.. yet you don't know how to deal with this problem. Impressive.
You gotta give him credit for realizing that this
is an issue. The amount of non-portable crap
out there in the world of commercial
software is amazing. In my rankings, any vendor
who supports *two* platforms from the same code
base ranks in the top 1% of portability.
The article
repeatedly assumes the current "web" (never mind that they don't know the difference between
"the internet" and "the web") is economically
unviable.
I fully agree that many (most?) sites are
economically unviable. But to say that we have
start paying a penny for every "page" (never mind
that they don't fully understand the difference
between a "page" and a "server hit") is about as
silly as those US government to tax E-mail"
hoaxes floating around the net.
I understand how the radio station thinks that
it *must* own every domain name that's vaguely
related to some combination of its call sign and
frequency. But at some point - realistically -
you've got to draw the line and stop buying up
everything you could imagine.
Does anyone remember in the mid-90's when Procter
and Gamble bought up every domain vaguely related
to any product it sells? This was widely seen
as an (early) abuse of the domain name registration process, especially when they
grabbed "underarms.com" and (yech) "diarrhea.com".
See, for example, these
old posts
in news.admin.net-abuse.misc.
Having a single unified kernel source is, IMHO,
not a worthy goal. The biggest
advantage to an open-source kernel is that you
can go in and tinker with it; having multiple
folks pursue multiple tacks to VM is not in
itself bad.
There are other "branches" off the kernel tree
for real-time kernels, etc. Getting rid of these
would not be "good news".
Your complaint seems to be "CS is just coding
and debugging." If that's the case, you're
not in a true CS cirriculum - instead you've
somehow become stuck in a sequence of neverending
programming classes. That might be your fault,
or it might be your school's fault.
The world of computer science (and in general "solutions
to problems through technology") is far more
broad (and interesting!) than just writing code.
You may be happier if you switch your direction
to veer slightly into hardware (probably
involving the EE department at your school) or
more into business computing (where there's more
emphasis on broad solutions to real problems).
Whatever you do, make sure you meet folks who
are outside your particular specialization!
You explicitly ask about directly interfacing to
scanners and digital cameras - my preferred
open-source way of dealing with these peripherals is
SANE.
The SANE folks have gone to great efforts to
get various scanner/camera devices to work in
an open source environment. In some cases the
manufacturer provided all the information needed
to interface to the device; in other cases the
interface has been found exclusively through
reverse-engineering.
I highly recommend that you look closely at the
list of
supported SANE devices and choose a
device known to work from the list. If you go
into your local computer store and buy something
off the shelf without looking at the SANE list, you are *very* likely to end up
with a product that is completely unsupported
in any useful environment.
It's true, today's web pages are far more
complicated than originally intended, but
I think it speaks highly of current HTML
standards that HTML *can* be used for these
purposes (and fairly portably, too, if you
know what you're doing.)
If a tool only does what you originally intended
for, you've met your goal. If your tool turns out
to be far more powerful than you ever imagined,
you've far surpassed your goal. Thank you,
Tim Berners-Lee.
_The Space Child's Mother Goose_ works on an entirely different level that the Richard Scarry books.
The Richard Scarry books reduce everything they involve to a child's level and language.
_The Space Child's Mother Goose_ takes an adult's language (actually, a highly technical math-science-oriented adult's language) and makes clever poems using the words and concepts. The resulting poems often mimic kid's poems, but don't make the mistake of thinking that they're "just" kid's poems.
Along the same lines (a "reissue" of a
space/science-oriented work for kids from the
1950's) I can highly recommend
They Might Be Giant's
Why Does The Sun Shine.
I live near the NIH, and the security being imposed there is particularly extreme. Especially considering that the NIH campus is like a big park, and how open it was before!
But there are other examples in the DC area too. For example, I just went to eat lunch at the Old Post Office in downtown DC and to get into the food court area, you have to go through a metal detector *and* show a photo ID.
I don't know about the legal implications, but the security crackdown is *sure* to drive the food court shops bankrupt - they were struggling already with the lack of tourist traffic.
Computers - largely desktop machines - now consume 13% of all electricity generated in the US.
A *rational* person would expect that as CPU MIPS go up, it would take a smaller number of CPU's to do the same work. Instead we see the opposite: everybody now tells me they need 1+ GHz machine just to browse the web, and if anything productivity per kwH in computing has gone down.
It's obvious to me that "the desktop" is an evolutionary dead end, a dinosaur that's going to lumber to its death and be replaced by all the little mammals. Unfortunately, I don't think we've found the computing equivalent of the mammals yet (though palmtops and portable appliances are getting close.) In any event domination of the desktop is not the wave of the future, it's the game of 1989.
I'm not sure that I fully appreciate the characterization of your typical engineering guru having a big beard, long hair, and enormous belly.
But what else would be a "guru uniform"? I could wear a slide rule on my belt, but I suspect most slashdotters wouldn't even know what the 18-inch-long implement was for.
DeForest Kelley had a very lengthy career
pre-Trek, being a bit of a "character actor"
in numerous Westerns. Getting on the cast of
TOS was probably the best possible career move
he could've made - there weren't all that many
Westerns being made in the 70's and 80's.
I can see perhaps the most famous NJ Unix guru of all trying to get a job as
a C programmer:
Interviewer:So, Mr. Ritchie, you claim you're a C programmer, yet you've never taken a class or been certified as one, right? And you
claim decades of experience in Unix, yet you don't
have any certifications? Sorry, don't call us,
we'll call you...
