If Watson can extract a reasonably sane relational object model of the information, then yes, it could produce the source code for that model.
MSS Code Factory 1.7 Rule Cartridges. instruct my tools how to do it. Not very complex, actually, just non-trivial. Took a while to figure out how to do it. Took a while longer to work through a few applicaton architectures to figure out what works best. Now I'm working on the next step -- actually finishing a full iteration with web form prototypes, database interface, object-relational model, table-access security., and cluster-tenant based scaling. I'm working on three projects in parallel with the tool and hope to have at least one of those projects in production by year end.
After that, things move faster.
But it still wouldn't be 100% -- the system can't automate business logic. But I suspect rather than doing business logic, you'd want to look at integrating the resulting application code under a Watson engine as a knowledge-topic, so that Watson can analyze the information for you instead of you writing code to do the analysis.
Thank you for taking the time to teach your students instead of subjecting them to a regurgitation of last year's overheads.
Without an actual educator in the class, responding interactively to student's questions and misunderstandings, you don't even have the real opportunity to learn. Canned videos can only present last year's overheads.
Oh, yes, every state and provincial college or university has staff as highly qualified as MIT, Harvard, etc.
None of them have to take the second-rate profs that the big schools didn't want.
Or the third-rate profs that the middle-tier schools didn't want.
But even at the bottom of the pile of schools, the student still deserves to get the education they're paying for. Otherwise the school is a fraud and not delivering on their obligations to what someone callously referred to as their "customers".
Professors with tenure at universities are pretty much the last bastion of job security in North America. They've remained silent while everyone else's job was automated and offshored, only now that their own jobs are threatened are they speaking up.
Unfortunately, half of my professors in University were not good educators. They'd slap up overheads for you to copy down while they read from the overheads, which could be done by any machine.
The profs who actually discussed their topics with the class and explained things when people had questions were another story, but such professors only constituted maybe half of the ones I had.
I'm all for well-paid educators, but I have no use for the dead weight whose focus is their research and paper-writing. If you want to do pure research, find a lab some where, don't drain the university and college systems. With the many thousands of dollars students pay for their education, they deserve better.
If the colleges and universities switch to online courses, what's the benefit of paying them so many thousands of dollars for an education that you can get for free from something like the Khan Academy videos? People need and want an education, not a video lecture series.
Apple built a lot of their implementations from the ground up, but implementations are only copyrightable, not patentable.
Just because it was a lot of work doesn't mean it was an invention. I'm just tired of seeing Apple fanboys try to rewrite history in terms of "Apple did it first", as if they were some sort of brilliant creative engineering powerhouse instead a good technology integrator with excellent marketing.
I was thinking more in terms of Firewire than I was USB, by the way, which never really caught on.
Don't get me wrong -- I think Jobs was a great man. But the last thing he "invented" was the Apple II.
The law in the EU, Canada, UK, Australia, US, etc. is quite clear about what constitutes "personal data." It does not mean "everything we know about you."
You're obviously an Apple/Jobs fanboy, but your understanding of computer history has been skewed by your rose-coloured glasses. Jobs and Apple were and are integrators, not creators, with the exception of the Apple I and Apple II.
Steve Jobs brought the world a computer you could just plug into the wall and TV and use without owning a soldering iron, even school kids could use it.
The TRS-80, Apple II, and Commodore PET all came out in 1977. The earlier Apple I was a kit, the same as earlier machines.
Then he made available a totally integrated computer with a GUI.
You mean Apple implemented some of the ideas from Xerox PARC research. The didn't invent anything there.
Along with that he brought regular people the capability to create beautiful printed documents on their own. (I think the Mac+LaserWriter alone had a greater impact on the world than Dennis Ritchie.)
The Macintosh probably was the first widely used computer to have WYSYWIG word processing, I'll grant you that, but it was not the first computer to support document preparation and formatting by a long shot.
Then he created an operating system / application development environment based on OOP, which after 25 years is now one of the most widely used (built on the back of C/Unix too!)
