I remember seeing a $300 paperback SE book in the CMU bookstore. I hope you're ready to shell out.
I love CMU as a college, but SE looks kind of boring. Perhaps it's just me. Mostly learning management and workflow models, from what I saw skimming the textbook.
Ironically enough, I've been more impressed with the little I've seen of CMU's Graduate School of Industrial Engineering.
Also, if you come back to CMU again, you'll be without an NNTP feed. Damn CMU's IT people and their stupid bboards (godawful extension to IMAP, if anyone wants to know what they are...CMU gateways USENET through them).
Anyway, your call.
As an interesting aside, I've read that masters students generally end up making less money over their lifetime than BSers that would have invested the money they would have spent on their education. This is an on-average thing over the past ten years or something similar.
Which has happened regularly throughout history, and I suspect would happen again if we fat lazy types in the US were ever in actual danger of starving.
Okay, I hate to hurt this person's feelings, but his post was too far out there not to do so.
I am fully qualified for the position you have listed.
You have your BS, eh?
I have been hacking copy protect mechanisms since I was 7.
What you're 16 now? And the first few years of this involved setting back the clock on your computer and chortling to your friends about how l33t you are?
I have something to tell you. You have heard this before from people just like me, but you have not listened.
Slashdot weirdo: "Bill Gates, you are evil".
BG: "Dum de dum...huh? What was that?"
You do not seem to realize that what you are doing, in your attempts to introduce completely "trusted" computers, is evil.
Translation: My l33t Windows game copy protection bypassing skills will be useless in your post-Armageddonesque society!
I'm not referring to your usual misguided 'save the world by taking it over' style of evil...
This man has a way of reaching out to the hearts of his audience and gaining their sympathy, no?
I'm talking more of a killing kittens for fun kind of evil.
Pay for my warezed copy of Windows? Forbid it, almighty God!
You are, whether it is your entention or not, going to remove general purpose computing from the hands of the non-experts, and they won't know enough to stop you
And what the hell "general purpose computing" experience is it that ordinary users are experiencing that is going to screw them over so much? They won't be able to pirate their Windows games any more?
Depending on your success I forsee one of two final results.
Translation: slap down your highly paid and talented executives -- I'm going to tell you the way your business is going to be!
The likeliest option is that you go out of business in 80 years, because your 'innovations' stunt the technological development of an entire generation and alienate those few who are intelligent enough to have become programmers anyways.
Earth to "We're All Alike"! MS hasn't shipped a development environment (well, except qbasic) with their systems for years, and the same goes for Apple. If we're stunted, we're stunted already. Every talented coder I know is already using Linux.
In this case, you will set back humanity's development by hundreds of years.
Smallpox will return! We'll lose all our advanced agricultural techniques! The horseless carrige will disappear!
Or, alternately, you drive your existing user base to other platforms and go out of business in 5 years.
Ah, yes. The other platforms without a stable ABI/library set/*standard filesystem layout* (Linux)? Or would that be the much more expensive, even more wannabe monopolistic platform (MacOS). You mean the platform without MS Office, or the one that MS could leave without MS Office with the snap of their fingers?
I doubt you will allow the second option to happen.
I'm sure they appreciate your confidence.
I have not participated in the efforts to hack your hardware (XBox) previously because I did not want to support you by purchasing one.
Translation: I'm unaware of the fact that you lose money on each box sold. I hate your guts already and listening to me is going to be unproductive in the extreme.
Now, I see the light. I, with the help of other slashdotters, have realized that the XBox is just a test run of your trusted computing initiatives.
BG: "Damn. Well, Slashdot has us by the balls. We better give up our current strategy."
Flunky: "Are you sure? But, sir..."
BG: "No. No, the Slashdotters have beaten us again. Retreat is the only option left to us now."
It is a chance for you to find the bugs in your system and fix them on a platform which attracts hackers, yet presents no serious loss when it is hacked.
Translation: I'm unaware of the fact that pirated software being freely traded for the XBox would represent a massive revenue loss.
I have no doubt in my mind that if you manage to perfect this architcture you will waste no time in implementing it in desktop PCs and using your monopoly power to force a significant number of users over to it.