My Atari 2600 boots and is running the "application" in
about a tenth of a second:-).
While a fast boot is obviously good for those
embedded developers who are stuck with PC-clone
hardware, I think the lesson here is that the
PC-clone architecture is only barely acceptable in many
embedded real-time situations.
By no means am I a Microsoft fan, but
let us not forget Bill Gates. While just
a teenager he founded "Traf-O-Data", using a
microcomputer to log traffic data. From every
bio of him I've seen, he was a hard-core true
hacker while a teenager, spending every spare
minute dialing into whatever mainframe he could
beg or steal access to.
Slashdot Mirror
You gotta give him credit for realizing that this is an issue. The amount of non-portable crap out there in the world of commercial software is amazing. In my rankings, any vendor who supports *two* platforms from the same code base ranks in the top 1% of portability.
I fully agree that many (most?) sites are economically unviable. But to say that we have start paying a penny for every "page" (never mind that they don't fully understand the difference between a "page" and a "server hit") is about as silly as those US government to tax E-mail" hoaxes floating around the net.
Does anyone remember in the mid-90's when Procter and Gamble bought up every domain vaguely related to any product it sells? This was widely seen as an (early) abuse of the domain name registration process, especially when they grabbed "underarms.com" and (yech) "diarrhea.com". See, for example, these old posts in news.admin.net-abuse.misc.
There are other "branches" off the kernel tree for real-time kernels, etc. Getting rid of these would not be "good news".
See the jargon entries for Flash Crowd and Slashdot Effect
The world of computer science (and in general "solutions to problems through technology") is far more broad (and interesting!) than just writing code.
You may be happier if you switch your direction to veer slightly into hardware (probably involving the EE department at your school) or more into business computing (where there's more emphasis on broad solutions to real problems).
Whatever you do, make sure you meet folks who are outside your particular specialization!
The SANE folks have gone to great efforts to get various scanner/camera devices to work in an open source environment. In some cases the manufacturer provided all the information needed to interface to the device; in other cases the interface has been found exclusively through reverse-engineering.
I highly recommend that you look closely at the list of supported SANE devices and choose a device known to work from the list. If you go into your local computer store and buy something off the shelf without looking at the SANE list, you are *very* likely to end up with a product that is completely unsupported in any useful environment.
If a tool only does what you originally intended for, you've met your goal. If your tool turns out to be far more powerful than you ever imagined, you've far surpassed your goal. Thank you, Tim Berners-Lee.
_The Space Child's Mother Goose_ works on an entirely different level that the Richard Scarry books.
The Richard Scarry books reduce everything they involve to a child's level and language.
_The Space Child's Mother Goose_ takes an adult's language (actually, a highly technical math-science-oriented adult's language) and makes clever poems using the words and concepts. The resulting poems often mimic kid's poems, but don't make the mistake of thinking that they're "just" kid's poems.
Along the same lines (a "reissue" of a space/science-oriented work for kids from the 1950's) I can highly recommend They Might Be Giant's Why Does The Sun Shine.
I live near the NIH, and the security being imposed there is particularly extreme. Especially considering that the NIH campus is like a big park, and how open it was before!
But there are other examples in the DC area too. For example, I just went to eat lunch at the Old Post Office in downtown DC and to get into the food court area, you have to go through a metal detector *and* show a photo ID.
I don't know about the legal implications, but the security crackdown is *sure* to drive the food court shops bankrupt - they were struggling already with the lack of tourist traffic.
Computers - largely desktop machines - now consume 13% of all electricity generated in the US.
A *rational* person would expect that as CPU MIPS go up, it would take a smaller number of CPU's to do the same work. Instead we see the opposite: everybody now tells me they need 1+ GHz machine just to browse the web, and if anything productivity per kwH in computing has gone down.
It's obvious to me that "the desktop" is an evolutionary dead end, a dinosaur that's going to lumber to its death and be replaced by all the little mammals. Unfortunately, I don't think we've found the computing equivalent of the mammals yet (though palmtops and portable appliances are getting close.) In any event domination of the desktop is not the wave of the future, it's the game of 1989.
I'm not sure that I fully appreciate the characterization of your typical engineering guru having a big beard, long hair, and enormous belly.
But what else would be a "guru uniform"? I could wear a slide rule on my belt, but I suspect most slashdotters wouldn't even know what the 18-inch-long implement was for.
DeForest Kelley had a very lengthy career
pre-Trek, being a bit of a "character actor"
in numerous Westerns. Getting on the cast of
TOS was probably the best possible career move
he could've made - there weren't all that many
Westerns being made in the 70's and 80's.
Interviewer:So, Mr. Ritchie, you claim you're a C programmer, yet you've never taken a class or been certified as one, right? And you claim decades of experience in Unix, yet you don't have any certifications? Sorry, don't call us, we'll call you...
Or, even better, run Akalabeth.
This was all "hot" stuff for Apple II emulators circa 1996; see these google archives for details.
While a fast boot is obviously good for those embedded developers who are stuck with PC-clone hardware, I think the lesson here is that the PC-clone architecture is only barely acceptable in many embedded real-time situations.
By no means am I a Microsoft fan, but let us not forget Bill Gates. While just a teenager he founded "Traf-O-Data", using a microcomputer to log traffic data. From every bio of him I've seen, he was a hard-core true hacker while a teenager, spending every spare minute dialing into whatever mainframe he could beg or steal access to.