That's better than my grandfather, who thinks OE is "the Internet", and thinks that his dial-up software is "starting the Internet", which can only be done through OE in his mind.
Once you "start the Internet", then you can move over to using "the Web", which is IE. He's very unsure what the connection is, but feels quite sure that you can't "use the Web" until after you've "started the Internet".
Yeah... except the company you're dealing with is Google. Evil or not, they make their money through their knack for storing and searching data. I bet they log everything and throw very little data away. Even if you don't have a use for it now, you might come up with something fun to do with it in the future.
contrary to some people's beliefs that an LCD is an LCD is an LCD.
Who thinks that? At the very least, it makes a huge difference whether you're going to the LCD through VGA or DVI. But of course there's also response time, contrast ratio, brightness, and the qualities of the surface (glossy or matte). That's not even getting into anything very technical.
Finally, someone talking some sense about economics. There's this great bit of mythology in the US that all economics are simple "supply and demand", and that "the market" will always magically make everything work well.
And then what I find most baffling is when those same people, when you complain that something costs too much, claim, "Well hey, it costs what it costs. I'm sure it takes that almost that much to manufacture, or why would they charge so much?"
Whatever sensory capacity aliens have may not actually consider it to be noise, to them, it may sound pleasant, the way the waves on a beach sound to us.
Everyone seems to want to ask, "what if it sounds good to aliens?" I guess that's kind of interesting and all, but I think the better question is, why would the aliens be listening? I'm just thinking that there are an awful lot of sources of EM radiation in the universe. If, among all those sources, they manage to detect these radio waves from Earth's atmosphere, why would they go pumping *that* into their stereo systems to listen to the sound?
I guess we're supposed to believe that they'd go through all that trouble just to listen to it, and hope that it might be musical. And when they're through, they'll hate us for not having a musical planet? It all sounds pretty absurd to me.
I don't know-- it depends on whether you consider writing shell scripts to be "programming".
I occasionally write bash scripts, HTML, CSS, a little javascript, etc. I don't consider myself a "programmer", and if someone asks if my job involves programming, I say "no".
Yeah, you could argue that those things are technically programming (I wouldn't say HTML/CSS are programming, though), but what I make are just hacked short-cuts for myself, often with some pieces copy/pasted from other scripts. It's really not worth considering to be "programming" any more than editing a conf file would be.
In every company I've worked at, from ones with thousands of employees, to ones with a dozen, we have learned that programmers make horrible sysadmins. I don't know if it's the training they receive, a personality thing, or what... So please don't do it!
I've noticed that too. My theory is that they're prone to have too much faith in computers (particularly software, especially their own software) doing what they're supposed to.
I've just heard too many times, "It shouldn't do that!" or "It's not supposed to do that!" You know, like I try running a piece of software and it crashes, and the developer/sysadmin's response is, "Well, that shouldn't happen." As though that's a solution or explanation, that knowing it's not supposed to be crashing will somehow stop it from happening.
I mean, no duh. Of course it's not *supposed to* crash. But it's crashing. I don't care if you track down the problem or perform voodoo to make it stop crashing, but your job is to make things work. And then when I fix it for the developer/sysadmin, he angrily tells me, "Well I don't know why that fixed it. That doesn't make any sense."
It seems to be a little-known or rarely-accepted fact among people with too much computer education that computers sometimes do whacky things and have unexplained errors. Especially computers running Windows. IMO, when it's your job to make things run well, it's less important to know how things are supposed to work, and more important to know the ways in which they tend not to work the way they're supposed to, and what to do when one of those things starts happening. Sometimes the results seem nonsensical. Oh well. Until we actually get commodity computers running as reliably as theory dictates they should, knowing the nonsensical voodoo that makes things work is the job of people who offer support.
I finished with the degree, and I've spent much of my college career working a job doing technical support (fixing laptops, troubleshooting Windows problems, etc). What jobs can I get with a computer science degree that are NOT mainly programming jobs?