Yes, this is pretty much what Microsoft already told all of us in their press release.
Therefore, this is my notice to you.
Throw down the gauntlet! You can take MS! Do it!
I will not let you succeed.
MS is fucked.
I will be adding my intelligence to the effort to stop you, and I will succeed.
What, by breaking XBox security and exposing another hole to be fixed on the PC? I thought you said that was bad.
And if I do not, it does not matter.
Does certainly take the wind out of the sails of the previous claim, doesn't it?
Because I am not alone. You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all.
Translation: I read way, way too much l33t haXor propoganda. I have seen too many movies and hung out way too much on IRC making vague claims of incredible skills.
And, in the end, you wil lose. I promise.
We'll see.
(Posted anonymously because Microsoft's lawyers are more expensive than mine.)
I think that in designing new algorithms or something, there isn't really any question -- you want a solid college education.
If you're doing architecture work, your'e a software engineer, I'm a lot more dubious. I can see how missing certain skills could be an issue, but two of the most industrious and technically skilled people I know didn't get a MS -- one got a two-year degree, and the other dropped out of high school. One's written more code for the Linux kernel than most Slashdot readers, and the other did some Linux porting work and last I heard, was reverse engineering and rewriting their oven's firmware.
Also, I've seen waaay too many PhDs that are simply out of touch with the world, aren't very motivated, and like to quibble over minor details, making arguments from authority.
Now, I've also seen very good, competent PhDs -- this wasn't meant to be a blanket statement. But how often have you used those finite automata or formal proof skills you learned in school? If you're a PhD, are you still doing the same work that you did your thesis on? If not, you've blown a lot of money getting skills that you aren't using.
This is just a thought.
I've finished my BS at a prestigious computer science school, and frankly, the stuff that I've used on the job has been almost exclusively the stuff that I spent time being interested in, poking at, reading research papers on, and whatnot. The stuff I learned during school? That mostly gets thrown out.
If you consider that most classes have one or two textbooks, and that reading one or two textbooks gives you the body of knowledge in the class, you can learn a lot more on your own for less money than you can in a class.
Actually, I know of four coders that work at Microsoft. The first is a Linux nut and has a Tux doll in his cubicle. The next two both prefer UNIX to Windows, and the last doesn't know a thing about UNIX but is relegated to really basic work in VB, and is a pretty poor coder.
Not that I think that this is universal, but it's a pretty good anecdote. Anyone know an MS person that really *doesn't* like UNIX?
...asserting that morality is relative becomes a pretty ridiculous philosophy when a 15 year old girl is raped by a 40 year old man
Actually, I've always thought that it's kind of a funny quirk of our legal system that a 15 year old boy could have sex with the same girl and it *not* be a crime.
Actually, I think most people (a few idealists aside) don't really give much of a damn about principles, at least the way you're using the term.
I've written a fair amount of code on P2P clients. Why? Because it's fun! It's a neat coding project. I donate the source to the community because it doesn't cost me anything and it helps some fellow coders out.
Now, if some company came along and offered me a nicely paying job writing code for monitoring programs to build evidence for court on P2P users, or DoS programs to attack P2P networks, would I take it? Of course! That's a fun problem too.
I don't have any interest at all in turning down a job so that some pimply-faced teenager doper can get just one more Eminem song. Not a chance. That's their own lookout.
Unfortunately, the mainstream products of major vendors largely ignore these demonstrated technologies. In their defense most of the vendors would claim that the market-place is not prepared to pay for high price for high assurance of security
Keep in mind that the price to pay for security is often not simply a higher initial purchase price.
It can be in difficulty maintaining code. If you write something in Eiffel or SML, you avoid buffer overflow attacks on the stack, but you have a much smaller pool of programmers to hire from.
It can be in performance. Java is the most popular "safe" (array and pointer deref checked) language, but you pay a severe performance hit when using Java over C/C++.
It can be in convenience. I'm used to troubleshooting my system by just booting into single-user mode. If I was really secure, I'd have the bootloader passworded and an encrypted filesystem. But that's enough of an irritation to me that it's just not worth it.
