So, if you look at some of the factors that he claims "dirty" the data, one is that a lot of management/refactoring of code is done by Sun employees, and another is that a lot of outside contributors find it hard to get commit access and just leave patches in the bugtracker, which Sun employees pick up.
He claims this means that the graph — which shows Sun responsible for the vast majority of all the commits — is inaccurate.
I claim that if the project isn't getting external contributors, or not giving them the ability to get commit access, and it's basically being run by Sun internally, and he has to mention that people leave patches in the bugtracker, that itself is a sign that the project is profoundly sick, more so than any charts can so.
As further evidence that Sun isn't playing well with external contributors and the community, read the tale of the non-upstreamed Calc solver, which Meeks linked to.
This is not true at all. Sure, you can type stuff in, mark some stuff bold, spell check it, and print it out -- but there's no need for an office suite to do that, and if that's all you intend to do don't call yourself an office suite.
Here's something I ran into yesterday. There's a "Compare Documents" feature under the Edit menu. It doesn't compare the contents of tables. The bug reporting this was opened in July 2003, and nobody has seemed to care yet. In 2007, someone had a patch, which was committed and not added to the next release's codeline because "I don't think that this issue fulfills the criteria for 2.3.1". This may it was retargeted for 3.1 and rejected in November because There are too many open questions to finish in 3.1." People complained again in 2004 and 2008; I don't think you can say in good faith that "no one cares enough".
It occurs to me that your exact phrasing was "no one cares enough to add it", which is completely right. Nobody cares enough to develop OpenOffice.org to where it should be.
If you ask what more, are they not done, then I'll ask the same thing about the Linux kernel -- isn't it done? What benefit is there to running the latest 2.6.28 or whatever instead of 2.4, which worked fine for everyone a few years ago? But yet who in their right mind would (all other things being equal) set up a new system with 2.4 instead of some kernel released this year? And you'd laugh if I suggested the Linux 1.x tree, but that can open and close programs and files just as well as any other OS, can't it?
No fine-tuning user access, no support for external authentication
MediaWiki supports both of these. The first is the userrights array, which you can configure in LocalSettings.php, and groups configured in the usergroup table. The second is by subclassing AuthPlugin.php and telling it exactly what you want — autocreate local users? create remote users? fetch a password db or authenticate externally? replace the login and logout pages?
Most decent external authentication providers set REMOTE_USER, and meta has a plugin for autologin with REMOTE_USER.
not easy to add new markup
I haven't had a reason to try this, so I don't know. But you can make pseudomarkup really easily via the template feature, e.g., map {{{serif|foo}}} to <font face="my favorite serif font">foo</font>, or whatever. In fact, templates are how Wikipedia does their infoboxes (the tables on the right side of articles about prominent public figures or businesses or whatever).
I want distributed backups with several, for lack of a better word, working copies checked out on different machines.
Aha, now I figured out why we're all misunderstanding you. Those aren't backups. "Backups" to my ears means that you copy the entire contents of your disk or your Documents folder nightly onto tape or some other archival medium, so that in case of hardware failure you have something to restore from. Potentially you also keep prior versions around. The tapes are stored in a corner somewhere because they're never actually accessed except in an emergency, and they're destroyed after a few months.
What you want isn't backups, since it doesn't make sense for different people to share backups any more than it makes sense for different people to share a single networked hard disk or networked home directory. You just want a distributed file storage system, with automatic syncing / commits.
If you try to roll backup and distributed file-storage into the same application, you're not going to get anything useful. Aunt Sally is going to want every single file including her OS and her tax returns backed up, in case her hard drive dies, but only wants the photos -- and only some of the photos, actually -- to be visible to Grandma Suzie. If Suzie can see every file on Sally's computer, and the entire history of each file, she's not going to be able to browse the photos in a way that's at all intuitive.
And worse yet, if Sally wants to send out links to her photos to fifteen of her friends by e-mail, she needs some sort of interface to mark parts of her backup as world-readable but the rest (like her passwords and e-mail) not. If the network backup program even lets you do this, it won't give Sally a UI that she'll be able to figure out.
You can certainly get network backup services: Mozy was mentioned in an earlier comment.
If you rethink your requirements in terms of your goals, you'll probably find that both rolled into one isn't what you want, and not just because a product doesn't exist at the moment that does that — a product that does that can't possibly have a good UI. If they shouldn't notice or care about how backups are being made, how are they going to figure out how to share photos with each other?