Well if you want to keep doing troubleshooting work, the obvious answer would to be to get some kind of helpdesk position. The good news there is that they can't really outsource that very well, so if you live someplace with lots of businesses, someone will need good helpdesk personnel.
The not-so-great news is that you probably could have done that without your degree. Lots of people hiring for helpdesk will put more stress on experience than education/certification, and rightly so. It's not rocket science, but it's important that you know the pitfalls of that sort of work.
The bad news is the pay is generally crappy, and half your job will be non-technical customer support skills. In other words, people will treat you like crap and part of your job will be to take it with a smile. This isn't unusual for jobs, though, when you're just starting out.
Back to the good news, though-- it's not necessarily a dead-end job. It can be, but I know people (myself included) who started out as a peon helpdesk tech and worked up to the executive level. If you pay attention to the business needs of your company, and apply your troubleshooting skills there (and not just in technical matters), you can make yourself pretty valuable.
On the other hand, you could just take what you know and go into something completely unrelated. You don't *have to* work in a field related to your major. Either way, keep in mind that when you're starting off, your first job probably won't be glamourous. That's ok. Take what opportunities you have available to you, make the best of them, and maybe they'll lead somewhere.
I've read stories (here on Slashdot) where black hats have admitted that social engineering is one of their most successful methods of "hacking". Why bother with a brute force or even a dictionary attack? You can just ask the user for their password and they'll give it to you.
When you think about it, phishing is just another form of social engineering.
There may be technological protection to try to prevent these things, but the best protection will always be procedural. Unfortunately, no one wants to follow procedures because it's bothersome, inconvenient, and sometimes expensive.
I'm afraid these security holes will always exist, except maybe in places where procedures are strictly enforced. Still, it only takes one lax personality in the right place, and all your other security measures won't protect you.
Frames, for example, cause similar problems, and JavaScript too (not just Ajax).
I'm sorry, I know I already replied to this, but I think there's a somewhat important point that I was implying by talking about "sensible" use of Javascript/Ajax, and it might warrant being spelled out.
First of all, you should just be careful about how you're using javascript, so as not to obscure any important data. If you're making an Ajax web application, then you probably provide your own search function, and provide perma-links so search engines can link directly to content (if that's appropriate). But you should also just be careful about what's being hidden/obscured.
But beyond that, you should also be making sure that your stuff degrades gracefully. You can write a javascript menu such that, if you disable javascript, you're still given an acceptable HTML menu system. And you can do that without writing separate code.
Can you do that in Flash? I suppose you could do something where the page detects whether you're using Flash, and if not, swaps out an HTML version. But then you have to remake and maintain your entire flash site in HTML anyway.
Let me know if you disagree or have alternate solutions, but because of reasons like this, I don't see Flash as an acceptable solution for making websites.
Absolutely. The web would not be where it is today if it required that you purchase expensive proprietary software to make a page. The fact that HTML is viewable in any text editor, and can be edited (and even made compliant) by anyone with half a brain is responsible for the massive amount of content that we have available.
And ultimately, HTML+CSS is a pretty good solution for static text/image representation. Some of the shortcomings (e.g. limited a font selection, image borders) are already being addressed in the current browser war.
So the "jumble" comes from the dynamic "web 2.0" sorts of things, and it comes from using HTML/CSS plus a client-end language plus a server-side language. Even that's being worked on, and it seems likely to me that a lot more work could be done. But the important thing is that it's standardized and open.
If Adobe wants to try to push Flash to be more than a niche product for games, they should turn the whole thing over to a standards body (W3C?) and let it be managed like other standards. But honestly, I'm not sure what the point of that would be. The only good uses of Flash that I've seen are games and embedded video, and really video embedding should be improved in HTML such that Flash players are irrelevant anyway.