And it's very difficult to get a good, objective overview of security. Most security analysts don't really know all that much -- they're working off their own biases and feelings as well. They tend to try to sell companies on one-time-cost, backed-by-a-big-name products like firewalls or expensive IDS systems, because that's what companies want to hear. Also, *so* many products are so insecure that it's really painful and can feel futile to try to secure a system -- you might fix one problem with your device only to find that an IC manufacturer that's one of your vendors has some testing mode that breaks all your security guarantees.
We need people willing to pay the price, a wider bed of knowledgeable security consultants, software written from scratch in a safe language, with strong constraints on it, components that one can build secure products out of, and a decade to put everything into place before we can really get secure products.
What issues do you have with using a package system? Keep in mind that ports *is* a package system -- as a matter of fact, the top hit on google for "package system" is a NetBSD page.
I had assumed (again, I'm a bit out of things with OS X) that for efficiency reasons, the background would exist as a quad and only the window being dragged is rendered as a quad.
The busy cursor is because the application is not responding to the OS
Actually, (at least in the classic MacOS API -- I don't know what happens under OS X) the busy cursor *only* appears and is animated if the application *is* responding to the OS. The application does the work of displaying the busy cursor.
The question is whether the application is currently ready to accept user input.
If the application was updated to do its heavy lifting in a thread and run the interface in a separate thread, then you wouldn't get the busy cursor
If you'll notice, I mentioned the fact that that it would be nice to thread or at least queue tasks at the bottom of my original post -- "of course, minimizing UI modality is also important..."
BTW, having a UI thread was decidedly nontrivial on the classic MacOS because the Toolbox was nonreentrant -- I suspect, but do not know, that this has changed.
The VM upheaval in early 2.4 (so-called "stable" series).
Uh, huh. And no one is going to get a random kernel and plop it on a $500K machine. They're going to get a vendor-tested and supported solution, like Red Hat or something, which actually undergoes serious "enterprise-level" QA. And doesn't have these problems.
Oh, give it a rest. They're easier to administer *for BSD people*, same as Linux is easier to administer *for Linux people*. Functionally, compared to the alternatives, they're freaking identical. You get an x86 platform, you plop a UNIX-like OS on it.
As it happens, Linux gets more press. I frankly would prefer Linux over BSD, but not the the point of dying over it.
Just because BSD is suitable for the job doesn't mean that Linux isn't.
He obviously didn't base his entire order on whether it ran Linux. If you're trying to focus on maintaining *one* set of software and avoid vendor lock-in, however, you can legitimately decide ahead of time the OS you want to use. Lots of places run out and look for a Windows server, or a Solaris server. They have a big installed base, and IT people that know their platform. So he had already decided on Linux. Big reaking deal.
You think he was buying a $500,000 rig to play Microsoft Flight Simulator, maybe?
I'm not so sure that IBM doesn't have a bit of a "bad rap" for being overly corporate in the past.
However, IBM just laid off thousands of workers, and there are hiring freezes all over. This is probably not a good time to try getting into IBM. I have a friend that spent the least three summers at IBM, and he says that you now need a signed okay from the site manager to hire *anyone*.
OTOH, I'm not sure what IBM's position is with MS -- whether they're as antagonistic with MS as Sun or not.
Both IBM and Sun want to ease into open source w/o risking too much. Right now, with open source just barely starting to be adopted in the business/government world, hiring someone as visible as Perens might be risky.
Perens is an idealist and a radical. Radicals have their history twisted to make them look like *evil* bastards by their opponents, and idealism is an impediment in politics. You want to *look* like you're an idealist, not be one.
There actually is at least one representative that has a pretty strong alignment with the pro-free-use, anti-government-regulated-Internet types that frequent Slashdot -- Rep. Boucher, from VA. He's figured prominently as the "good guy" in a number of Slashdot stories, and makes me feel good about the legislative branch, despite a few despicable legislators like the Senator from Disneyland.
Also, geeks will get a lot more support at the minute, as the telecom and tech companies are buying off legislators left and right.
* Divided the board of directors, causing major rifts in high level management and a huge expensive PR and legal battle for the company * Pissed off most employees, who were overwhelmingly against the merger.
