I'm all "power to the engineers" but let's say this another way.
You can work for a company that micromanages your time to 5 minute intervals. You will help coworker A debug his system for 2 hours. You will then work on a cross-team initiative to replace the corporate tools with duct tape and sandpaper. Then you will innovate for exactly 1 hour, on the subject of how to make product U enclosure shinier without adding cost. Etc. In this environment you're just turning the corporate crank, any creativity you may have had will be replaced with cheap corporate synthetic. You're doing what your CEO thinks he needs to succeed. You may have this idea for a cool smart phone, but it doesn't help your CEO meet his OPEX goals, or it doesn't give a 5% Y/Y increase in business unit Q's gross margin, or whatever. You present your idea, people give you weird looks like "WTF is that", maybe ask "How much money will this make?" and you don't know, because no one has built it before, so it sounds like risk and we don't like risk. Marketing doesn't help you, because they spend all their time doing the same thing you do, and the idea is lost.
Or you can work for a company that insists you develop a product. They don't know what product, figure it out. You, your teammates or that really clever guy in the basement says "Hey, we can make a really awesome phone, all we need is a major cellular telco, and a few million dollars". The idea flows upstream, someone sees the vision and potential, the idea gains momentum and voila you're funded. You do your design thing, probably get some user interface stuff wrong, probably miss some polish. You get a proto, the CEO works out a deal with otherwise impossible to approach cellular telco's and they agree to support the project. Managers sit in your lap to get you to behave for a few months to a year doing disciplined design and engineering, but out comes a nice product.
So yes, the CEO and the middle management he chooses, matters a whole lot, even if you believe your company has a lot of smart engineers.
You are free to code the client in Java, and the server in PHP, for example. The value in my opinion, of GWT is really the client side stuff...but I'm just a hardware guy writing tools for teammates and not a pro by any stretch of the imagination.
I can think of any number of reasons why it is the best choice to kill, steal or lie. Given an extreme enough circumstance any of the ten are fair game. I know there are some that follow them to the letter, but not most of us, not even those that claim to take the bible literally.
Most of us would believe it's ok to kill in self defense if there were no choice. Most would believe it's ok to kill in defense of another incapable of defending himself, some would argue it's an OBLIGATION. Many believe it's ok for a government to kill criminals, many of them devout Christians.
The list goes on. However, that doesn't undo the spirit of the ten commandments and their intention. They are an attempt to document the prerequisites for a happy, productive society. Why believe in a God who says I shall not kill, when quite clearly if I kill my neighbor, and take his stuff, I will be happier? What problem does that answer? Interpret them how you will, but the thought processes involved are more valuable than the fact.
Speaking of interpretations, most of us can't read the languages they various parts of the Bible were written in. Very much of the Bible is interpreted for us already, with some evidence that different instances of the Bible vary on certain points.
Every part of the Bible I had to read in school, or in church, was written to be interpreted and read into or so I was lead to believe by my Baptist minister. There were the begots of course, that seems like a brutal description of fact rather than interpretation...or is it to show prosperity and lineage? A quaint mannerism of the time? But then there's the meat of the thing, things like David and Goliath. Literal? I hope not, that would be depressing. Sodom and Gomorrah? I really doubt it. And let's not even start on the new testament. The point is it's FULL of moral stories, some purely dogmatic, but all should make you think.
It's definitely possible some of these events did happen in some form or fashion, but that's not what's important about them. By taking the Bible literally, IMO, it is just another history book. Some parts of it I personally patently disagree with, but regardless, if it gets you to think it's done its job.
That's really a better way. We have some people come in (for a HW job, but same restrictions) bringing in PCBs they've designed in other places, etc. In addition to the obvious potential theft question, it's not appropriate to even look at designs done by another company.
It's really not that helpful as an interviewer to ask someone to show work they may or may not have done anyhow, you want to be sure they presently have the capacity to do so.
Another alternative that meets the interviewers demands, however is to design something of your own that solves a relevant problem in your field, and present that. It doesn't have the be huge. Point to GPL work you've done, or a pet project you worked hard on. I personally think it's not as practical, again I want to be sure the person sitting in front of me is the good problem solver.
