth, but one doesn't always need a theorem to recognize truth. If you turn out to be right like Wesley and you've created a non-exploitable software product, let us know. In the mean time, watch out for those ROUS's er, I mean bugs.
"Yes he had poor judgement in creating a worm that did no evil. He should have created one that did very bad things and then he would have been on his gaurd and not have gotten caught."
I'm sure there's a lot of guys in prison right now who use the same quality of logic as you. Perhaps it never occurred to them that the best way to not get caught is to not commit the crime in the first place.
"I'm sure the whole sentence was handed down just to send a public message: Don't fuck with MySpace."
The judge's first question was probably "What's a my space"? The court doesn't give a rats ass about MySpace vs any other company that was a victim of a crime. If anybody reports seeing him on any website that falls into the category the court has defined, he'll be in big trouble. If MySpace shut down tommorrow the court probably wouldn't know and certainly wouldn't care.
You, and others with similiar beliefs, are part of the problem. If you really believe that exploits are a problem, than you should condemn anyone who writes one. Instead, you make excuses for these guys because you like the fact that exploits give you some ammunition against MS and other companies.
It's not possible to create a large software product that is 100% unexploitable, but it is quite easy for any individual to decide not to write an exploit. Those who make excuses for these guys and celebrate every MS vunerability also bear some responsibilty for encouraging these guys to cross the line.
Last time I checked most reality TV shows are longer than 5 mins. Youtube's business model was apparently to get a lot of attention and then sell out to another company for big bucks. I suspect Youtube will be as profitable to Google as AOL was to Time Warner.
"But they were very expensive - and you probably took care of them."
The Xerox mice were hardly coddled. They were used in labs (sometimes smoke-filled) for years.
"Generally, usability is much more important than functionality."
Sorry, but that's simply not true. Functionality is the minimum requirement for usability. In any case, Xerox played at least as key a role in the development of usable interfaces as Apple has and even Microsoft has conducted extensive usability studies.
If you're over 50 it's tough enough to find a programming job even when you are highly qualified. I don't think very many companies would be interested in hiring you unless they make a practice of hiring retirees for other jobs in the company.
I'm sure there's a lot of good 5 min videos out there, but I don't think there's any danger that these short videos are going to take the place of longer professional efforts. And how many of the people making these videos hope to qualify themselves for professional paid work someday. If you take away the hope of making a living, I suspect that the number of submissions would drop dramatically (no pun intended).
If you think Apple and NeXT were invisible to the press until the iPod came along, think again. Despite the fact that none of Jobs's computer companies had much more than 10% of the computer market, Jobs appeared on the cover of major magazines like Time, Newsweek, etc many, many times before Apple introduced the iPod. In 1997 when Apple was bailed-out by MS, it was Jobs alone that appeared on the cover of Time.
Jobs is a master marketer and showman who has kept himself and his companies in the spotlight regardless of their success or failure.
I have years of experience using mice on the Alto and Star and never had a problem with them. Nobody disputes that Apple brought the GUI computer to the masses, but that doesn't mean that the Xerox computers it was based on had some sort of problem that Apple corrected. The Mac's functionality was a subset of Xerox's with some ideas Apple added. It would be many years later before Apple's computers could do everything the Xerox computers could do.
Thanks for the fact-free post. Even if I don't "get it" (assuming there's really something to get), I'm not a content producer, so I'm not part of "the game" and thus unworried about being left behind.
Sure. Jobs sent his team to PARC so they could laugh at how far behind Xerox was.
Apple did make contributions (as did many other companies) but it's clear that there would have been no Lisa/Mac as we know it if Jobs had never visted PARC.
What I see is that nearly every review of Vista is written by a Mac user. Since I haven't used a Mac since test driving it in a store in 1984, I'm obviously extremely qualified to review the next version of OS X. Apple, I'll be waiting for my free Mac!
Well, that's fine if all the future of video holds is watching people like your next door neighbor do silly stuff on the Internet that is equally entertaining as watching him live over the back fence.
Nobody is going to spend a lot of time, effort, and money producing entertainment programs they don't make any money on.
I assume you mean "secret" API's that only MS knows about and might write applications that call them. Even if that were the case, it would only affect MS applications. Obviously anybody who doesn't know about the secret APIs can't be using them.
On the other hand, if you mean unpublished lower-level functions that the public APIs are built on, then duplicating them (or providing equivalents) is a legitimate part of the wine project's work and is nothing to complain about.