HP used to be a pretty well run company. Let's see what Fiorina managed to do:
* Axe the world-renowned calculator development people. * Merge with a company bleeding money based in an industry (high margin desktop PCs) that's bleeding money -- *and* an area that HP was trying to extract itself from. * Not get any criticism, because God knows she's a woman, *the* female tech CEO, and it would be hideous to actually bash someone that "broke the glass ceiling". Grrr.
It just pisses me off. There are *tons* of smart engineers at HP, and they're getting completely screwed over because they have idiotic upper management.
All these moves either get Fiorina huge bonuses (like the merger) or give short term cost benefits (like killing the calculator dev group) at the cost of serious long term damage. Yes, the shareholders will be happy -- for a short period of time.
HTML was originally designed to work this way. Unfortunately, it's hard to convince peopel that this is a better system -- legions of hard-copy print era designers swarmed the Web design scene and pretty much decimated any hope of client-side UI control.
Now, HTML is pretty much an inefficient, hard to parse Postscript variant.
The spinning beachball only appears on applications that are busy
I'd like to see the "busy cursor" die. It's really annoying in a modern windowing system, where you have multiple windows open with different busy states and need to move the mouse around to see all of their states.
The "busy cursor" was developed for application-modal systems, where only one application was ever in onscreen at one time. The user was usually looking at the cursor, so the cursor was the best place to put a busy indicator -- and if they weren't (possibly using the keyboard, you'd make the cursor visible and then start animating it).
These days the "busy cursor"provides only a partial view of information on the system and requires the user to switch to the mouse to check busy statuses on various apps. It would be much better to provide a "busy" titlebar indicator on each window (since these days windows, not screens, are the smallest unit across which a "busy" status might differ).
Of course, minimizing UI modality is also important...
Slashdot Mirror
I remember seeing a $300 paperback SE book in the CMU bookstore. I hope you're ready to shell out.
I love CMU as a college, but SE looks kind of boring. Perhaps it's just me. Mostly learning management and workflow models, from what I saw skimming the textbook.
Ironically enough, I've been more impressed with the little I've seen of CMU's Graduate School of Industrial Engineering.
Also, if you come back to CMU again, you'll be without an NNTP feed. Damn CMU's IT people and their stupid bboards (godawful extension to IMAP, if anyone wants to know what they are...CMU gateways USENET through them).
Anyway, your call.
As an interesting aside, I've read that masters students generally end up making less money over their lifetime than BSers that would have invested the money they would have spent on their education. This is an on-average thing over the past ten years or something similar.
Ah, thanks. I'd been working off Classic knowledge.
Which has happened regularly throughout history, and I suspect would happen again if we fat lazy types in the US were ever in actual danger of starving.
Okay, I hate to hurt this person's feelings, but his post was too far out there not to do so.
...huh? What was that?"
I am fully qualified for the position you have listed.
You have your BS, eh?
I have been hacking copy protect mechanisms since I was 7.
What you're 16 now? And the first few years of this involved setting back the clock on your computer and chortling to your friends about how l33t you are?
I have something to tell you. You have heard this before from people just like me, but you have not listened.
Slashdot weirdo: "Bill Gates, you are evil".
BG: "Dum de dum
You do not seem to realize that what you are doing, in your attempts to introduce completely "trusted" computers, is evil.
Translation: My l33t Windows game copy protection bypassing skills will be useless in your post-Armageddonesque society!
I'm not referring to your usual misguided 'save the world by taking it over' style of evil...
This man has a way of reaching out to the hearts of his audience and gaining their sympathy, no?
I'm talking more of a killing kittens for fun kind of evil.
Pay for my warezed copy of Windows? Forbid it, almighty God!
You are, whether it is your entention or not, going to remove general purpose computing from the hands of the non-experts, and they won't know enough to stop you
And what the hell "general purpose computing" experience is it that ordinary users are experiencing that is going to screw them over so much? They won't be able to pirate their Windows games any more?
Depending on your success I forsee one of two final results.
Translation: slap down your highly paid and talented executives -- I'm going to tell you the way your business is going to be!
The likeliest option is that you go out of business in 80 years, because your 'innovations' stunt the technological development of an entire generation and alienate those few who are intelligent enough to have become programmers anyways.