Yeah, I know you said, "Nuff said", and honestly what you said was enough. I'm just piling on.
nine-times was specifically talking about options available to developers.
Actually, what I had in mind when I wrote it was this: Even if Google (or some other search engine) can index the Flash file, what do they link to? Does it just link to the Flash file, and then I have to go clicking around to navigate the Flash file looking for the text relevant to my search? Or will Google be able to link straight to the portion that I was searching for?
AFAIK, it's not so simple to link into the Flash file, but correct me if I'm wrong.
And yes, I'm sure I could have stated it better, but I was trying to be glib.
That's usually true, but like you say, there are exceptions, and it's not just the ones you mention. Frames, for example, cause similar problems, and JavaScript too (not just Ajax).
Yeah, personally I'm not such a big fan of frames either. And I do think people should be careful about their use of Javascript (and AJAX) to make sure it's used sensibly.
Now all they have to do is make it so, when you make a web site in Flash, you can link directly to the "page" you want. And make the Flash plugin fast. And make it not crash so often. Oh and then, finally, come up with a real reason as to why we should use Flash instead of something else.
Once they do that, it'll be a great little format.
AC didn't say that his manager was Ballmer. He referenced "management", which implies the company-wide management of the company.
And yes, I would assume that the upper-management of the company is important. They often do help set a tone for the culture of the company in general, but also the poster seemed concerned with "where the company is going", and upper management sure has something to do with that.
At Microsoft, everything is pretty much run by Marketing.
This is just a minor quibble over word choice, but you may be underestimating the worth of "marketing". There's more to marketing than market-speak. I *wish* Microsoft's product development was driven more by marketing, because that would imply that their product development was market-driven.
Because product development is part of marketing. Marketing involves analyzing your customers' needs (or your perspective customers' needs) and developing a product that provides for those needs. It'd be great if Microsoft was actually engaging in such a practice.
Yes, I've seen their ads, and I would say that their advertising is aimed at both the tech-savvy and the non-tech-savvy. Their ads hype the reliability and security of Apple products, and take some digs at Microsoft that tech-savvy people might appreciate. But there's nothing in particular in their ads that give the impression that their products are specifically for those who aren't tech-savvy.
Beyond that, marketing isn't just advertising. Marketing includes the creation of a product for a target market. It's clear that Apple is, in fact, marketing to Unix geeks and even business IT departments if you look at their products and designs. They've recently been making improvements to their server software to compete better with Exchange, their OS makes for dead-simple imaging, and Apple Remote Desktop is an incredible tool for someone managing a large number of Macs.
Apple kind of stopped marketing to know-nothings close to a decade ago.
Yeah, I think we (by "we" I mean "people on Slashdot") have talked about this sort of thing before, except in a theoretical sense. The example I remember from the time was something like the following.
Imagine you had a very big file being shared through bittorrent, supposing it was something valid (like multiple DVD ISO files for Linux distributions). Now suppose someone found that they could recombine some subset of those blocks in a different order, and get some kind of a copyrighted file. Could the copyright holder sue someone for copyright infringement for sharing those blocks of data online (by participating in the torrent)? Or would they have to try to sue the person who published an altered tracker, allowing that copyrighted file to be pulled out, even though the tracker was not itself copyrighted material?
I don't think all of this is simply an attempt at legal hand-waving. It seems to me it's a general problem with copyright in the digital/internet age. Of course, the given example is far fetched, but apparently not all that far-fetched if someone is making a distributed filesystem that works that way.
Customer service is a service, and it's part of a larger package. Apple has its own business plan. They do not market towards the tech savvy
You should tell that to Apple's customers, many of whom are very tech savvy, and buy Apple laptops because they're (at least one of) the best integrated solution for getting Unix on a laptop.
Wouldn't it still be news if all it's saying is "this is now possible on an iPhone too"?