More generally, I think the wine project is using a "best bang for the buck" application-driven approach. I can certainly understand the practical reasons for doing that, but if you were really serious about 100% compatability, you'd use a API-driven approach. Duplicate the API correctly and the applications should take care of themselves.
"The project could have been "done" in six months with a published spec to work against."
Well, if by "published spec" you mean a document that tells you step by step how to implement each function call using Linux, than maybe they could do it in 2 or 3 years.
Otherwise, they're effectively recreating Windows using the published Windows API interface and Linux capabilities. It would be a very large and complex project. Testing it alone would probably take more man-hours than the Wine project has used so far.
Wine doesn't plan to implement 100% of the API for any version of Windows, so they're not running very hard. Given the scope of the project without much return other than a pat on the back, who can blame them.
So, if all the volunteer work was removed from Linux, for example, what percentage would be left? 5%? 10%?
Red Hat started with a product that was fundamentally working before it contributed anything. IBM isn't making any significant profit directly from "free" software and continues to maintain tight control over any of its proprietary cash cows.
If you want evidence that "free" software can make a "nice" profit in the general case, you'll need to look elsewhere.
A kludge is a work-around for an unanticipated problem or function. So both Sidekick and javascript qualify. It doesn't mean that Sidekick or javascript are crap, it just means that they play the role of a kludge in their most common use scenarios.
But the main point of the sub-thread is that copy and paste was possible on the PC in the 1980s just as I claimed.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the goal of trying to make these distinctions is to produce some kind of pecking order where none is required.
I suspect that SE's have accomplished as much in the area of computer vision as CS's have. Parallelism? I'm not sure. Given the underwhelming accomplishments of AI, I don't think anybody would want to claim that.
I'll bet a lot of people get a CS degree and then do what you describe as SE work. There's not a lot of profit in strictly theoretical work and where's there's little profit, there are few jobs.
As for the latter, as a guy who has been in industry for many, many years I can tell you that a lot of the advanced math I took was never used by me or any of my colleagues. Depending on the specific course, it might as you say "have a ton to do with programming" and still have nothing to do with the day-to-day work programmers actually do.
It's also important to realize that colleges and universities don't base the requirements for a particular major solely on the what's good for the student. Many courses (both in humanities and technical areas) are inappropriately required simply because there are aren't enough students who legitimately need the course to justify it's existence.
ClosedSource: It's not possible to create a large software product that is 100% unexploitable.
Schraegstrichpunkt: Nonsense. You're only saying that because no one ever has.
Yes, I'm putting words in your mouth, but one doesn't always need a theorem to recognize truth. If you turn out to be right like Wesley and you've created a non-exploitable software product, let us know. In the mean time, watch out for those ROUS's er, I mean bugs.
"Yes he had poor judgement in creating a worm that did no evil. He should have created one that did very bad things and then he would have been on his gaurd and not have gotten caught."
I'm sure there's a lot of guys in prison right now who use the same quality of logic as you. Perhaps it never occurred to them that the best way to not get caught is to not commit the crime in the first place.
"I'm sure the whole sentence was handed down just to send a public message: Don't fuck with MySpace."
The judge's first question was probably "What's a my space"? The court doesn't give a rats ass about MySpace vs any other company that was a victim of a crime. If anybody reports seeing him on any website that falls into the category the court has defined, he'll be in big trouble. If MySpace shut down tommorrow the court probably wouldn't know and certainly wouldn't care.
You, and others with similiar beliefs, are part of the problem. If you really believe that exploits are a problem, than you should condemn anyone who writes one. Instead, you make excuses for these guys because you like the fact that exploits give you some ammunition against MS and other companies.
It's not possible to create a large software product that is 100% unexploitable, but it is quite easy for any individual to decide not to write an exploit. Those who make excuses for these guys and celebrate every MS vunerability also bear some responsibilty for encouraging these guys to cross the line.
"I am not sure what he is going to learn from it other than to be more anonymous in the future maybe"
The goal isn't to teach him anything, it's to punish him for breaking the law and discouraging others from doing the same.
Last time I checked most reality TV shows are longer than 5 mins. Youtube's business model was apparently to get a lot of attention and then sell out to another company for big bucks. I suspect Youtube will be as profitable to Google as AOL was to Time Warner.
"But they were very expensive - and you probably took care of them."
The Xerox mice were hardly coddled. They were used in labs (sometimes smoke-filled) for years.
