This is a very long story, but I'll try to condense it in the hopes that someone will bother reading it. I worked on a project for several oil companies, and my job was to produce a 3D crane simulator to train crane operators on the cheap. The client's machines were Windows NT 4, and there was no upgrade planned for years. I did research on what was the best way to accomplish accelerated 3D under Windows NT (This was in the old days before everyone and their grandma had accelerated 3D!)
It looked like OpenGL might fit the bill, but all of the developers around me were "Microsoft Guys" and I was nervous about taking the plunge and failing. Hardware acceleration wasn't exactly "there". Since my company was a top-tier Microsoft Solution provider, I got on the horn with some of the guys on the DirectX team, and they recommended that I use DirectX 5. They said that it was in the pipe and days away from release on NT4. Microsoft wouldn't lie, right? So we used Win95/DirectX as our development platform, under the solid assurance from Microsoft's DirectX team that DirectX5 would be released for NT4.
So, a few months into the project, the simulator was complete. It was pretty sweet, running hardware accelerated, and the collision detection was great. So, now we're just waiting on that DirectX5 for NT 4! The DirectX team told me that it was gold, and they were just waiting on Captain Bill's orders to release it.
That week Bill announced that DirectX5 was not going to be released for NT4. (Now that I think about it, I might have my Windows versions messed up...Was it 3.5? I can't remember, suffice to say, it was the version of Windows my client was running!) This was purely a marketing decision, aimed at artificially forcing people to upgrade their version of Windows. Unfortunately, oil companies are not going to mplement a company-wide upgrade of Windows for my software, so I was screwed. After the DirectX team themselves promised me that they were about to release for NT4 -- after THEY talked me out of OpenGL because it was not the Windows "standard", I was royally screwed. No DirectX 5. We had to back-port to DirectX3 and the BEST part was that it wasn't hardware accelerated. The 3D ran in software. We would have been better off writing our own freaking rendering engine.
The back port took 3 months. We had already finished the project, and been paid all we were going to get. This was in the startup phase of my new company. We had to work for three months with no income because Microsoft lied to us. Not only that, their API sucked so much that porting from 5 to 3 took three months.
The simulator was released, and the performance was so bad that we couldn't spare any cycles for collision detection. The simulator was a pale shadow of what it was supposed to be.
Fast forward: After my company tanked because of this event, I ported the simulator over to OpenGL just to see. It took a week, and ran accelerated in the version of Windows that my client had. Had I gone with a non-Microsoft solution that project would have succeeded, and my Partner would still be working with me instead of hanging out with hotties in San Francisco and bragging that he's a programmer on Tomb Raider.
That's why I hate Microsoft with every molecule in my body.
I actually own the Linux Quake3, and I am aware that they statically compiled against everything and the kitchen sink. I haven't tested it on my current Linux Desktop (I packed the CD away when I moved), so I don't know if it still works out of the box.
Even if you completely dismiss the binary compatibility argument, the rest of what I'm saying is still valid. There is a lot more to maintaining a codebase for Linux than a one-shot porting effort. You either have to fork your codebase, or backport the SDL/Whatever changes back into your Windows version, and over time this is no small task. Bear in mind that iD planned from the ground up for their game to be portable to Linux. Most game shops don't do this and have DirectX dependencies bleeding throughout their code.
Also still valid is my support argument. Providing support for people running a Linux game would be much more difficult than for a Windows game. I use Linux on every Desktop machine I own and I *still* have Alsa problems:P
If game companies could just do a Linux build of their program and forget about it, they'd probably be willing to invest the money. But it isn't that simple. People aren't going to buy a $50 game and accept that it doesn't run properly on their variant of Linux. And SOMEONE is going to have to pay support staff to make sure that the game continues to run on people's machines.
This is a MUCH more expensive proposition in Linux than in Windows. The binaries that I built for my Windows 95 games almost 10 years ago still run unaltered on Windows XP. Linux? Hell, some of my projects from 2 years ago won't even **build** due to library changes, and you can simply forget about binary compatibility -- it doesn't exist.