Earth to "We're All Alike"! MS hasn't shipped a development environment (well, except qbasic) with their systems for years, and the same goes for Apple. If we're stunted, we're stunted already. Every talented coder I know is already using Linux.
In this case, you will set back humanity's development by hundreds of years.
Smallpox will return! We'll lose all our advanced agricultural techniques! The horseless carrige will disappear!
Or, alternately, you drive your existing user base to other platforms and go out of business in 5 years.
Ah, yes. The other platforms without a stable ABI/library set/*standard filesystem layout* (Linux)? Or would that be the much more expensive, even more wannabe monopolistic platform (MacOS). You mean the platform without MS Office, or the one that MS could leave without MS Office with the snap of their fingers?
I doubt you will allow the second option to happen.
I'm sure they appreciate your confidence.
I have not participated in the efforts to hack your hardware (XBox) previously because I did not want to support you by purchasing one.
Translation: I'm unaware of the fact that you lose money on each box sold. I hate your guts already and listening to me is going to be unproductive in the extreme.
Now, I see the light. I, with the help of other slashdotters, have realized that the XBox is just a test run of your trusted computing initiatives.
BG: "Damn. Well, Slashdot has us by the balls. We better give up our current strategy."
Flunky: "Are you sure? But, sir..."
BG: "No. No, the Slashdotters have beaten us again. Retreat is the only option left to us now."
It is a chance for you to find the bugs in your system and fix them on a platform which attracts hackers, yet presents no serious loss when it is hacked.
Translation: I'm unaware of the fact that pirated software being freely traded for the XBox would represent a massive revenue loss.
I have no doubt in my mind that if you manage to perfect this architcture you will waste no time in implementing it in desktop PCs and using your monopoly power to force a significant number of users over to it.
Yes, this is pretty much what Microsoft already told all of us in their press release.
Therefore, this is my notice to you.
Throw down the gauntlet! You can take MS! Do it!
I will not let you succeed.
MS is fucked.
I will be adding my intelligence to the effort to stop you, and I will succeed.
What, by breaking XBox security and exposing another hole to be fixed on the PC? I thought you said that was bad.
And if I do not, it does not matter.
Does certainly take the wind out of the sails of the previous claim, doesn't it?
Because I am not alone. You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all.
Translation: I read way, way too much l33t haXor propoganda. I have seen too many movies and hung out way too much on IRC making vague claims of incredible skills.
And, in the end, you wil lose. I promise.
We'll see.
(Posted anonymously because Microsoft's lawyers are more expensive than mine.)
I'm not going to say anything here...
Sometimes you're right, sometimes wrong.
I think that in designing new algorithms or something, there isn't really any question -- you want a solid college education.
If you're doing architecture work, your'e a software engineer, I'm a lot more dubious. I can see how missing certain skills could be an issue, but two of the most industrious and technically skilled people I know didn't get a MS -- one got a two-year degree, and the other dropped out of high school. One's written more code for the Linux kernel than most Slashdot readers, and the other did some Linux porting work and last I heard, was reverse engineering and rewriting their oven's firmware.
Also, I've seen waaay too many PhDs that are simply out of touch with the world, aren't very motivated, and like to quibble over minor details, making arguments from authority.
Now, I've also seen very good, competent PhDs -- this wasn't meant to be a blanket statement. But how often have you used those finite automata or formal proof skills you learned in school? If you're a PhD, are you still doing the same work that you did your thesis on? If not, you've blown a lot of money getting skills that you aren't using.
This is just a thought.
I've finished my BS at a prestigious computer science school, and frankly, the stuff that I've used on the job has been almost exclusively the stuff that I spent time being interested in, poking at, reading research papers on, and whatnot. The stuff I learned during school? That mostly gets thrown out.
If you consider that most classes have one or two textbooks, and that reading one or two textbooks gives you the body of knowledge in the class, you can learn a lot more on your own for less money than you can in a class.
Actually, I know of four coders that work at Microsoft. The first is a Linux nut and has a Tux doll in his cubicle. The next two both prefer UNIX to Windows, and the last doesn't know a thing about UNIX but is relegated to really basic work in VB, and is a pretty poor coder.