You're asking two questions. The first is that you want backup, so that all their data just gets thrown somewhere and they lose the last few days' work their hard drive dies. You don't even necessarily want this on the network; just back up to a DVD-R every so often, and take every month's DVD-R offsite (a friend's house, a bank's vault, whatever). There's lots of backup software for this. Most can do fancy stuff like incremental backups. You can probably find something opensource you can host for your friends and family on a decently-available server.
The second question is networked file storage, where you don't care about automatically archiving files, but you do want frequent access and a good UI. For this I recommend something like Dropbox, which has good support for OS integration and a web interface.
To be semantic, every trivial piece of human knowledge includes the contents of my room at 2:47 AM. There's no real need for that information.
[...]Unless I can go to the library, grab the book and say "oh, wow, this is exactly like Wiki said it was! oh and look, hundreds of pages going into depth on the same topic! now I'm off to write a paper!", the information exists in a Schrodinger-like state of verifiable purgatory where citing it is a huge risk if I don't know anything about it in the first place.
Now here's the problem.... as the Economist mentions, one of the hard-to-reference things (in the US at least) is the biographies of Solidarity leaders who were not, oh, Lech Wasa. It's probably more verifiable that there was CLRS on my shelf and some pizza in my fridge at 2:47 AM, since I can take a picture of it (or may have blogged about it or whatever), than where Andrzej Gwiazda went to grade school. And it's thousands of times easier to get a picture of 150 (er, 250... er... almost 500, according to Wikipedia) Pokemon than of even 100 important political and social figures over the centuries that shaped modern Poland.
And to me at least, the development of modern Poland is way more important in an encyclopedia than Mudkip. So clearly immediate verifiability on its own can't be the criterion for inclusion. So do we keep Mudkip around, hoping that someone will get to Poland eventually? Remove both Mudkip and Gwiazda? Or can you convince me that I'm wrong, and that Mudkip's cited one-and-a-half paragraphs prove him more worthy for inclusion than Gwiazda's uncited one-and-a-half paragraphs?
There are a few exceptions -- you might be able to get away with something like Coda or AFS, though I don't know how well that scales to crappy bandwidth.
You realize that AFS was designed in the late 80s, when all bandwidth was crappy?
"DRM" is not the search term you want, though, and it is in fact not what you want for business documents. You just want to set up a public-key infrastructure (PKI) and make sure people protect their private keys. This can be done by OpenPGP, GnuPG, etc.
DRM makes it hard for people to leak a file. It does not spend very much effort, if any, on authenticating the initial owner of the file (for example, anyone who picks up a DVD can play it, although they can't copy it to a new DVD). In a business environment, you're usually far more worried about authenticating the file's recipient and making sure the original does not accidentally reach anyone else's computer, than about preventing a cooperative person from intentionally leaking the file. (In most cases, you do want to permit them to print, copy-and-paste, etc. the document. These would all be prevented by DRM because they all make it easy to leak the file.)
The other failing of DRM, as I'm sure you've seen discussed, is that it's crackable by mere cleverness. If you're going to permit someone to view a file on screen (or hear an audio clip over headphones), you can always take a screenshot (or recording) and leak that. HDCP and so forth make the screenshot harder, but nothing prevents you from pointing a camera at the TV. It will be low quality but it will be a leak. PKI, on the other hand, is only crackable by brute-force searches of the key space, or (unlikely though possible) sufficiently smart mathematicians.
But then, to be honest, I'd rather have no web browser bundled with a Windows install, thanks very much.
I don't know about you, but I'd much rather download Firefox by visiting getfirefox.com in IE than by typing HTTP commands into telnet getfirefox.com 80 > firefox.exe.
If the GUI is properly designed, the fonts will be large enough and the high pixel density will allow the fonts to be smoother.
Agreed. Despite owning a MacBook Pro with a decent-size screen, I've found myself reaching for this XO B4 to read documents / lengthy websites just because it's way easier on the eyes to read at 200 dpi. The web browser (Gecko-based) does the right thing with fixed-size elements, namely scales them up to 96 or so dpi. This makes math in Wikipedia articles look a bit odd. Other than that I haven't really noticed anything being small - well, other than the laptop itself.
who skipped out on their rallies and only joined because everyone was basically forced to
is evil because he still prohibits birth control. Ever poor family of 12 that loses kids to starvation or the side effects of malnutrition can look to the Pope for why they couldn't just have two kids that they were able to take care of.