There is a reason almost no game shop supports Linux, and the small market share of Linux isn't the whole story. Commercial games by their very nature are proprietary and closed source, which is antithetical to the entire structure of Linux. Linux is built from top to bottom with the tacit assumption that the source is available for everything. The system is put together by completely independent teams, and there is no governing body ensuring that everything is backwards compatible. If you are a heavy Linux user, then you know full well that the guys running different projects change things because they think it's the right thing to do, and do not care how much software out there they break when they change things. How many times has Apache's vhosts configuration changed in the past 5 years?
If you release a Linux game, think about all of the crap you have to support for this tiny marketshare. Your programmers have to understand the different Linux distributions. The differences between Gentoo, Ubuntu, Red Hat, or whatever other variant they're using. Are you going to leave it up to the user to make sure that their OpenGL is accelerated? If a user installs your game "out of the box", and the GL is running in software, do you just tell them too bad?
Most Windows games are written using DirectX. Migrating your application from a fully-functioning game programming suite over to the SDL, Allegro, or whatever in Linux is no small task. And if you hand this over to a third party developer, what then? Do you have a forked code base? Do you actually change the *Windows* version of your game to use SDL as well? Is the entire interface going to change? (I can tell you from experience in moving between APIs, things change. The different APIs have different quirks, and it affects everything from interface design to the file formats of your graphics).
The point I'm trying to make here is that while doing a quick-and-dirty port of a PC game to Linux may not be that incredibly difficult, doing it in a maintainable fashion, without forking your codebase, and without opening yourself up to an immense support headache, is a very difficult thing indeed.
Write something in it. Seriously. When there's a high-profile app written in mono that I care about, I'll care about Mono. How about err..Gnome? Gimp? Anything? I mean Miguel was captain Gnome, why isn't the Gnome team using Mono?
Maybe I'm a mennonite, but I don't care about what the cool new API is. The only reason I even looked at QT is that it's the underlying API for KDE. Given that Mono now has Novell behind it, you'd think that they'd be able to convince SOMEBODY to use it. Maybe I'm a retard, but last time I checked Mono wasn't a dependency when I emerged anything on Gentoo...
This is an easy one. Think of all of the people you know who play WoW. Think about their game playing habits before they bought it, and their habits now. The avid gamers I know who started playing WoW are no longer avid gamers. They are avid WoW players. Period.
You know, nobody has any problem saying "White men can't jump" or "White guys don't know how to dance", yet if you dare suggest that maybe...women aren't really cut out for programming, your are a sexist bastard.
Look, society can't keep you away from your passions. When I was 10 years old I learned how to program in basic off of computers at other people's houses. I wrote a text adventure game that year. That's what someone does when they are driven by a passion.
Women don't constitute a noticable percentage of programmers because most women don't care about programming. It doesn't interest them. They don't have the passion. They aren't cut out for it.
And no amount of government grants, or hippy-dippy activism is going to change that. In general, women aren't cut out to be computer programmers. (And I don't care about the Asian chick in your CSCI class...yes I know SOME women are good programmers. That doesn't change the fact that they are a rarity)
Slashdot, if you want me to take you seriously, don't use as reference a site (which spells website as websight) rife with misspellings, horrible formatting, and the usage of quotation marks for emphasis.
Seriously, I'm hella drunk and I can write better than whoever shit that site out.
Back in the old days, computers had built in programming tools. On the C64, the shell was inherently programmable. Most of the cheap text adventure games you bought were simply basic scripts you could look at. Back then it was hard to use the computer and *not* figure out how to write a simple program.
Along with the GUI abstraction came an almost paranoid desire not to use a shell. Programming is simply further away from the typical user's experience these days. They can barely install Firefox, much less get a full Python build environment working, and forget about knowing what in the hell to type into the magic box once it's up.
Revenge of the Sith has enjoyed the biggest opening in movie history. Makes it kind of hard for me to cry a river over the downloaders hurting the poor wittle movie industry.
During the boom anyone and everyone was in this business. Every guy who could launch VB was treated like a god. Tons of custom software development houses sprung up and promised the world to unwitting clients.