Not that I think that this is universal, but it's a pretty good anecdote. Anyone know an MS person that really *doesn't* like UNIX?
...asserting that morality is relative becomes a pretty ridiculous philosophy when a 15 year old girl is raped by a 40 year old man
Actually, I've always thought that it's kind of a funny quirk of our legal system that a 15 year old boy could have sex with the same girl and it *not* be a crime.
Back in Rome, it used to be a popular practice for men to have sex with young boys.
:-)
I think you're thinking of Greece, though Rome supposedly had its own brands of debauchery.
This is part of what got Socrates drinking hemlock...fathers pissed off at him corrupting their sons.
Actually, I think most people (a few idealists aside) don't really give much of a damn about principles, at least the way you're using the term.
I've written a fair amount of code on P2P clients. Why? Because it's fun! It's a neat coding project. I donate the source to the community because it doesn't cost me anything and it helps some fellow coders out.
Now, if some company came along and offered me a nicely paying job writing code for monitoring programs to build evidence for court on P2P users, or DoS programs to attack P2P networks, would I take it? Of course! That's a fun problem too.
I don't have any interest at all in turning down a job so that some pimply-faced teenager doper can get just one more Eminem song. Not a chance. That's their own lookout.
Unfortunately, the mainstream products of major vendors largely ignore these demonstrated technologies. In their defense most of the vendors would claim that the market-place is not prepared to pay for high price for high assurance of security
Keep in mind that the price to pay for security is often not simply a higher initial purchase price.
It can be in difficulty maintaining code. If you write something in Eiffel or SML, you avoid buffer overflow attacks on the stack, but you have a much smaller pool of programmers to hire from.
It can be in performance. Java is the most popular "safe" (array and pointer deref checked) language, but you pay a severe performance hit when using Java over C/C++.
It can be in convenience. I'm used to troubleshooting my system by just booting into single-user mode. If I was really secure, I'd have the bootloader passworded and an encrypted filesystem. But that's enough of an irritation to me that it's just not worth it.
And it's very difficult to get a good, objective overview of security. Most security analysts don't really know all that much -- they're working off their own biases and feelings as well. They tend to try to sell companies on one-time-cost, backed-by-a-big-name products like firewalls or expensive IDS systems, because that's what companies want to hear. Also, *so* many products are so insecure that it's really painful and can feel futile to try to secure a system -- you might fix one problem with your device only to find that an IC manufacturer that's one of your vendors has some testing mode that breaks all your security guarantees.
We need people willing to pay the price, a wider bed of knowledgeable security consultants, software written from scratch in a safe language, with strong constraints on it, components that one can build secure products out of, and a decade to put everything into place before we can really get secure products.
What issues do you have with using a package system? Keep in mind that ports *is* a package system -- as a matter of fact, the top hit on google for "package system" is a NetBSD page.
Is it really every window?
I had assumed (again, I'm a bit out of things with OS X) that for efficiency reasons, the background would exist as a quad and only the window being dragged is rendered as a quad.
The busy cursor is because the application is not responding to the OS
Actually, (at least in the classic MacOS API -- I don't know what happens under OS X) the busy cursor *only* appears and is animated if the application *is* responding to the OS. The application does the work of displaying the busy cursor.
The question is whether the application is currently ready to accept user input.
If the application was updated to do its heavy lifting in a thread and run the interface in a separate thread, then you wouldn't get the busy cursor
If you'll notice, I mentioned the fact that that it would be nice to thread or at least queue tasks at the bottom of my original post -- "of course, minimizing UI modality is also important..."
BTW, having a UI thread was decidedly nontrivial on the classic MacOS because the Toolbox was nonreentrant -- I suspect, but do not know, that this has changed.
I think, at least for the past few years, that Apple has a better per-capita profit.
Of course, Apple also has fewer people.
The VM upheaval in early 2.4 (so-called "stable" series).
Uh, huh. And no one is going to get a random kernel and plop it on a $500K machine. They're going to get a vendor-tested and supported solution, like Red Hat or something, which actually undergoes serious "enterprise-level" QA. And doesn't have these problems.
Also, you're a troll.