You mean NeXT? NeXT integrated the Mach microkernel with a Unix layer, they did not invent either. What did come out of NeXT were Objective-C and the object-oriented GUI APIs. They certainly didn't invent OOP (see Smalltalk), the GUI, the OS, or the kernel, so what did they invent? Don't get me wrong -- NeXT was a very elegant programming API and rather innovative at the time, but it was also an abject market failure and on the verge of death before Apple brought Jobs back on line and he forced them to use the NeXT core as replacement for MacOS. To be honest, I don't remember whether NeXT came before Neuron Data's "Open Interface" GUI development libraries or not, but NDOI was the first OO GUI programming toolkit I worked with, and cross-platform to boot.
Then, in the face of huge resistance, he killed the floppy drive, serial ports, and parallel ports which would probably still be shipping on most computers today.
Huge resistance because the only motivation for doing so was to force people to buy overpriced Mac-only hardware. Hardly innovative or progressive.
He showed people that computers could be pretty and stylish objects that people would be proud to display instead of depressingly shaped and shaded "office equipment."
Ah, yes, hiring artists and building colour cases is truely innovative. No one ever did case mods or anything like that before Apple. Clearly they were the first to think "something other than beige."
Then he created a music player with integrated library management software at a time when all players came with horrible software that made regular people scream in frustration.
Sorry, no, Apple did NOT invent the MP3 player nor the media library. Not by a long shot. And the only one that had "horrible software" was Creative.
Then he used that to radically transform the music industry, which everyone thought was on its last legs.
What you talkin' bout, Willis? Apple made huge inroads into the graphics departments of the industry, but this is the first time I've heard anyone claim they transformed the music industry. The original Macs had really crappy sound and no expansion to add on the devices you'd need for sound engineering.
Then he took everything he had spent the last 20 years working on, along with some tech he got from people who made keyboards that normal people couldn't use, and used it to totally
C is the most widely ported language on the planet, but it is not the most widely portable language.
In the era of K&R C, every machine had it's own interpretation of the size of short, int, and long. You had to litter your code with #ifdefs like crazy to get it to build on different platforms and operating systems. It was more portable than assembler, but the language itself did very little for operating systems portability.
OS portability is actually a relatively recent phenomenon. Historically, operating systems were designed and built for the specific hardware they ran on, and were not ported to other CPU architectures.
Seeing as you brought up the subject, you need to take another very close look at the.Net APIs behind C#. Microsoft changed the name of APIs to camel-case with leading upper-case names, but other than that 99% of Java code can be ported to C# by doing little more than converting the case of that initial character.
C# adds some interesting constructs to it's syntax which I rather like, but there's no doubt in my mind it's a Java clone.
Having ported a few hundred thousand lines of code back and forth between Java 6 and C#/.Net 3.5, I can assure you C# is indeed a Java rip-off.
I tried programming in "B" in late university out of curiousity. It was actually very close to "C", which really was an incremental evolution of the language. Never looked into BCPL, though, so maybe "B" was the language that implemented the significant changes.
Let me get this straight. You're trying to tell me what my priorities are? Bwahahahahhahahah
When I "hook up", it's mainly to have fun. If that sounds vague, it's because it is. Half the enjoyment comes from trying out things the other person is interested in that I haven't tried out before.
The odds of having something in common with a guy is no higher than with a lady. In fact, I tend not to get along with "the guys" because I'm not into sports, I gave up beer-binging years ago, and I'm too old to go chasing after women in a bar without looking like a perverted old man.
The biggest gearheads I've known were women. Most of the women I've known like fishing. When I was younger, they liked beer as much as I did. And so on.
Women aren't all that different from men in most of the ways that count for friendship or companionship. As you get older, you'll come to understand that, young grasshopper. And with that understanding, you'll find they're a lot easier to get along with than they used to be.