Years later, after dumping millions of dollars into our industry, clients are wising up. Most companies have horror stories at this point. Most of them have been burned by start-up custom software houses who can no longer maintain the broken wreck they have created. Most clients have been through the ringer with consultants who charge an arm and a leg but don't deliver anything.
There are a lot of good computer guys out there, and a lot of good software companies, but my honest opinion is that most people in our business are little better than snake oil salesmen.
OK, you have to forgive me. It is Mardi Gras time in New Orleans, and I am drunk and typing on Slashdot.
But for Shiva's sake man! Sun is an evil company. All us Slashdot kids have watched this writhing beast spew out whatever cool word it can in its death throes.
Maybe we'll Open Source Solaris. Maybe we'll do this or that. Maybe we'll do something cool and our efforts will finally make your webcam work with Yahoo under Linux. Maybe.
Buy our servers.
Fuck Sun. They aren't our friend and you know it. And their little weekly press releases made to satiate the masturbating Slashdot masses mean two (2) things. Jack and Shit.
Fuck Sun. I am tired of reading their bullshit. I am tired of reading 20 pages of banter that completely contradicts what old MC Nealy swore was the company "vision" last month. Sick of it. Were it not for lock-in, those bastards would have dried up and died 5 years ago.
I would continue, but my drunk girlfriend is yelling at me for typing at 7:39 in the morning.
"What in the fuck are you typing?" she shouted at me.
"I am writing on Slashdot, it's like the #1 site in the world for Linux dudes. I'm totally drunk typing and bitching about how much I hate Sun and it's pretty funny. And I'm going to promote my site and make my company's bandwidth get farked."
After having over a year of my life sucked into Ultima Online I can tell you from experience that you want to stay away from the MMORPG genre.
These games are specifically designed to maximise addiction and require as much of your time as is possible. They are designed to make it impossible to just sit down for 15 minutes and have a fun little game.
There is a whole world out there with actual real things that games only exist to simulate. Computer games are great while they are augmenting your real life. They are good for a little off time every now and then.
When you reach a point where your wife/girlfriend/whatever feels neglected because of a video game, you need to question your priorities. Perhaps the proper question isn't how to get her off your back, but rather, is this game worth the time I am spending?
I have personally met the man. I have been at a convention in Taiwan, filled with people eager to hear about this thing called Linux. They were willing to learn.
All he did was berate them for saying Linux. I watched him shout at the top of his lungs at the organizers. Yeah, that's going to help.
In addition, hearing his answers to questions I was struck by how out of touch he is. Several of the questions were regarding Mesa (open source OpenGL). He had never heard of the project, which is borderline forgivable, but even after I piped up (being the only other American) and tried to help him by giving him about 10 other graphics APIs as reference, he still had no idea what they were talking about.
In addition, his utter disdain for money and corporations' motivations for using free software was just ridiculous. "I don't care about your profits" he answered to one question from the audience regarding how one can sell the idea of free software to their accountants.
If he feels that way, I wonder why he lets them fly him out there to talk.
I have read much of what he has written, and you are right, he has predicted many of the bad things that are coming to pass.
Unfortunately, he has absolutely no tact and no ability to communicate with normal people. I also believe he is totally out of touch with the modern computing industry. He is fixated on this one semantic issue and obsessively brings it up regardless of the topic at hand.
Ahh, in this world of uncertainty at least you can count on good old Stallman to filter EVERY SINGLE THING that ever happens through the Linux vs. GNU/Linux argument.
I just reread what I wrote and I look stupid. Of course any competitors need to support MS file formats to compete.
My intended point is that an open file format is preferable in every way, but, given that this is not the case, the only viable option is to support the dominant closed format.
> Using "closed" formats is a good thing, depending > on market conditions.
Well, the market condition being that one vendor has over 99% of the market, I'd say ANY use of a closed format is bad. Your argument only holds water when there are myriad vendors producing similar products in virtual parity of market share, which is in no way happening in the spreadsheet market.