I'd never dream of even "testing" someone by asking him to bring in work done for another employer, even one that's relatively permissive. I wouldn't want even the appearance of impropriety. If it's brought in, especially with all the crackdowns going on in large corporations wrt licensing...it will only count against you.
You still answer your phone? If I don't recognize it, I don't pick it up. Like you, down here in TX I get bombarded with people who are exploiting the loopholes. We just don't answer the phone anymore.
I wish the DNC registry had options for closing the loopholes. I don't want to hear about politicians, charities, or from people who I did business with, unless it's about current business.
There are lots and lots of situations in life where there is no clear cut, correct answer. No way to get reliable data, no way to apply the scientific method (or where it's application could hurt someone). At this point you must have faith in something, and act on your principles. There's nothing wrong or sick about that. I wish more people would have faith, for example, in the founding principles of our country (by that, I mean the US).
When it comes to scientific inquiry, that's another matter. To be fair evolution isn't as clean cut as we want it to be, we can't exactly directly observe how humans were created. Perhaps there's a little bit of faith in our extrapolation. A magic omnipotent man surely could also have done this. However, we can directly observe and measure evolution in other things. Dogs and horses...we've guided their evolution for centuries. In other organisms we can observe it a little closer to real time. Here I agree with you, faith is absurd, clearly evolution is a real and measurable force.
Nothing about faith means believing in something absurd. The Bible does not call for you to have faith in The Bible, depending on what you read it's asking for your faith and obedience to a higher power, and to an overall philosophy.
There IS having blind faith in the letter of the Bible, but I don't think that's a consequence of faith itself or anything written in the Bible. That's a perversion introduced later by man.
Regardless of the debate on faith & science, if I were devout in any religion, I would object to this solely for the reasons you almost said: If you allow one religious opinion, you must allow ALL religious opinions. I know if I send my child to a biology class here, he'll learn about evolution to some degree or another. Like it or not, I know what he's learning. If I don't believe in evolution I can steer him away from it and hope he eventually sees it my way.
However, if we allow any religious debate in science, we must allow ALL religious debate in science. Thus ID, creationism, FSMism etc must all be allowed. The US 1st amendment, as the supreme court has ruled in the past, applies to public schools. My child can be learning anything from creationism to circumstances in which he must kill his wife or daughter to defend the families honor, to when it's ok to rape young girls to create the next messiah. I can't mount a defense against EVERYTHING and my own religious education doesn't include every wacko out there. Some of those ideas are highly dangerous and illegal. True, by high school hopefully his moral underpinnings are in place, but having been through high school I know teenagers to be impressionable particularly to authority figures.
People have been pirating games for almost 30 years, but companies have been profitable. Pirating games is a giant pain in the butt, so if you can purchase a game online and legally download it, you're probably going to do it. You can purchase almost any game via digital downloads these days.
Compare to consoles, I own an xbox 360 but do not own a single game. I don't pirate, but I have gamefly. I get 3-4 games per month, which I play beat and return in mere days. The amount of money being made there per game is miniscule, if I had more free time I would probably do the trade-in thing which I understand is all the rage.
I'm not convinced "free" (as in crack) games are a solution to a real problem. Windows is just not turnkey enough for the simple games that consoles do best. For the complicated games, lately people don't buy very many. Who has time for WoW AND Lotro AND MMOG++? PC games tend to be involved, for this reason we won't acquire every game that hits the shelves and will be selective. If a game sucks, we won't buy it, no time, forget money.
Console games...well gamefly will send me anything on my queue, and I'll keep the queue full even if the games on it suck and I just send it back barely touched. If you're EA, this is just fine, that means they're getting more share of my entertainment budget ($14.99/mo or whatever it is). From the standpoint of running a business based on increasing profits, they like it, no risk.
Because that would be so obvious! But alas, believing the literal letter of every word in a book that's clearly not intended to be taken literally is so important to some that it's replacing the actual point of the Bible.
Also, this way they can take their rulers out and show how powerful they are! "Look, we beat science! God is on our side! Yay!"