Oh, wait, I get it. You're one of those people who get angry that everyone else is interested in the iPhone, right? Oh, yeah, then I mean... Let's all hate big bad Apple and their horrible habit of making products that people are interested in. It's all their fault that nobody is impressed with my OpenMoko, which causes me to have an inferiority complex.
Is there really anything wrong with the Windows kernel? I mean, if Microsoft improved the shell, cleared out some of the cruft, and implemented standard file formats, protocols, etc. Wouldn't it at least be relatively decent?
Lots of what people complain about are GUI problems, bundled applications, copy protection, and a failure to support standards. Not to downplay those complaints, but those aren't really an issue of the technical capabilities of the kernel itself.
Blindingly trusting technology or discarding it altogether is unreasonable.
I disagree. Since this is a game, it seems to me the most important thing is that the rules are applied consistently and impartially. Accuracy may be the goal of making the rules, but once the rules are set, I'm much more concerned about the consistency and impartiality.
They played tennis for quite a long time without the technology, and so it's evident that discarding it altogether wouldn't be so bad. Accuracy isn't really the issue. You could decide all disputes with the roll of a 12-sided die, and it would still be fine, in the sense that it would become part of the game and players could adjust their strategies accordingly. As long as it was consistent, it would be fair.
So the only question in my mind is, is the Hawkeye inaccurate in a way that would cause players to use strategies that would be bad for the game. For example, if it were truly random, then players might start appealing every call. If they have nothing to lose and a random chance at success, then why not?
But the use of the Hawkeye system doesn't seem to have any effect like that on the game, so I don't see what the problem is with trusting it blindly. Even if it makes occasional bad calls, they don't seem to be any worse than the call a ref would make. If anything, in those instances, it might even be better for a machine to make an arbitrary bad call, because at least you know the machine won't favor a particular player.
Slashdot Mirror
That's better than my grandfather, who thinks OE is "the Internet", and thinks that his dial-up software is "starting the Internet", which can only be done through OE in his mind.
Once you "start the Internet", then you can move over to using "the Web", which is IE. He's very unsure what the connection is, but feels quite sure that you can't "use the Web" until after you've "started the Internet".
I don't agree. I am a moron who cannot get anything ok-sounding to come out of an electric guitar.
I wasn't arguing with you. I just wasn't aware that it was opinion anyone was taking seriously.
Yeah... except the company you're dealing with is Google. Evil or not, they make their money through their knack for storing and searching data. I bet they log everything and throw very little data away. Even if you don't have a use for it now, you might come up with something fun to do with it in the future.
contrary to some people's beliefs that an LCD is an LCD is an LCD.
Who thinks that? At the very least, it makes a huge difference whether you're going to the LCD through VGA or DVI. But of course there's also response time, contrast ratio, brightness, and the qualities of the surface (glossy or matte). That's not even getting into anything very technical.
Aren't any policies or laws only as good as the people enforcing them?
Finally, someone talking some sense about economics. There's this great bit of mythology in the US that all economics are simple "supply and demand", and that "the market" will always magically make everything work well.
And then what I find most baffling is when those same people, when you complain that something costs too much, claim, "Well hey, it costs what it costs. I'm sure it takes that almost that much to manufacture, or why would they charge so much?"
Whatever sensory capacity aliens have may not actually consider it to be noise, to them, it may sound pleasant, the way the waves on a beach sound to us.
Everyone seems to want to ask, "what if it sounds good to aliens?" I guess that's kind of interesting and all, but I think the better question is, why would the aliens be listening? I'm just thinking that there are an awful lot of sources of EM radiation in the universe. If, among all those sources, they manage to detect these radio waves from Earth's atmosphere, why would they go pumping *that* into their stereo systems to listen to the sound?
I guess we're supposed to believe that they'd go through all that trouble just to listen to it, and hope that it might be musical. And when they're through, they'll hate us for not having a musical planet? It all sounds pretty absurd to me.
I don't know-- it depends on whether you consider writing shell scripts to be "programming".