No, they can look to their own genitals for that reason. I know plenty of families that don't use birth control and have a reasonable number of kids.
Then you can ask him why he thinks that paying taxes is actually contributing to the good of the common man?
Because the more that the rich ged rid of tax havens, the more money goes into governmental redistribution programs for the poor. Do you seriously think he's asking the poor to pay up their taxes?
Hasn't every war in history been started by either those-collecting-taxes or those-who-want-to-collect-taxes ?
Yeah, this sentence means nothing. The only forces capable of starting actual wars (not rebellions) are governments or proto-government-oids, which need taxes to survive. And to, uh, finance their war.
"Sadly, a kernel by itself gets you nowhere. To get a working system you need a shell, compilers, a library etc. These are separate parts and may be under a stricter (or even looser) copyright. Most of the tools used with linux are GNU software and are under the GNU copyleft. These tools aren't in the distribution - ask me (or GNU) for more info."
He made the kernel, at the very least you generally need the GNU tool chain to have something usable, plus a couple of other little things.
The term "GNU toolchain" usually refers to their compiler stack (gcc, as, make, autoconf, etc.) rather than their regular userland tools, aka coreutils (ls, cp, du, stty, su, etc.), or other stuff that are more than just "little things", like init and sh. I usually wouldn't nitpick, but you seem way too sure of what you're talking about.
And yes, I believe the original discussion centered on Linus's credentials as kernel author and made no claim that he wrote coreutils or anything else. Writing a functional coreutils isn't that amazing of an achievement, actually - take a look at BusyBox, a single binary that does all the useful coreutils plus (working imitations of) init, sh, insmod, ifconfig, dpkg, wget, etc., so that, "To create a working system, just add some device nodes in/dev, a few configuration files in/etc, and a Linux kernel." Notably, you need nothing from the GNU project, just the two binaries (Linux and busybox).
In modern society, we have a thing called "decency." Part of it is that we have enough self-respect so as not to debase ourselves with needless profanity. It's pretty much the same reason that we tend to use more formal language in formal writing - we similarly don't consider our everyday conversation so uncouth as to warrant whatever curses we can think of.
This, in turn, would mean, though, that all a potential virus writer has to do is to get his program to match the fed trojan in behaviour and shape, possibly in signature.
Er, what if AV programs are configured to ignore programs that connect to (and only connect to) cipav.fbi.gov or somesuch?:-)
Actually, I'd like to see the OS kernel consist entirely of only the scheduler and the thinnest APIs to secure drivers granting access to the HW. Everything else, including IPC, could be in userspace.
Go write it. It would be pretty cool if we had a new kernel that's Linux-compatible for userspace apps, but is designed as a microkernel.
Ah, of course, Daniel Brandt and Pierre Salinger, the most trusted names when it comes to Internet conspiracy theories. These two have never gotten their facts wrong.
From here you've both made a giant leap to assume that programs can't be described by an algorithm. You haven't understood that the difference between a "computation" and "reactive software" is actually a technical triviality that is easily overcome. Indeed it is so trivial that most languages simply ignore it and have stateful operations for input/output. Reactive programs are normally modelled as a sequence of algorithmic steps, everything that the program does apart from sending / receiving data is modelled by an algorithm.
Indeed. I wrote a program in Scheme the other day, and just because of that, you'd have trouble arguing it isn't algorithmically-based.
The program takes inputs by instant messages, and updates our ticket tracking software based on it. (There's a complicated story as to why I chose Scheme, but it involves a messaging library that generates S-expressions.) It's certainly "Reactive Software", or a "Universal Behavior Machine."
You can be great at IT without knowing math. You can probably even be a good programmer.
You cannot go anywhere in CS without knowing math, because (as the author himself admits) CS is merely a discipline of pure mathematics.
This is rather like saying "Forget math to be a great stockbroker." You can start a Fortune 500 company from the ground up without knowing a cosine from a cosecant, but D. E. Shaw will never hire you.
Slashdot Mirror
So, if you look at some of the factors that he claims "dirty" the data, one is that a lot of management/refactoring of code is done by Sun employees, and another is that a lot of outside contributors find it hard to get commit access and just leave patches in the bugtracker, which Sun employees pick up.