Sure, but I know their secret, because usually I'm often one of them. The secret, is I've solved the problem already, some day before to research some curiosity I had. It may not have been that exact problem, it may not have even been in that field, but chances are, it was because I had invested work in solving something similar, just not when the audience was watching.
I've known a lot of really smart people, the only real differentiation was the level of curiosity. The more curious would spend time understanding (by reading, hypothesizing and verifying), and would in turn be better prepared for new/unexpected challenges later. By adulthood curious people who spent the time, resources and mentors to work out their questions can be quite impressive.
I wholly reject this notion that you can develop some incredible insight and problem solving skills by "drawing in mana" at the bank line. If you're solving a good problem in line at the bank, it's because you've already read and researched the subject before and you just need some time to mull the problem over and use the other side of your brain.
...they don't have to struggle to learn something...
Not even mensa is that arrogant. If it's easy to learn and/or comes via the ether, it's probably trivial. Intelligent people have to work every bit as hard, we expect a whole lot more from them.
Re:Major problems with Firefox 3 on Gentoo 2008.0.
on
Gentoo 2008.0 Released
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· Score: 2, Funny
I was wondering if he was an embittered guru or a seasoned novice, myself. That seems to be the way they differentiate users.
I so want to work there. I've seen both sides of this, run by engineering is 100000x better, if you're an engineer.
I agree if you're trying to get to management and NOT the alpha geek in the pack, then you are dicked. But then why are you in engineering at all? The hours are long, the people are socially clueless, failure to know some obscure piece of academia turd may brand you the retard of the group...why put up with that? You are GUARANTEED to get in to management (in the private sector) if you are even slightly responsible and care even a little bit about the company...outside of engineering. Inside engineering, you need to be in a Microsoft (or the N equivalents) that will dumb down engineering to level the playing field. A few companies can do that, but not many that are on track.
All this is peaceful bliss compared to being an engineer in an a business-oriented company. It's illogical, insane, dubiously profitable, hard in all the wrong ways...but yeah I could climb ye ole ladder and make mom happy. Somehow culturally incompetant middle management >> clueful engineer in the bragometer. Eh, I'll trade them my senseless business-driven engineering job for their engineering-driven engineering job.
Absolutely, things don't build themselves. I'm sure engineering work was done for his various creations. Some of it ahead of his time, no doubt. But you can be a great artist (painter), but be completely unable to paint a house without destroying the furniture. His roof leaked, in a house that's probably a hallmark of failure. If I designed a 10TFlop computer that operated on 2W of power, but had to be made of anti-matter...I don't believe anyone would call me a good engineer. In hundreds of years, when magic technology enables that design (with a lot of modifications to fit real technology), I'm still not sure I'd be called a great engineer. Scientist, or artist perhaps, influential thinker...but probably not engineer. I'd have died on the street hungry since I failed to use science or art to solve a practical problem.
Art on the other hand, is inspirational but totally non-functional. Lots of time and money are spent on it, but you can't buy a painting and expect it to serve any tangible purpose. Having expensive art will not make you creative, or produce a design for you. However, you may be moved or inspired to create something on your own. As an artist, with a very unusual canvas, you could argue he was quite successful.
Marketing, in the loosest sense is creating and promoting ones own reality and bringing everyone along for it to pay the bills. Similar to art, but a bit more focused on the ROI. It would seem he was successful at that too, although it's probably nothing to be proud of and I don't think it was his intention.
In the end, it seems like he contributed something to architecture, and inspired people in many other ways. He was a reasonably likeable eccentric. But I'm not sure it's because of he did sound engineering work (maybe he did). He influenced and inspired people, who have actually built successful designs based on his ideas. So maybe he's more of an artist or marketer than an engineer.
I like the idea that engineering practices can be applied to art, and totally believe that sometimes you have to build something to show the world how it COULD be, even if it doesn't quite work. I general, I like how he thought. But I'm not sure engineering is what his true contribution was.
Drivers continue to expose the hardware design to the users. When you write device drivers, you put a lot of your knowledge about the architecture of the chip into it. That information can be used against you.