I occasionally write bash scripts, HTML, CSS, a little javascript, etc. I don't consider myself a "programmer", and if someone asks if my job involves programming, I say "no".
Yeah, you could argue that those things are technically programming (I wouldn't say HTML/CSS are programming, though), but what I make are just hacked short-cuts for myself, often with some pieces copy/pasted from other scripts. It's really not worth considering to be "programming" any more than editing a conf file would be.
In every company I've worked at, from ones with thousands of employees, to ones with a dozen, we have learned that programmers make horrible sysadmins. I don't know if it's the training they receive, a personality thing, or what... So please don't do it!
I've noticed that too. My theory is that they're prone to have too much faith in computers (particularly software, especially their own software) doing what they're supposed to.
I've just heard too many times, "It shouldn't do that!" or "It's not supposed to do that!" You know, like I try running a piece of software and it crashes, and the developer/sysadmin's response is, "Well, that shouldn't happen." As though that's a solution or explanation, that knowing it's not supposed to be crashing will somehow stop it from happening.
I mean, no duh. Of course it's not *supposed to* crash. But it's crashing. I don't care if you track down the problem or perform voodoo to make it stop crashing, but your job is to make things work. And then when I fix it for the developer/sysadmin, he angrily tells me, "Well I don't know why that fixed it. That doesn't make any sense."
It seems to be a little-known or rarely-accepted fact among people with too much computer education that computers sometimes do whacky things and have unexplained errors. Especially computers running Windows. IMO, when it's your job to make things run well, it's less important to know how things are supposed to work, and more important to know the ways in which they tend not to work the way they're supposed to, and what to do when one of those things starts happening. Sometimes the results seem nonsensical. Oh well. Until we actually get commodity computers running as reliably as theory dictates they should, knowing the nonsensical voodoo that makes things work is the job of people who offer support.
I finished with the degree, and I've spent much of my college career working a job doing technical support (fixing laptops, troubleshooting Windows problems, etc). What jobs can I get with a computer science degree that are NOT mainly programming jobs?
Well if you want to keep doing troubleshooting work, the obvious answer would to be to get some kind of helpdesk position. The good news there is that they can't really outsource that very well, so if you live someplace with lots of businesses, someone will need good helpdesk personnel.
The not-so-great news is that you probably could have done that without your degree. Lots of people hiring for helpdesk will put more stress on experience than education/certification, and rightly so. It's not rocket science, but it's important that you know the pitfalls of that sort of work.
The bad news is the pay is generally crappy, and half your job will be non-technical customer support skills. In other words, people will treat you like crap and part of your job will be to take it with a smile. This isn't unusual for jobs, though, when you're just starting out.
Back to the good news, though-- it's not necessarily a dead-end job. It can be, but I know people (myself included) who started out as a peon helpdesk tech and worked up to the executive level. If you pay attention to the business needs of your company, and apply your troubleshooting skills there (and not just in technical matters), you can make yourself pretty valuable.
On the other hand, you could just take what you know and go into something completely unrelated. You don't *have to* work in a field related to your major. Either way, keep in mind that when you're starting off, your first job probably won't be glamourous. That's ok. Take what opportunities you have available to you, make the best of them, and maybe they'll lead somewhere.
I've read stories (here on Slashdot) where black hats have admitted that social engineering is one of their most successful methods of "hacking". Why bother with a brute force or even a dictionary attack? You can just ask the user for their password and they'll give it to you.
When you think about it, phishing is just another form of social engineering.
There may be technological protection to try to prevent these things, but the best protection will always be procedural. Unfortunately, no one wants to follow procedures because it's bothersome, inconvenient, and sometimes expensive.
I'm afraid these security holes will always exist, except maybe in places where procedures are strictly enforced. Still, it only takes one lax personality in the right place, and all your other security measures won't protect you.
Frames, for example, cause similar problems, and JavaScript too (not just Ajax).