Bear in mind that I have been out of college for approaching 10 years, so my perspective may be a bit behind the times. When I was at UNO, the only majors available were CS and EE. There were absolutely no other computer related majors.
And my point is not that there is no place at all for mathematics, but rather that the bulk of graduates end up in the business world rather than a "pure" science discipline, and that the weight of the available curriculum should reflect this.
I took CS in college and remain somewhat bitter at the experience. The heavy emphasis on mathematics drove me away after two years.
I have now been professionally writing business software for about eight years, and in that time I have never used mathematics more complex than arithmetic and very basic algebra.
I do, however, use my English skills on a daily basis. I have to write documentation and communicate with clients. I have to explain things to non-programmers and I have to translate business speak to techs.
I have to understand the workings of business. My software exists to make businesses more efficient. If I do not understand the real world processes, I cannot improve them with software.
When I took CS, they acted as if we were scientists and would all get heavily algorithmic signal processing jobs or some such theoretical crap. The reality is that 99% of us end up in the business world helping people make more money.
It sickens me that CS is churning out people who took calculus but know absolutely nothing about the business world in which they will most likely be working.
Why not just buy windows? If I'm going to plunk down money on licensing proprietary software, I might as well pay for the stuff I know works. I don't run Windows, but I don't understand the mindset that isn't willing to buy Windows, but IS willing to spend a comparable amount of money on emulation.
Granted, he runs the #1 software company in the world, but that makes him an authority on business and killing competitors, not innovation and predicting the future of the industry. For a good laugh go and read the first edition of "The Road Ahead". If he would have had his way there wouldn't be server-side content on the internet. You'd download (for a fee, of course) content off of a MS server to whatever proprietary MS software you were using, and view it locally for a "rich experience."
Slashdot Mirror
This is a very long story, but I'll try to condense it in the hopes that someone will bother reading it. I worked on a project for several oil companies, and my job was to produce a 3D crane simulator to train crane operators on the cheap. The client's machines were Windows NT 4, and there was no upgrade planned for years. I did research on what was the best way to accomplish accelerated 3D under Windows NT (This was in the old days before everyone and their grandma had accelerated 3D!)
It looked like OpenGL might fit the bill, but all of the developers around me were "Microsoft Guys" and I was nervous about taking the plunge and failing. Hardware acceleration wasn't exactly "there". Since my company was a top-tier Microsoft Solution provider, I got on the horn with some of the guys on the DirectX team, and they recommended that I use DirectX 5. They said that it was in the pipe and days away from release on NT4. Microsoft wouldn't lie, right? So we used Win95/DirectX as our development platform, under the solid assurance from Microsoft's DirectX team that DirectX5 would be released for NT4.
So, a few months into the project, the simulator was complete. It was pretty sweet, running hardware accelerated, and the collision detection was great. So, now we're just waiting on that DirectX5 for NT 4! The DirectX team told me that it was gold, and they were just waiting on Captain Bill's orders to release it.
That week Bill announced that DirectX5 was not going to be released for NT4. (Now that I think about it, I might have my Windows versions messed up...Was it 3.5? I can't remember, suffice to say, it was the version of Windows my client was running!) This was purely a marketing decision, aimed at artificially forcing people to upgrade their version of Windows. Unfortunately, oil companies are not going to mplement a company-wide upgrade of Windows for my software, so I was screwed. After the DirectX team themselves promised me that they were about to release for NT4 -- after THEY talked me out of OpenGL because it was not the Windows "standard", I was royally screwed. No DirectX 5. We had to back-port to DirectX3 and the BEST part was that it wasn't hardware accelerated. The 3D ran in software. We would have been better off writing our own freaking rendering engine.
The back port took 3 months. We had already finished the project, and been paid all we were going to get. This was in the startup phase of my new company. We had to work for three months with no income because Microsoft lied to us. Not only that, their API sucked so much that porting from 5 to 3 took three months.
The simulator was released, and the performance was so bad that we couldn't spare any cycles for collision detection. The simulator was a pale shadow of what it was supposed to be.