Maybe a day will soon come where a video card API is just something like OpenGL, and conceals all the dirty magic of the chip from the OS, but there are a number of technical obstacles blocking that for now.
I don't agree with closed source drivers, but then neither do I agree with offshoring jobs and having western companies attempt to maintain equal footing with countries that don't have any of our limitations, regulations and restrictions which improve our quality of life at a very real monetary cost. It's protectionism, but for me, it's the lesser of two evils. Fix the labor problem first, then the device drivers will follow.
ATI and nVidia both share a lot of intellectual resources and economic conditions (i.e. the expensive western world). They're more concerned not with each other, but with the far east. If their chips become commodity, they will lose their shirts, particularly right now with MS destroying the PC gaming market.
I wholly encourage the government to protect citizens from overly powerful corporations. I don't think this is the correct approach to MS, but it's all we as citizens left them with. The government should force MS to open up device drivers and file formats, and provide tools to encourage competition. MS should not have the power to use a successful product to hurt the country. They've made people filthy rich, good job, but the industry is stagnant so share and compete.
What the gov't is doing is stupid...but we're confused about what capitalism is and isn't and not providing clear direction.
I'm not sure if it's engineering so much as art and/or marketing. He created a movement. It's not clear that it was well advised, but people went for it.
Except for the part where they move too fast and we realize that IP is a stupid "resource" to sit on. They really need to wait a generation, let all the people with "know how" retire/get laid off and die. THEN spring the trap.
Right now we'd be inconvenienced. Things would appear worse than they were while we recovered. In 20 years, very few people would be left who would know what to do. Sure, we're smart, we could figure it out and re-invent ourselves, but it'd take decades.
I have yet to see boundary scan be used even in digital designs. For everything from low volume specialist apps, to very high volume apps, it's always bed of nails, then out the door.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm all "power to the engineers" but let's say this another way.
You can work for a company that micromanages your time to 5 minute intervals. You will help coworker A debug his system for 2 hours. You will then work on a cross-team initiative to replace the corporate tools with duct tape and sandpaper. Then you will innovate for exactly 1 hour, on the subject of how to make product U enclosure shinier without adding cost. Etc. In this environment you're just turning the corporate crank, any creativity you may have had will be replaced with cheap corporate synthetic. You're doing what your CEO thinks he needs to succeed. You may have this idea for a cool smart phone, but it doesn't help your CEO meet his OPEX goals, or it doesn't give a 5% Y/Y increase in business unit Q's gross margin, or whatever. You present your idea, people give you weird looks like "WTF is that", maybe ask "How much money will this make?" and you don't know, because no one has built it before, so it sounds like risk and we don't like risk. Marketing doesn't help you, because they spend all their time doing the same thing you do, and the idea is lost.
Or you can work for a company that insists you develop a product. They don't know what product, figure it out. You, your teammates or that really clever guy in the basement says "Hey, we can make a really awesome phone, all we need is a major cellular telco, and a few million dollars". The idea flows upstream, someone sees the vision and potential, the idea gains momentum and voila you're funded. You do your design thing, probably get some user interface stuff wrong, probably miss some polish. You get a proto, the CEO works out a deal with otherwise impossible to approach cellular telco's and they agree to support the project. Managers sit in your lap to get you to behave for a few months to a year doing disciplined design and engineering, but out comes a nice product.
So yes, the CEO and the middle management he chooses, matters a whole lot, even if you believe your company has a lot of smart engineers.
You are free to code the client in Java, and the server in PHP, for example. The value in my opinion, of GWT is really the client side stuff...but I'm just a hardware guy writing tools for teammates and not a pro by any stretch of the imagination.
You may be right, but they probably have him dead to rights on interfering with contractual relationships.
Absolutely.
I can think of any number of reasons why it is the best choice to kill, steal or lie. Given an extreme enough circumstance any of the ten are fair game. I know there are some that follow them to the letter, but not most of us, not even those that claim to take the bible literally.