He claims this means that the graph — which shows Sun responsible for the vast majority of all the commits — is inaccurate.
I claim that if the project isn't getting external contributors, or not giving them the ability to get commit access, and it's basically being run by Sun internally, and he has to mention that people leave patches in the bugtracker, that itself is a sign that the project is profoundly sick, more so than any charts can so.
As further evidence that Sun isn't playing well with external contributors and the community, read the tale of the non-upstreamed Calc solver, which Meeks linked to.
This is not true at all. Sure, you can type stuff in, mark some stuff bold, spell check it, and print it out -- but there's no need for an office suite to do that, and if that's all you intend to do don't call yourself an office suite.
Here's something I ran into yesterday. There's a "Compare Documents" feature under the Edit menu. It doesn't compare the contents of tables. The bug reporting this was opened in July 2003, and nobody has seemed to care yet. In 2007, someone had a patch, which was committed and not added to the next release's codeline because "I don't think that this issue fulfills the criteria for 2.3.1". This may it was retargeted for 3.1 and rejected in November because There are too many open questions to finish in 3.1." People complained again in 2004 and 2008; I don't think you can say in good faith that "no one cares enough".
It occurs to me that your exact phrasing was "no one cares enough to add it", which is completely right. Nobody cares enough to develop OpenOffice.org to where it should be.
If you ask what more, are they not done, then I'll ask the same thing about the Linux kernel -- isn't it done? What benefit is there to running the latest 2.6.28 or whatever instead of 2.4, which worked fine for everyone a few years ago? But yet who in their right mind would (all other things being equal) set up a new system with 2.4 instead of some kernel released this year? And you'd laugh if I suggested the Linux 1.x tree, but that can open and close programs and files just as well as any other OS, can't it?
No fine-tuning user access, no support for external authentication
MediaWiki supports both of these. The first is the userrights array, which you can configure in LocalSettings.php, and groups configured in the usergroup table. The second is by subclassing AuthPlugin.php and telling it exactly what you want — autocreate local users? create remote users? fetch a password db or authenticate externally? replace the login and logout pages?
Most decent external authentication providers set REMOTE_USER, and meta has a plugin for autologin with REMOTE_USER.
not easy to add new markup
I haven't had a reason to try this, so I don't know. But you can make pseudomarkup really easily via the template feature, e.g., map {{{serif|foo}}} to <font face="my favorite serif font">foo</font>, or whatever. In fact, templates are how Wikipedia does their infoboxes (the tables on the right side of articles about prominent public figures or businesses or whatever).
I want distributed backups with several, for lack of a better word, working copies checked out on different machines.
Aha, now I figured out why we're all misunderstanding you. Those aren't backups. "Backups" to my ears means that you copy the entire contents of your disk or your Documents folder nightly onto tape or some other archival medium, so that in case of hardware failure you have something to restore from. Potentially you also keep prior versions around. The tapes are stored in a corner somewhere because they're never actually accessed except in an emergency, and they're destroyed after a few months.
What you want isn't backups, since it doesn't make sense for different people to share backups any more than it makes sense for different people to share a single networked hard disk or networked home directory. You just want a distributed file storage system, with automatic syncing / commits.
If you try to roll backup and distributed file-storage into the same application, you're not going to get anything useful. Aunt Sally is going to want every single file including her OS and her tax returns backed up, in case her hard drive dies, but only wants the photos -- and only some of the photos, actually -- to be visible to Grandma Suzie. If Suzie can see every file on Sally's computer, and the entire history of each file, she's not going to be able to browse the photos in a way that's at all intuitive.
And worse yet, if Sally wants to send out links to her photos to fifteen of her friends by e-mail, she needs some sort of interface to mark parts of her backup as world-readable but the rest (like her passwords and e-mail) not. If the network backup program even lets you do this, it won't give Sally a UI that she'll be able to figure out.
You can certainly get network backup services: Mozy was mentioned in an earlier comment.
If you rethink your requirements in terms of your goals, you'll probably find that both rolled into one isn't what you want, and not just because a product doesn't exist at the moment that does that — a product that does that can't possibly have a good UI. If they shouldn't notice or care about how backups are being made, how are they going to figure out how to share photos with each other?