Fast forward: After my company tanked because of this event, I ported the simulator over to OpenGL just to see. It took a week, and ran accelerated in the version of Windows that my client had. Had I gone with a non-Microsoft solution that project would have succeeded, and my Partner would still be working with me instead of hanging out with hotties in San Francisco and bragging that he's a programmer on Tomb Raider.
That's why I hate Microsoft with every molecule in my body.
I actually own the Linux Quake3, and I am aware that they statically compiled against everything and the kitchen sink. I haven't tested it on my current Linux Desktop (I packed the CD away when I moved), so I don't know if it still works out of the box.
:P
Even if you completely dismiss the binary compatibility argument, the rest of what I'm saying is still valid. There is a lot more to maintaining a codebase for Linux than a one-shot porting effort. You either have to fork your codebase, or backport the SDL/Whatever changes back into your Windows version, and over time this is no small task. Bear in mind that iD planned from the ground up for their game to be portable to Linux. Most game shops don't do this and have DirectX dependencies bleeding throughout their code.
Also still valid is my support argument. Providing support for people running a Linux game would be much more difficult than for a Windows game. I use Linux on every Desktop machine I own and I *still* have Alsa problems
If game companies could just do a Linux build of their program and forget about it, they'd probably be willing to invest the money. But it isn't that simple. People aren't going to buy a $50 game and accept that it doesn't run properly on their variant of Linux. And SOMEONE is going to have to pay support staff to make sure that the game continues to run on people's machines.
This is a MUCH more expensive proposition in Linux than in Windows. The binaries that I built for my Windows 95 games almost 10 years ago still run unaltered on Windows XP. Linux? Hell, some of my projects from 2 years ago won't even **build** due to library changes, and you can simply forget about binary compatibility -- it doesn't exist.
There is a reason almost no game shop supports Linux, and the small market share of Linux isn't the whole story. Commercial games by their very nature are proprietary and closed source, which is antithetical to the entire structure of Linux. Linux is built from top to bottom with the tacit assumption that the source is available for everything. The system is put together by completely independent teams, and there is no governing body ensuring that everything is backwards compatible. If you are a heavy Linux user, then you know full well that the guys running different projects change things because they think it's the right thing to do, and do not care how much software out there they break when they change things. How many times has Apache's vhosts configuration changed in the past 5 years?
If you release a Linux game, think about all of the crap you have to support for this tiny marketshare. Your programmers have to understand the different Linux distributions. The differences between Gentoo, Ubuntu, Red Hat, or whatever other variant they're using. Are you going to leave it up to the user to make sure that their OpenGL is accelerated? If a user installs your game "out of the box", and the GL is running in software, do you just tell them too bad?
Most Windows games are written using DirectX. Migrating your application from a fully-functioning game programming suite over to the SDL, Allegro, or whatever in Linux is no small task. And if you hand this over to a third party developer, what then? Do you have a forked code base? Do you actually change the *Windows* version of your game to use SDL as well? Is the entire interface going to change? (I can tell you from experience in moving between APIs, things change. The different APIs have different quirks, and it affects everything from interface design to the file formats of your graphics).
The point I'm trying to make here is that while doing a quick-and-dirty port of a PC game to Linux may not be that incredibly difficult, doing it in a maintainable fashion, without forking your codebase, and without opening yourself up to an immense support headache, is a very difficult thing indeed.
Write something in it. Seriously. When there's a high-profile app written in mono that I care about, I'll care about Mono. How about err..Gnome? Gimp? Anything? I mean Miguel was captain Gnome, why isn't the Gnome team using Mono?
Maybe I'm a mennonite, but I don't care about what the cool new API is. The only reason I even looked at QT is that it's the underlying API for KDE. Given that Mono now has Novell behind it, you'd think that they'd be able to convince SOMEBODY to use it. Maybe I'm a retard, but last time I checked Mono wasn't a dependency when I emerged anything on Gentoo...
This is an easy one. Think of all of the people you know who play WoW. Think about their game playing habits before they bought it, and their habits now. The avid gamers I know who started playing WoW are no longer avid gamers. They are avid WoW players. Period.