Most of us would believe it's ok to kill in self defense if there were no choice. Most would believe it's ok to kill in defense of another incapable of defending himself, some would argue it's an OBLIGATION. Many believe it's ok for a government to kill criminals, many of them devout Christians.
The list goes on. However, that doesn't undo the spirit of the ten commandments and their intention. They are an attempt to document the prerequisites for a happy, productive society. Why believe in a God who says I shall not kill, when quite clearly if I kill my neighbor, and take his stuff, I will be happier? What problem does that answer? Interpret them how you will, but the thought processes involved are more valuable than the fact.
Speaking of interpretations, most of us can't read the languages they various parts of the Bible were written in. Very much of the Bible is interpreted for us already, with some evidence that different instances of the Bible vary on certain points.
Every part of the Bible I had to read in school, or in church, was written to be interpreted and read into or so I was lead to believe by my Baptist minister. There were the begots of course, that seems like a brutal description of fact rather than interpretation...or is it to show prosperity and lineage? A quaint mannerism of the time? But then there's the meat of the thing, things like David and Goliath. Literal? I hope not, that would be depressing. Sodom and Gomorrah? I really doubt it. And let's not even start on the new testament. The point is it's FULL of moral stories, some purely dogmatic, but all should make you think.
It's definitely possible some of these events did happen in some form or fashion, but that's not what's important about them. By taking the Bible literally, IMO, it is just another history book. Some parts of it I personally patently disagree with, but regardless, if it gets you to think it's done its job.
That's really a better way. We have some people come in (for a HW job, but same restrictions) bringing in PCBs they've designed in other places, etc. In addition to the obvious potential theft question, it's not appropriate to even look at designs done by another company.
It's really not that helpful as an interviewer to ask someone to show work they may or may not have done anyhow, you want to be sure they presently have the capacity to do so.
Another alternative that meets the interviewers demands, however is to design something of your own that solves a relevant problem in your field, and present that. It doesn't have the be huge. Point to GPL work you've done, or a pet project you worked hard on. I personally think it's not as practical, again I want to be sure the person sitting in front of me is the good problem solver.
I'd never dream of even "testing" someone by asking him to bring in work done for another employer, even one that's relatively permissive. I wouldn't want even the appearance of impropriety. If it's brought in, especially with all the crackdowns going on in large corporations wrt licensing...it will only count against you.
You still answer your phone? If I don't recognize it, I don't pick it up. Like you, down here in TX I get bombarded with people who are exploiting the loopholes. We just don't answer the phone anymore.
I wish the DNC registry had options for closing the loopholes. I don't want to hear about politicians, charities, or from people who I did business with, unless it's about current business.
There are lots and lots of situations in life where there is no clear cut, correct answer. No way to get reliable data, no way to apply the scientific method (or where it's application could hurt someone). At this point you must have faith in something, and act on your principles. There's nothing wrong or sick about that. I wish more people would have faith, for example, in the founding principles of our country (by that, I mean the US).
When it comes to scientific inquiry, that's another matter. To be fair evolution isn't as clean cut as we want it to be, we can't exactly directly observe how humans were created. Perhaps there's a little bit of faith in our extrapolation. A magic omnipotent man surely could also have done this. However, we can directly observe and measure evolution in other things. Dogs and horses...we've guided their evolution for centuries. In other organisms we can observe it a little closer to real time. Here I agree with you, faith is absurd, clearly evolution is a real and measurable force.
Nothing about faith means believing in something absurd. The Bible does not call for you to have faith in The Bible, depending on what you read it's asking for your faith and obedience to a higher power, and to an overall philosophy.
There IS having blind faith in the letter of the Bible, but I don't think that's a consequence of faith itself or anything written in the Bible. That's a perversion introduced later by man.
Regardless of the debate on faith & science, if I were devout in any religion, I would object to this solely for the reasons you almost said: If you allow one religious opinion, you must allow ALL religious opinions. I know if I send my child to a biology class here, he'll learn about evolution to some degree or another. Like it or not, I know what he's learning. If I don't believe in evolution I can steer him away from it and hope he eventually sees it my way.