"Generally, usability is much more important than functionality."
Sorry, but that's simply not true. Functionality is the minimum requirement for usability. In any case, Xerox played at least as key a role in the development of usable interfaces as Apple has and even Microsoft has conducted extensive usability studies.
If you're over 50 it's tough enough to find a programming job even when you are highly qualified. I don't think very many companies would be interested in hiring you unless they make a practice of hiring retirees for other jobs in the company.
I'm sure there's a lot of good 5 min videos out there, but I don't think there's any danger that these short videos are going to take the place of longer professional efforts. And how many of the people making these videos hope to qualify themselves for professional paid work someday. If you take away the hope of making a living, I suspect that the number of submissions would drop dramatically (no pun intended).
If you think Apple and NeXT were invisible to the press until the iPod came along, think again. Despite the fact that none of Jobs's computer companies had much more than 10% of the computer market, Jobs appeared on the cover of major magazines like Time, Newsweek, etc many, many times before Apple introduced the iPod. In 1997 when Apple was bailed-out by MS, it was Jobs alone that appeared on the cover of Time.
Jobs is a master marketer and showman who has kept himself and his companies in the spotlight regardless of their success or failure.
I have years of experience using mice on the Alto and Star and never had a problem with them. Nobody disputes that Apple brought the GUI computer to the masses, but that doesn't mean that the Xerox computers it was based on had some sort of problem that Apple corrected. The Mac's functionality was a subset of Xerox's with some ideas Apple added. It would be many years later before Apple's computers could do everything the Xerox computers could do.
The GP didn't mean "concepts" as opposed to implementation. Xerox had thousands of employees using the Alto and the Star for everyday work.
As far as the mouse is concerned, Apple's primary innovation was the removal of buttons.
Thanks for the fact-free post. Even if I don't "get it" (assuming there's really something to get), I'm not a content producer, so I'm not part of "the game" and thus unworried about being left behind.
Sure. Jobs sent his team to PARC so they could laugh at how far behind Xerox was.
Apple did make contributions (as did many other companies) but it's clear that there would have been no Lisa/Mac as we know it if Jobs had never visted PARC.
What I see is that nearly every review of Vista is written by a Mac user. Since I haven't used a Mac since test driving it in a store in 1984, I'm obviously extremely qualified to review the next version of OS X. Apple, I'll be waiting for my free Mac!
Well, that's fine if all the future of video holds is watching people like your next door neighbor do silly stuff on the Internet that is equally entertaining as watching him live over the back fence.
Nobody is going to spend a lot of time, effort, and money producing entertainment programs they don't make any money on.
I assume you mean "secret" API's that only MS knows about and might write applications that call them. Even if that were the case, it would only affect MS applications. Obviously anybody who doesn't know about the secret APIs can't be using them.
On the other hand, if you mean unpublished lower-level functions that the public APIs are built on, then duplicating them (or providing equivalents) is a legitimate part of the wine project's work and is nothing to complain about.
More generally, I think the wine project is using a "best bang for the buck" application-driven approach. I can certainly understand the practical reasons for doing that, but if you were really serious about 100% compatability, you'd use a API-driven approach. Duplicate the API correctly and the applications should take care of themselves.
"The project could have been "done" in six months with a published spec to work against."
Well, if by "published spec" you mean a document that tells you step by step how to implement each function call using Linux, than maybe they could do it in 2 or 3 years.
Otherwise, they're effectively recreating Windows using the published Windows API interface and Linux capabilities. It would be a very large and complex project. Testing it alone would probably take more man-hours than the Wine project has used so far.
Wine doesn't plan to implement 100% of the API for any version of Windows, so they're not running very hard. Given the scope of the project without much return other than a pat on the back, who can blame them.
They probably don't forsee any great return on such an investment.
So, if all the volunteer work was removed from Linux, for example, what percentage would be left? 5%? 10%?
Red Hat started with a product that was fundamentally working before it contributed anything. IBM isn't making any significant profit directly from "free" software and continues to maintain tight control over any of its proprietary cash cows.
If you want evidence that "free" software can make a "nice" profit in the general case, you'll need to look elsewhere.
A kludge is a work-around for an unanticipated problem or function. So both Sidekick and javascript qualify. It doesn't mean that Sidekick or javascript are crap, it just means that they play the role of a kludge in their most common use scenarios.
But the main point of the sub-thread is that copy and paste was possible on the PC in the 1980s just as I claimed.