You're asking two questions. The first is that you want backup, so that all their data just gets thrown somewhere and they lose the last few days' work their hard drive dies. You don't even necessarily want this on the network; just back up to a DVD-R every so often, and take every month's DVD-R offsite (a friend's house, a bank's vault, whatever). There's lots of backup software for this. Most can do fancy stuff like incremental backups. You can probably find something opensource you can host for your friends and family on a decently-available server.
The second question is networked file storage, where you don't care about automatically archiving files, but you do want frequent access and a good UI. For this I recommend something like Dropbox, which has good support for OS integration and a web interface.
Running Linux in a VM on Windows is good for things like security
For... security of your Windows machine? So that in case a virus attacks your Linux machine it won't get out? Uh...
Especially since one can get OO.org for Win, Firefox for win, Thunderbird for win, Gimp for win etc.
So by that logic, you should never need to switch from Windows to Linux, right?
To be semantic, every trivial piece of human knowledge includes the contents of my room at 2:47 AM. There's no real need for that information.
[...]Unless I can go to the library, grab the book and say "oh, wow, this is exactly like Wiki said it was! oh and look, hundreds of pages going into depth on the same topic! now I'm off to write a paper!", the information exists in a Schrodinger-like state of verifiable purgatory where citing it is a huge risk if I don't know anything about it in the first place.
Now here's the problem.... as the Economist mentions, one of the hard-to-reference things (in the US at least) is the biographies of Solidarity leaders who were not, oh, Lech Wasa. It's probably more verifiable that there was CLRS on my shelf and some pizza in my fridge at 2:47 AM, since I can take a picture of it (or may have blogged about it or whatever), than where Andrzej Gwiazda went to grade school. And it's thousands of times easier to get a picture of 150 (er, 250... er... almost 500, according to Wikipedia) Pokemon than of even 100 important political and social figures over the centuries that shaped modern Poland.
And to me at least, the development of modern Poland is way more important in an encyclopedia than Mudkip. So clearly immediate verifiability on its own can't be the criterion for inclusion. So do we keep Mudkip around, hoping that someone will get to Poland eventually? Remove both Mudkip and Gwiazda? Or can you convince me that I'm wrong, and that Mudkip's cited one-and-a-half paragraphs prove him more worthy for inclusion than Gwiazda's uncited one-and-a-half paragraphs?
There are a few exceptions -- you might be able to get away with something like Coda or AFS, though I don't know how well that scales to crappy bandwidth.
You realize that AFS was designed in the late 80s, when all bandwidth was crappy?
"DRM" is not the search term you want, though, and it is in fact not what you want for business documents. You just want to set up a public-key infrastructure (PKI) and make sure people protect their private keys. This can be done by OpenPGP, GnuPG, etc.
DRM makes it hard for people to leak a file. It does not spend very much effort, if any, on authenticating the initial owner of the file (for example, anyone who picks up a DVD can play it, although they can't copy it to a new DVD). In a business environment, you're usually far more worried about authenticating the file's recipient and making sure the original does not accidentally reach anyone else's computer, than about preventing a cooperative person from intentionally leaking the file. (In most cases, you do want to permit them to print, copy-and-paste, etc. the document. These would all be prevented by DRM because they all make it easy to leak the file.)
The other failing of DRM, as I'm sure you've seen discussed, is that it's crackable by mere cleverness. If you're going to permit someone to view a file on screen (or hear an audio clip over headphones), you can always take a screenshot (or recording) and leak that. HDCP and so forth make the screenshot harder, but nothing prevents you from pointing a camera at the TV. It will be low quality but it will be a leak. PKI, on the other hand, is only crackable by brute-force searches of the key space, or (unlikely though possible) sufficiently smart mathematicians.
But then, to be honest, I'd rather have no web browser bundled with a Windows install, thanks very much.
I don't know about you, but I'd much rather download Firefox by visiting getfirefox.com in IE than by typing HTTP commands into telnet getfirefox.com 80 > firefox.exe.
If the GUI is properly designed, the fonts will be large enough and the high pixel density will allow the fonts to be smoother.
Agreed. Despite owning a MacBook Pro with a decent-size screen, I've found myself reaching for this XO B4 to read documents / lengthy websites just because it's way easier on the eyes to read at 200 dpi. The web browser (Gecko-based) does the right thing with fixed-size elements, namely scales them up to 96 or so dpi. This makes math in Wikipedia articles look a bit odd. Other than that I haven't really noticed anything being small - well, other than the laptop itself.