However, if we allow any religious debate in science, we must allow ALL religious debate in science. Thus ID, creationism, FSMism etc must all be allowed. The US 1st amendment, as the supreme court has ruled in the past, applies to public schools. My child can be learning anything from creationism to circumstances in which he must kill his wife or daughter to defend the families honor, to when it's ok to rape young girls to create the next messiah. I can't mount a defense against EVERYTHING and my own religious education doesn't include every wacko out there. Some of those ideas are highly dangerous and illegal. True, by high school hopefully his moral underpinnings are in place, but having been through high school I know teenagers to be impressionable particularly to authority figures.
People have been pirating games for almost 30 years, but companies have been profitable. Pirating games is a giant pain in the butt, so if you can purchase a game online and legally download it, you're probably going to do it. You can purchase almost any game via digital downloads these days.
Compare to consoles, I own an xbox 360 but do not own a single game. I don't pirate, but I have gamefly. I get 3-4 games per month, which I play beat and return in mere days. The amount of money being made there per game is miniscule, if I had more free time I would probably do the trade-in thing which I understand is all the rage.
I'm not convinced "free" (as in crack) games are a solution to a real problem. Windows is just not turnkey enough for the simple games that consoles do best. For the complicated games, lately people don't buy very many. Who has time for WoW AND Lotro AND MMOG++? PC games tend to be involved, for this reason we won't acquire every game that hits the shelves and will be selective. If a game sucks, we won't buy it, no time, forget money.
Console games...well gamefly will send me anything on my queue, and I'll keep the queue full even if the games on it suck and I just send it back barely touched. If you're EA, this is just fine, that means they're getting more share of my entertainment budget ($14.99/mo or whatever it is). From the standpoint of running a business based on increasing profits, they like it, no risk.
Because that would be so obvious! But alas, believing the literal letter of every word in a book that's clearly not intended to be taken literally is so important to some that it's replacing the actual point of the Bible.
Also, this way they can take their rulers out and show how powerful they are! "Look, we beat science! God is on our side! Yay!"
Sure, but I know their secret, because usually I'm often one of them. The secret, is I've solved the problem already, some day before to research some curiosity I had. It may not have been that exact problem, it may not have even been in that field, but chances are, it was because I had invested work in solving something similar, just not when the audience was watching.
I've known a lot of really smart people, the only real differentiation was the level of curiosity. The more curious would spend time understanding (by reading, hypothesizing and verifying), and would in turn be better prepared for new/unexpected challenges later. By adulthood curious people who spent the time, resources and mentors to work out their questions can be quite impressive.
I wholly reject this notion that you can develop some incredible insight and problem solving skills by "drawing in mana" at the bank line. If you're solving a good problem in line at the bank, it's because you've already read and researched the subject before and you just need some time to mull the problem over and use the other side of your brain.
...they don't have to struggle to learn something...
Not even mensa is that arrogant. If it's easy to learn and/or comes via the ether, it's probably trivial. Intelligent people have to work every bit as hard, we expect a whole lot more from them.
I was wondering if he was an embittered guru or a seasoned novice, myself. That seems to be the way they differentiate users.
What if the phone gets "stolen"?
I stopped reading when I saw that he is using Advil, this cannot work when it is well established that Excedrin is the preferred migraine reliever.
Until the cast of Hannah Montana get appointed to the Hair and Makeup Committee.
$5/mo is outrageous, considering you'll eat more in ONE voice call than your little fingers could type all month.
This is why we need cell phone carriers to be just that, carriers aka bandwidth providers.
I so want to work there. I've seen both sides of this, run by engineering is 100000x better, if you're an engineer.
I agree if you're trying to get to management and NOT the alpha geek in the pack, then you are dicked. But then why are you in engineering at all? The hours are long, the people are socially clueless, failure to know some obscure piece of academia turd may brand you the retard of the group...why put up with that? You are GUARANTEED to get in to management (in the private sector) if you are even slightly responsible and care even a little bit about the company...outside of engineering. Inside engineering, you need to be in a Microsoft (or the N equivalents) that will dumb down engineering to level the playing field. A few companies can do that, but not many that are on track.