You know, nobody has any problem saying "White men can't jump" or "White guys don't know how to dance", yet if you dare suggest that maybe...women aren't really cut out for programming, your are a sexist bastard.
Look, society can't keep you away from your passions. When I was 10 years old I learned how to program in basic off of computers at other people's houses. I wrote a text adventure game that year. That's what someone does when they are driven by a passion.
Women don't constitute a noticable percentage of programmers because most women don't care about programming. It doesn't interest them. They don't have the passion. They aren't cut out for it.
And no amount of government grants, or hippy-dippy activism is going to change that. In general, women aren't cut out to be computer programmers. (And I don't care about the Asian chick in your CSCI class...yes I know SOME women are good programmers. That doesn't change the fact that they are a rarity)
Slashdot, if you want me to take you seriously, don't use as reference a site (which spells website as websight) rife with misspellings, horrible formatting, and the usage of quotation marks for emphasis.
Seriously, I'm hella drunk and I can write better than whoever shit that site out.
As if there were EVER a better scientist than Dr. Emmett Brown.
Did Dr. Strangelove design a flux capacitor? Didn't think so. I bet he doesn't even know what a gigawatt is.
Back in the old days, computers had built in programming tools. On the C64, the shell was inherently programmable. Most of the cheap text adventure games you bought were simply basic scripts you could look at. Back then it was hard to use the computer and *not* figure out how to write a simple program.
Along with the GUI abstraction came an almost paranoid desire not to use a shell. Programming is simply further away from the typical user's experience these days. They can barely install Firefox, much less get a full Python build environment working, and forget about knowing what in the hell to type into the magic box once it's up.
So...confused...don't know which evil to side with...
He admits early in the writeup that he hasn't used non-IE browsers in over two years, yet says the IE7 feature set isn't borrowed from competitors.
Any Firefox user can see that almost all of the features being touted are simply borrowed from Firefox.
Revenge of the Sith has enjoyed the biggest opening in movie history. Makes it kind of hard for me to cry a river over the downloaders hurting the poor wittle movie industry.
During the boom anyone and everyone was in this business. Every guy who could launch VB was treated like a god. Tons of custom software development houses sprung up and promised the world to unwitting clients.
Years later, after dumping millions of dollars into our industry, clients are wising up. Most companies have horror stories at this point. Most of them have been burned by start-up custom software houses who can no longer maintain the broken wreck they have created. Most clients have been through the ringer with consultants who charge an arm and a leg but don't deliver anything.
There are a lot of good computer guys out there, and a lot of good software companies, but my honest opinion is that most people in our business are little better than snake oil salesmen.
OK, you have to forgive me. It is Mardi Gras time in New Orleans, and I am drunk and typing on Slashdot.
But for Shiva's sake man! Sun is an evil company. All us Slashdot kids have watched this writhing beast spew out whatever cool word it can in its death throes.
Maybe we'll Open Source Solaris. Maybe we'll do this or that. Maybe we'll do something cool and our efforts will finally make your webcam work with Yahoo under Linux. Maybe.
Buy our servers.
Fuck Sun. They aren't our friend and you know it. And their little weekly press releases made to satiate the masturbating Slashdot masses mean two (2) things. Jack and Shit.
Fuck Sun. I am tired of reading their bullshit. I am tired of reading 20 pages of banter that completely contradicts what old MC Nealy swore was the company "vision" last month. Sick of it. Were it not for lock-in, those bastards would have dried up and died 5 years ago.
I would continue, but my drunk girlfriend is yelling at me for typing at 7:39 in the morning.
"What in the fuck are you typing?" she shouted at me.
"I am writing on Slashdot, it's like the #1 site in the world for Linux dudes. I'm totally drunk typing and bitching about how much I hate Sun and it's pretty funny. And I'm going to promote my site and make my company's bandwidth get farked."
http://www.hardgeus.com
The CEO of ACME Coal Power thinks that Nuclear Power Plants could be sabatoged by terrorists and pose a national security threat.
Yeah, baby. I'm going to divorce her and marry you. Just keep sleeping with me.