But more on topic, I can't imagine "loving" a machine unless it were truly sentient. Nor can I imagine wanting sex with a machine, because it wouldn't even reach the level of being masturbation with a partner (which is all a one-night stand is, when you think about it.)
You didn't ask what other impacts he had on technology, you asked what he did with his life. He worked. He researched. And the odds are he's behind way more technology that came out of Lucent than you or I will ever know unless we get off our fat arses and poke around to see what patents his lab at Lucent was granted.
The technology behind the multitouch screen we all know and love started when Wayne Westerman and John Elias started a company called Fingerworks in 1998
It was all conceived at Xerox PARC decades ago. Read up on Alan Kay's work there. All Apple did is BUILD something like the tablet devices envisioned all those years ago. There are also clear examples to the tablet designs throughout science fiction, particularly the Star Trek PADD devices, so Apple didn't even invent the idea of shiny surfaces or rectangular form factors.
They didn't invent the multi-touch screen; they just used it.
They didn't invent the icon; they used them.
The didn't invent the rectangular form factor.
They didn't invent the touch screen.
Stop trying to claim that using technology the way it was designed is in some way "innovative" or "creative."
Does Slashdot censor threads now, or is it buggy? A whole discussion chain just disappeared. No loss as we eventually came to some degree of understanding, but I was rather enjoying the argument.
I was going to make a point about C and operating systems portability, but then thought better of it when I considered all the #ifdefs I needed in my early C code to make it work on multiple platforms. Although it's the most widely ported language in the world, it's not the world's most portable language.
Actually, yeah, I'd have to agree that C is the only path to the modern world. Had history been different, the world would have been different. Could have been better, could have been worse, but it definitely would not be the same.
If you want to talk purely theoretical, computing as a whole might well have begun in the 1800s, had Babbage's machine been built.
Coulda, woulda, shoulda, might have. Personally I'll stick to giving credit to the people who actually did.
And I guess I should apologize for the Westboror comparison. In retrospect, it was over the line.
Slashdot Mirror
A true Slashdotter is not permitted to admire Apple due to an incompatabilitiy between the GPL and Apple's "walled garden."
Sorry. Turn in your Mac for a Debian box.
If Watson can extract a reasonably sane relational object model of the information, then yes, it could produce the source code for that model.
MSS Code Factory 1.7 Rule Cartridges. instruct my tools how to do it. Not very complex, actually, just non-trivial. Took a while to figure out how to do it. Took a while longer to work through a few applicaton architectures to figure out what works best. Now I'm working on the next step -- actually finishing a full iteration with web form prototypes, database interface, object-relational model, table-access security., and cluster-tenant based scaling. I'm working on three projects in parallel with the tool and hope to have at least one of those projects in production by year end.
After that, things move faster.
But it still wouldn't be 100% -- the system can't automate business logic. But I suspect rather than doing business logic, you'd want to look at integrating the resulting application code under a Watson engine as a knowledge-topic, so that Watson can analyze the information for you instead of you writing code to do the analysis.
Actually, in the US, corporations DO have the rights of citizens. Look it up.
They don't in any other nation as far as I know, but in the US, they do.
Thank you for taking the time to teach your students instead of subjecting them to a regurgitation of last year's overheads.
Without an actual educator in the class, responding interactively to student's questions and misunderstandings, you don't even have the real opportunity to learn. Canned videos can only present last year's overheads.
Come to think of it, that obligation to educate applies to all teachers, whether the student's tuition is paid by them or by the public school system.
Oh, yes, every state and provincial college or university has staff as highly qualified as MIT, Harvard, etc.
None of them have to take the second-rate profs that the big schools didn't want.
Or the third-rate profs that the middle-tier schools didn't want.
But even at the bottom of the pile of schools, the student still deserves to get the education they're paying for. Otherwise the school is a fraud and not delivering on their obligations to what someone callously referred to as their "customers".
Yes. Exactly.
Not surprising, really. Journalists write about Apple products. Jobs was just the front-man, not the whole company.
Ever hear of a "Jobs fanboy"?
Me neither.