There's no more hand crank.
It was right in the Firehose submission. I wonder how Zonk *intentionally* changed it to the wrong URL.
First and foremost that little Hitler Youth
who skipped out on their rallies and only joined because everyone was basically forced to
is evil because he still prohibits birth control. Ever poor family of 12 that loses kids to starvation or the side effects of malnutrition can look to the Pope for why they couldn't just have two kids that they were able to take care of.
No, they can look to their own genitals for that reason. I know plenty of families that don't use birth control and have a reasonable number of kids.
Then you can ask him why he thinks that paying taxes is actually contributing to the good of the common man?
Because the more that the rich ged rid of tax havens, the more money goes into governmental redistribution programs for the poor. Do you seriously think he's asking the poor to pay up their taxes?
Hasn't every war in history been started by either those-collecting-taxes or those-who-want-to-collect-taxes ?
Yeah, this sentence means nothing. The only forces capable of starting actual wars (not rebellions) are governments or proto-government-oids, which need taxes to survive. And to, uh, finance their war.
"Sadly, a kernel by itself gets you nowhere. To get a working system you need a shell, compilers, a library etc. These are separate parts and may be under a stricter (or even looser) copyright. Most of the tools used with linux are GNU software and are under the GNU copyleft. These tools aren't in the distribution - ask me (or GNU) for more info."
-Linus Torvalds, September 1991
He made the kernel, at the very least you generally need the GNU tool chain to have something usable, plus a couple of other little things.
/dev, a few configuration files in /etc, and a Linux kernel." Notably, you need nothing from the GNU project, just the two binaries (Linux and busybox).
The term "GNU toolchain" usually refers to their compiler stack (gcc, as, make, autoconf, etc.) rather than their regular userland tools, aka coreutils (ls, cp, du, stty, su, etc.), or other stuff that are more than just "little things", like init and sh. I usually wouldn't nitpick, but you seem way too sure of what you're talking about.
And yes, I believe the original discussion centered on Linus's credentials as kernel author and made no claim that he wrote coreutils or anything else. Writing a functional coreutils isn't that amazing of an achievement, actually - take a look at BusyBox, a single binary that does all the useful coreutils plus (working imitations of) init, sh, insmod, ifconfig, dpkg, wget, etc., so that, "To create a working system, just add some device nodes in
Friend, you have entirely too much time on your hands.
What did you think the Time Cube guy does with the other 3 parallel 24-hour days?
In modern society, we have a thing called "decency." Part of it is that we have enough self-respect so as not to debase ourselves with needless profanity. It's pretty much the same reason that we tend to use more formal language in formal writing - we similarly don't consider our everyday conversation so uncouth as to warrant whatever curses we can think of.
We choose not to profane our conversation.
Yet the surprising twist was that a whopping 63% of CS majors had participated in sex.
Wellesley is an all-girls school. Do you find that result more believable of the girls in your CS department?
This, in turn, would mean, though, that all a potential virus writer has to do is to get his program to match the fed trojan in behaviour and shape, possibly in signature.
:-)
Er, what if AV programs are configured to ignore programs that connect to (and only connect to) cipav.fbi.gov or somesuch?
Actually, I'd like to see the OS kernel consist entirely of only the scheduler and the thinnest APIs to secure drivers granting access to the HW. Everything else, including IPC, could be in userspace.
Go write it. It would be pretty cool if we had a new kernel that's Linux-compatible for userspace apps, but is designed as a microkernel.
Ah, of course, Daniel Brandt and Pierre Salinger, the most trusted names when it comes to Internet conspiracy theories. These two have never gotten their facts wrong.
Indeed. I wrote a program in Scheme the other day, and just because of that, you'd have trouble arguing it isn't algorithmically-based.
The program takes inputs by instant messages, and updates our ticket tracking software based on it. (There's a complicated story as to why I chose Scheme, but it involves a messaging library that generates S-expressions.) It's certainly "Reactive Software", or a "Universal Behavior Machine."
How do I reconcile the two?
You can be great at IT without knowing math. You can probably even be a good programmer.
You cannot go anywhere in CS without knowing math, because (as the author himself admits) CS is merely a discipline of pure mathematics.
This is rather like saying "Forget math to be a great stockbroker." You can start a Fortune 500 company from the ground up without knowing a cosine from a cosecant, but D. E. Shaw will never hire you.