All this is peaceful bliss compared to being an engineer in an a business-oriented company. It's illogical, insane, dubiously profitable, hard in all the wrong ways...but yeah I could climb ye ole ladder and make mom happy. Somehow culturally incompetant middle management >> clueful engineer in the bragometer. Eh, I'll trade them my senseless business-driven engineering job for their engineering-driven engineering job.
Absolutely, things don't build themselves. I'm sure engineering work was done for his various creations. Some of it ahead of his time, no doubt. But you can be a great artist (painter), but be completely unable to paint a house without destroying the furniture. His roof leaked, in a house that's probably a hallmark of failure. If I designed a 10TFlop computer that operated on 2W of power, but had to be made of anti-matter...I don't believe anyone would call me a good engineer. In hundreds of years, when magic technology enables that design (with a lot of modifications to fit real technology), I'm still not sure I'd be called a great engineer. Scientist, or artist perhaps, influential thinker...but probably not engineer. I'd have died on the street hungry since I failed to use science or art to solve a practical problem.
Art on the other hand, is inspirational but totally non-functional. Lots of time and money are spent on it, but you can't buy a painting and expect it to serve any tangible purpose. Having expensive art will not make you creative, or produce a design for you. However, you may be moved or inspired to create something on your own. As an artist, with a very unusual canvas, you could argue he was quite successful.
Marketing, in the loosest sense is creating and promoting ones own reality and bringing everyone along for it to pay the bills. Similar to art, but a bit more focused on the ROI. It would seem he was successful at that too, although it's probably nothing to be proud of and I don't think it was his intention.
In the end, it seems like he contributed something to architecture, and inspired people in many other ways. He was a reasonably likeable eccentric. But I'm not sure it's because of he did sound engineering work (maybe he did). He influenced and inspired people, who have actually built successful designs based on his ideas. So maybe he's more of an artist or marketer than an engineer.
I like the idea that engineering practices can be applied to art, and totally believe that sometimes you have to build something to show the world how it COULD be, even if it doesn't quite work. I general, I like how he thought. But I'm not sure engineering is what his true contribution was.
Drivers continue to expose the hardware design to the users. When you write device drivers, you put a lot of your knowledge about the architecture of the chip into it. That information can be used against you.
Maybe a day will soon come where a video card API is just something like OpenGL, and conceals all the dirty magic of the chip from the OS, but there are a number of technical obstacles blocking that for now.
I don't agree with closed source drivers, but then neither do I agree with offshoring jobs and having western companies attempt to maintain equal footing with countries that don't have any of our limitations, regulations and restrictions which improve our quality of life at a very real monetary cost. It's protectionism, but for me, it's the lesser of two evils. Fix the labor problem first, then the device drivers will follow.
ATI and nVidia both share a lot of intellectual resources and economic conditions (i.e. the expensive western world). They're more concerned not with each other, but with the far east. If their chips become commodity, they will lose their shirts, particularly right now with MS destroying the PC gaming market.
I wholly encourage the government to protect citizens from overly powerful corporations. I don't think this is the correct approach to MS, but it's all we as citizens left them with. The government should force MS to open up device drivers and file formats, and provide tools to encourage competition. MS should not have the power to use a successful product to hurt the country. They've made people filthy rich, good job, but the industry is stagnant so share and compete.
What the gov't is doing is stupid...but we're confused about what capitalism is and isn't and not providing clear direction.
I'm not sure if it's engineering so much as art and/or marketing. He created a movement. It's not clear that it was well advised, but people went for it.
Except for the part where they move too fast and we realize that IP is a stupid "resource" to sit on. They really need to wait a generation, let all the people with "know how" retire/get laid off and die. THEN spring the trap.
Right now we'd be inconvenienced. Things would appear worse than they were while we recovered. In 20 years, very few people would be left who would know what to do. Sure, we're smart, we could figure it out and re-invent ourselves, but it'd take decades.
I have yet to see boundary scan be used even in digital designs. For everything from low volume specialist apps, to very high volume apps, it's always bed of nails, then out the door.