Professors with tenure at universities are pretty much the last bastion of job security in North America. They've remained silent while everyone else's job was automated and offshored, only now that their own jobs are threatened are they speaking up.
Unfortunately, half of my professors in University were not good educators. They'd slap up overheads for you to copy down while they read from the overheads, which could be done by any machine.
The profs who actually discussed their topics with the class and explained things when people had questions were another story, but such professors only constituted maybe half of the ones I had.
I'm all for well-paid educators, but I have no use for the dead weight whose focus is their research and paper-writing. If you want to do pure research, find a lab some where, don't drain the university and college systems. With the many thousands of dollars students pay for their education, they deserve better.
If the colleges and universities switch to online courses, what's the benefit of paying them so many thousands of dollars for an education that you can get for free from something like the Khan Academy videos? People need and want an education, not a video lecture series.
Apple built a lot of their implementations from the ground up, but implementations are only copyrightable, not patentable.
Just because it was a lot of work doesn't mean it was an invention. I'm just tired of seeing Apple fanboys try to rewrite history in terms of "Apple did it first", as if they were some sort of brilliant creative engineering powerhouse instead a good technology integrator with excellent marketing.
I was thinking more in terms of Firewire than I was USB, by the way, which never really caught on.
Don't get me wrong -- I think Jobs was a great man. But the last thing he "invented" was the Apple II.
The law in the EU, Canada, UK, Australia, US, etc. is quite clear about what constitutes "personal data." It does not mean "everything we know about you."
You're obviously an Apple/Jobs fanboy, but your understanding of computer history has been skewed by your rose-coloured glasses. Jobs and Apple were and are integrators, not creators, with the exception of the Apple I and Apple II.
The TRS-80, Apple II, and Commodore PET all came out in 1977. The earlier Apple I was a kit, the same as earlier machines.
You mean Apple implemented some of the ideas from Xerox PARC research. The didn't invent anything there.
The Macintosh probably was the first widely used computer to have WYSYWIG word processing, I'll grant you that, but it was not the first computer to support document preparation and formatting by a long shot.
You mean NeXT? NeXT integrated the Mach microkernel with a Unix layer, they did not invent either. What did come out of NeXT were Objective-C and the object-oriented GUI APIs. They certainly didn't invent OOP (see Smalltalk), the GUI, the OS, or the kernel, so what did they invent? Don't get me wrong -- NeXT was a very elegant programming API and rather innovative at the time, but it was also an abject market failure and on the verge of death before Apple brought Jobs back on line and he forced them to use the NeXT core as replacement for MacOS. To be honest, I don't remember whether NeXT came before Neuron Data's "Open Interface" GUI development libraries or not, but NDOI was the first OO GUI programming toolkit I worked with, and cross-platform to boot.
Huge resistance because the only motivation for doing so was to force people to buy overpriced Mac-only hardware. Hardly innovative or progressive.
Ah, yes, hiring artists and building colour cases is truely innovative. No one ever did case mods or anything like that before Apple. Clearly they were the first to think "something other than beige."
Sorry, no, Apple did NOT invent the MP3 player nor the media library. Not by a long shot. And the only one that had "horrible software" was Creative.
What you talkin' bout, Willis? Apple made huge inroads into the graphics departments of the industry, but this is the first time I've heard anyone claim they transformed the music industry. The original Macs had really crappy sound and no expansion to add on the devices you'd need for sound engineering.
C is the most widely ported language on the planet, but it is not the most widely portable language.
In the era of K&R C, every machine had it's own interpretation of the size of short, int, and long. You had to litter your code with #ifdefs like crazy to get it to build on different platforms and operating systems. It was more portable than assembler, but the language itself did very little for operating systems portability.
OS portability is actually a relatively recent phenomenon. Historically, operating systems were designed and built for the specific hardware they ran on, and were not ported to other CPU architectures.