I'm sorry, I know I already replied to this, but I think there's a somewhat important point that I was implying by talking about "sensible" use of Javascript/Ajax, and it might warrant being spelled out.
First of all, you should just be careful about how you're using javascript, so as not to obscure any important data. If you're making an Ajax web application, then you probably provide your own search function, and provide perma-links so search engines can link directly to content (if that's appropriate). But you should also just be careful about what's being hidden/obscured.
But beyond that, you should also be making sure that your stuff degrades gracefully. You can write a javascript menu such that, if you disable javascript, you're still given an acceptable HTML menu system. And you can do that without writing separate code.
Can you do that in Flash? I suppose you could do something where the page detects whether you're using Flash, and if not, swaps out an HTML version. But then you have to remake and maintain your entire flash site in HTML anyway.
Let me know if you disagree or have alternate solutions, but because of reasons like this, I don't see Flash as an acceptable solution for making websites.
Absolutely. The web would not be where it is today if it required that you purchase expensive proprietary software to make a page. The fact that HTML is viewable in any text editor, and can be edited (and even made compliant) by anyone with half a brain is responsible for the massive amount of content that we have available.
And ultimately, HTML+CSS is a pretty good solution for static text/image representation. Some of the shortcomings (e.g. limited a font selection, image borders) are already being addressed in the current browser war.
So the "jumble" comes from the dynamic "web 2.0" sorts of things, and it comes from using HTML/CSS plus a client-end language plus a server-side language. Even that's being worked on, and it seems likely to me that a lot more work could be done. But the important thing is that it's standardized and open.
If Adobe wants to try to push Flash to be more than a niche product for games, they should turn the whole thing over to a standards body (W3C?) and let it be managed like other standards. But honestly, I'm not sure what the point of that would be. The only good uses of Flash that I've seen are games and embedded video, and really video embedding should be improved in HTML such that Flash players are irrelevant anyway.
Yeah, I know you said, "Nuff said", and honestly what you said was enough. I'm just piling on.
nine-times was specifically talking about options available to developers.
Actually, what I had in mind when I wrote it was this: Even if Google (or some other search engine) can index the Flash file, what do they link to? Does it just link to the Flash file, and then I have to go clicking around to navigate the Flash file looking for the text relevant to my search? Or will Google be able to link straight to the portion that I was searching for?
AFAIK, it's not so simple to link into the Flash file, but correct me if I'm wrong.
And yes, I'm sure I could have stated it better, but I was trying to be glib.
That's usually true, but like you say, there are exceptions, and it's not just the ones you mention. Frames, for example, cause similar problems, and JavaScript too (not just Ajax).
Yeah, personally I'm not such a big fan of frames either. And I do think people should be careful about their use of Javascript (and AJAX) to make sure it's used sensibly.
Now all they have to do is make it so, when you make a web site in Flash, you can link directly to the "page" you want. And make the Flash plugin fast. And make it not crash so often. Oh and then, finally, come up with a real reason as to why we should use Flash instead of something else.
Once they do that, it'll be a great little format.
Why is he referencing Ballmer directly after management?
The second definition of management on answers.com: The person or persons who control or direct a business or other enterprise.
So when he says "in terms of management", he's saying, "in terms of who's running the company". Hence, Ballmer.
AC didn't say that his manager was Ballmer. He referenced "management", which implies the company-wide management of the company.
And yes, I would assume that the upper-management of the company is important. They often do help set a tone for the culture of the company in general, but also the poster seemed concerned with "where the company is going", and upper management sure has something to do with that.
At Microsoft, everything is pretty much run by Marketing.
This is just a minor quibble over word choice, but you may be underestimating the worth of "marketing". There's more to marketing than market-speak. I *wish* Microsoft's product development was driven more by marketing, because that would imply that their product development was market-driven.