Oh, give it a rest. They're easier to administer *for BSD people*, same as Linux is easier to administer *for Linux people*. Functionally, compared to the alternatives, they're freaking identical. You get an x86 platform, you plop a UNIX-like OS on it.
As it happens, Linux gets more press. I frankly would prefer Linux over BSD, but not the the point of dying over it.
Just because BSD is suitable for the job doesn't mean that Linux isn't.
Wow, you're stupid.
He obviously didn't base his entire order on whether it ran Linux. If you're trying to focus on maintaining *one* set of software and avoid vendor lock-in, however, you can legitimately decide ahead of time the OS you want to use. Lots of places run out and look for a Windows server, or a Solaris server. They have a big installed base, and IT people that know their platform. So he had already decided on Linux. Big reaking deal.
You think he was buying a $500,000 rig to play Microsoft Flight Simulator, maybe?
I'm not so sure that IBM doesn't have a bit of a "bad rap" for being overly corporate in the past.
However, IBM just laid off thousands of workers, and there are hiring freezes all over. This is probably not a good time to try getting into IBM. I have a friend that spent the least three summers at IBM, and he says that you now need a signed okay from the site manager to hire *anyone*.
OTOH, I'm not sure what IBM's position is with MS -- whether they're as antagonistic with MS as Sun or not.
Both IBM and Sun want to ease into open source w/o risking too much. Right now, with open source just barely starting to be adopted in the business/government world, hiring someone as visible as Perens might be risky.
Free software is quite possible. I'm using dillo in Sawfish in XFree86 on a Linux box at the minute to type this.
Okay, let's find the flaws
Perens is an idealist and a radical. Radicals have their history twisted to make them look like *evil* bastards by their opponents, and idealism is an impediment in politics. You want to *look* like you're an idealist, not be one.
There actually is at least one representative that has a pretty strong alignment with the pro-free-use, anti-government-regulated-Internet types that frequent Slashdot -- Rep. Boucher, from VA. He's figured prominently as the "good guy" in a number of Slashdot stories, and makes me feel good about the legislative branch, despite a few despicable legislators like the Senator from Disneyland.
Also, geeks will get a lot more support at the minute, as the telecom and tech companies are buying off legislators left and right.
Oh, forgot a few points.
* Divided the board of directors, causing major rifts in high level management and a huge expensive PR and legal battle for the company
* Pissed off most employees, who were overwhelmingly against the merger.
HP used to be a pretty well run company. Let's see what Fiorina managed to do:
* Axe the world-renowned calculator development people.
* Merge with a company bleeding money based in an industry (high margin desktop PCs) that's bleeding money -- *and* an area that HP was trying to extract itself from.
* Not get any criticism, because God knows she's a woman, *the* female tech CEO, and it would be hideous to actually bash someone that "broke the glass ceiling". Grrr.
It just pisses me off. There are *tons* of smart engineers at HP, and they're getting completely screwed over because they have idiotic upper management.
All these moves either get Fiorina huge bonuses (like the merger) or give short term cost benefits (like killing the calculator dev group) at the cost of serious long term damage. Yes, the shareholders will be happy -- for a short period of time.
"That company screwed us over three years ago -- how can we sock it to them?"
HTML was originally designed to work this way. Unfortunately, it's hard to convince peopel that this is a better system -- legions of hard-copy print era designers swarmed the Web design scene and pretty much decimated any hope of client-side UI control.
Now, HTML is pretty much an inefficient, hard to parse Postscript variant.
The spinning beachball only appears on applications that are busy
I'd like to see the "busy cursor" die. It's really annoying in a modern windowing system, where you have multiple windows open with different busy states and need to move the mouse around to see all of their states.
The "busy cursor" was developed for application-modal systems, where only one application was ever in onscreen at one time. The user was usually looking at the cursor, so the cursor was the best place to put a busy indicator -- and if they weren't (possibly using the keyboard, you'd make the cursor visible and then start animating it).
These days the "busy cursor"provides only a partial view of information on the system and requires the user to switch to the mouse to check busy statuses on various apps. It would be much better to provide a "busy" titlebar indicator on each window (since these days windows, not screens, are the smallest unit across which a "busy" status might differ).
Of course, minimizing UI modality is also important...