Seeing as you brought up the subject, you need to take another very close look at the .Net APIs behind C#. Microsoft changed the name of APIs to camel-case with leading upper-case names, but other than that 99% of Java code can be ported to C# by doing little more than converting the case of that initial character.
C# adds some interesting constructs to it's syntax which I rather like, but there's no doubt in my mind it's a Java clone.
Having ported a few hundred thousand lines of code back and forth between Java 6 and C#/.Net 3.5, I can assure you C# is indeed a Java rip-off.
I tried programming in "B" in late university out of curiousity. It was actually very close to "C", which really was an incremental evolution of the language. Never looked into BCPL, though, so maybe "B" was the language that implemented the significant changes.
Let me get this straight. You're trying to tell me what my priorities are? Bwahahahahhahahah
When I "hook up", it's mainly to have fun. If that sounds vague, it's because it is. Half the enjoyment comes from trying out things the other person is interested in that I haven't tried out before.
The odds of having something in common with a guy is no higher than with a lady. In fact, I tend not to get along with "the guys" because I'm not into sports, I gave up beer-binging years ago, and I'm too old to go chasing after women in a bar without looking like a perverted old man.
The biggest gearheads I've known were women. Most of the women I've known like fishing. When I was younger, they liked beer as much as I did. And so on.
Women aren't all that different from men in most of the ways that count for friendship or companionship. As you get older, you'll come to understand that, young grasshopper. And with that understanding, you'll find they're a lot easier to get along with than they used to be.
But more on topic, I can't imagine "loving" a machine unless it were truly sentient. Nor can I imagine wanting sex with a machine, because it wouldn't even reach the level of being masturbation with a partner (which is all a one-night stand is, when you think about it.)
Jobs was an integrator and business man famous the world over.
Dennis Ritchie was the relatively unknown creator of core technologies Jobs built his empire on.
I have far more respect for a creator than an integrator. If you think that's "bashing", you're missing the point.
You didn't ask what other impacts he had on technology, you asked what he did with his life. He worked. He researched. And the odds are he's behind way more technology that came out of Lucent than you or I will ever know unless we get off our fat arses and poke around to see what patents his lab at Lucent was granted.
It was all conceived at Xerox PARC decades ago. Read up on Alan Kay's work there. All Apple did is BUILD something like the tablet devices envisioned all those years ago. There are also clear examples to the tablet designs throughout science fiction, particularly the Star Trek PADD devices, so Apple didn't even invent the idea of shiny surfaces or rectangular form factors.
They didn't invent the multi-touch screen; they just used it.
They didn't invent the icon; they used them.
The didn't invent the rectangular form factor.
They didn't invent the touch screen.
Stop trying to claim that using technology the way it was designed is in some way "innovative" or "creative."
Apple is a patent troll.
I apologize for the Westboro Baptist comparison. It was over the line.
Apparently the rest of the discussion has disappeared into the slashdot bitbucket unless you chase it down from my post history page.
Does Slashdot censor threads now, or is it buggy? A whole discussion chain just disappeared. No loss as we eventually came to some degree of understanding, but I was rather enjoying the argument.
Oh well.
I was going to make a point about C and operating systems portability, but then thought better of it when I considered all the #ifdefs I needed in my early C code to make it work on multiple platforms. Although it's the most widely ported language in the world, it's not the world's most portable language.
Actually, yeah, I'd have to agree that C is the only path to the modern world. Had history been different, the world would have been different. Could have been better, could have been worse, but it definitely would not be the same.
If you want to talk purely theoretical, computing as a whole might well have begun in the 1800s, had Babbage's machine been built.
Coulda, woulda, shoulda, might have. Personally I'll stick to giving credit to the people who actually did.
And I guess I should apologize for the Westboror comparison. In retrospect, it was over the line.
He was heading up Lucent's research department. Nothing major, just continuing to work and contribute to the bottom line.
Just because someone isn't spinning out product pitches doesn't mean they're doing nothing.
Jobs brought together the technology other people invented. I'm not nearly as impressed by an integrator as I am by a creator.