After having over a year of my life sucked into Ultima Online I can tell you from experience that you want to stay away from the MMORPG genre.
These games are specifically designed to maximise addiction and require as much of your time as is possible. They are designed to make it impossible to just sit down for 15 minutes and have a fun little game.
There is a whole world out there with actual real things that games only exist to simulate. Computer games are great while they are augmenting your real life. They are good for a little off time every now and then.
When you reach a point where your wife/girlfriend/whatever feels neglected because of a video game, you need to question your priorities. Perhaps the proper question isn't how to get her off your back, but rather, is this game worth the time I am spending?
I have personally met the man. I have been at a convention in Taiwan, filled with people eager to hear about this thing called Linux. They were willing to learn.
All he did was berate them for saying Linux. I watched him shout at the top of his lungs at the organizers. Yeah, that's going to help.
In addition, hearing his answers to questions I was struck by how out of touch he is. Several of the questions were regarding Mesa (open source OpenGL). He had never heard of the project, which is borderline forgivable, but even after I piped up (being the only other American) and tried to help him by giving him about 10 other graphics APIs as reference, he still had no idea what they were talking about.
In addition, his utter disdain for money and corporations' motivations for using free software was just ridiculous. "I don't care about your profits" he answered to one question from the audience regarding how one can sell the idea of free software to their accountants.
If he feels that way, I wonder why he lets them fly him out there to talk.
I have read much of what he has written, and you are right, he has predicted many of the bad things that are coming to pass.
Unfortunately, he has absolutely no tact and no ability to communicate with normal people. I also believe he is totally out of touch with the modern computing industry. He is fixated on this one semantic issue and obsessively brings it up regardless of the topic at hand.
Ahh, in this world of uncertainty at least you can count on good old Stallman to filter EVERY SINGLE THING that ever happens through the Linux vs. GNU/Linux argument.
I just reread what I wrote and I look stupid. Of course any competitors need to support MS file formats to compete.
My intended point is that an open file format is preferable in every way, but, given that this is not the case, the only viable option is to support the dominant closed format.
> Using "closed" formats is a good thing, depending
> on market conditions.
Well, the market condition being that one vendor has over 99% of the market, I'd say ANY use of a closed format is bad. Your argument only holds water when there are myriad vendors producing similar products in virtual parity of market share, which is in no way happening in the spreadsheet market.
Bear in mind that I have been out of college for approaching 10 years, so my perspective may be a bit behind the times. When I was at UNO, the only majors available were CS and EE. There were absolutely no other computer related majors.
And my point is not that there is no place at all for mathematics, but rather that the bulk of graduates end up in the business world rather than a "pure" science discipline, and that the weight of the available curriculum should reflect this.
I took CS in college and remain somewhat bitter at the experience. The heavy emphasis on mathematics drove me away after two years.
I have now been professionally writing business software for about eight years, and in that time I have never used mathematics more complex than arithmetic and very basic algebra.
I do, however, use my English skills on a daily basis. I have to write documentation and communicate with clients. I have to explain things to non-programmers and I have to translate business speak to techs.
I have to understand the workings of business. My software exists to make businesses more efficient. If I do not understand the real world processes, I cannot improve them with software.
When I took CS, they acted as if we were scientists and would all get heavily algorithmic signal processing jobs or some such theoretical crap. The reality is that 99% of us end up in the business world helping people make more money.
It sickens me that CS is churning out people who took calculus but know absolutely nothing about the business world in which they will most likely be working.
Why not just buy windows? If I'm going to plunk down money on licensing proprietary software, I might as well pay for the stuff I know works. I don't run Windows, but I don't understand the mindset that isn't willing to buy Windows, but IS willing to spend a comparable amount of money on emulation.
Granted, he runs the #1 software company in the world, but that makes him an authority on business and killing competitors, not innovation and predicting the future of the industry. For a good laugh go and read the first edition of "The Road Ahead". If he would have had his way there wouldn't be server-side content on the internet. You'd download (for a fee, of course) content off of a MS server to whatever proprietary MS software you were using, and view it locally for a "rich experience."