Because product development is part of marketing. Marketing involves analyzing your customers' needs (or your perspective customers' needs) and developing a product that provides for those needs. It'd be great if Microsoft was actually engaging in such a practice.
Yes, I've seen their ads, and I would say that their advertising is aimed at both the tech-savvy and the non-tech-savvy. Their ads hype the reliability and security of Apple products, and take some digs at Microsoft that tech-savvy people might appreciate. But there's nothing in particular in their ads that give the impression that their products are specifically for those who aren't tech-savvy.
Beyond that, marketing isn't just advertising. Marketing includes the creation of a product for a target market. It's clear that Apple is, in fact, marketing to Unix geeks and even business IT departments if you look at their products and designs. They've recently been making improvements to their server software to compete better with Exchange, their OS makes for dead-simple imaging, and Apple Remote Desktop is an incredible tool for someone managing a large number of Macs.
Apple kind of stopped marketing to know-nothings close to a decade ago.
Yeah, I think we (by "we" I mean "people on Slashdot") have talked about this sort of thing before, except in a theoretical sense. The example I remember from the time was something like the following.
Imagine you had a very big file being shared through bittorrent, supposing it was something valid (like multiple DVD ISO files for Linux distributions). Now suppose someone found that they could recombine some subset of those blocks in a different order, and get some kind of a copyrighted file. Could the copyright holder sue someone for copyright infringement for sharing those blocks of data online (by participating in the torrent)? Or would they have to try to sue the person who published an altered tracker, allowing that copyrighted file to be pulled out, even though the tracker was not itself copyrighted material?
I don't think all of this is simply an attempt at legal hand-waving. It seems to me it's a general problem with copyright in the digital/internet age. Of course, the given example is far fetched, but apparently not all that far-fetched if someone is making a distributed filesystem that works that way.
Customer service is a service, and it's part of a larger package. Apple has its own business plan. They do not market towards the tech savvy
You should tell that to Apple's customers, many of whom are very tech savvy, and buy Apple laptops because they're (at least one of) the best integrated solution for getting Unix on a laptop.
Wouldn't it still be news if all it's saying is "this is now possible on an iPhone too"?
Oh, wait, I get it. You're one of those people who get angry that everyone else is interested in the iPhone, right? Oh, yeah, then I mean... Let's all hate big bad Apple and their horrible habit of making products that people are interested in. It's all their fault that nobody is impressed with my OpenMoko, which causes me to have an inferiority complex.
We cool?
Is there really anything wrong with the Windows kernel? I mean, if Microsoft improved the shell, cleared out some of the cruft, and implemented standard file formats, protocols, etc. Wouldn't it at least be relatively decent?
Lots of what people complain about are GUI problems, bundled applications, copy protection, and a failure to support standards. Not to downplay those complaints, but those aren't really an issue of the technical capabilities of the kernel itself.
Blindingly trusting technology or discarding it altogether is unreasonable.
I disagree. Since this is a game, it seems to me the most important thing is that the rules are applied consistently and impartially. Accuracy may be the goal of making the rules, but once the rules are set, I'm much more concerned about the consistency and impartiality.
They played tennis for quite a long time without the technology, and so it's evident that discarding it altogether wouldn't be so bad. Accuracy isn't really the issue. You could decide all disputes with the roll of a 12-sided die, and it would still be fine, in the sense that it would become part of the game and players could adjust their strategies accordingly. As long as it was consistent, it would be fair.
So the only question in my mind is, is the Hawkeye inaccurate in a way that would cause players to use strategies that would be bad for the game. For example, if it were truly random, then players might start appealing every call. If they have nothing to lose and a random chance at success, then why not?
But the use of the Hawkeye system doesn't seem to have any effect like that on the game, so I don't see what the problem is with trusting it blindly. Even if it makes occasional bad calls, they don't seem to be any worse than the call a ref would make. If anything, in those instances, it might even be better for a machine to make an arbitrary bad call, because at least you know the machine won't favor a particular player.