What you're not taking into account is what was available when Netscape 3.x and 4.x were around. What you're doing is almost like as comparing Doom to Half-Life 2. The notion of pumping ads constantly into your browser, spamming your cache full of garbage, back then, was widely seen as a "good idea". There were a lot of ideas like that during the late 90's.
Lynx was the free browser alternative of choice right up until Opera came out, but back then, either your browser was bloated, broken, didn't render html right, would get regularly rejected by security schemes, and it would inundate you with ads until you paid for the ad-free version. I recall switching browsers frequently due to one stupid problem or another...and generally ended up sucking it up and dealing with Netscape's bloat instead of IE's incredible insecurity or having to use two browsers just to do anything.
In that kind of landscape, bloated wasn't so bad. I think we all remember all this, but maybe not. I am noticing a lot of folks getting modded a 5 for stuff like the parent post.
There's more prior art than that. A whole freaking lot more. I've personally interviewed and worked with several companies that have practically patented almost the exact same concept. Using a mobile device to buy stuff wirelessly is a concept that has been around for many years. There are patents all over the place in regards to this idea, and the biggest problem is actually implementing something without tripping one of them off. You need to do such and such for security scheme x, but that's already patented by so and so...etc.
It's a bloody mess, so Mac fans...don't get your hopes up. I know a lot of you are suddenly all pumped about this smartphone revolution that has been around a lot longer than your iPhone...but this particular market is a minefield. Wonder why you haven't seen much out of Palm lately? Everywhere you turn, there's another freaking patent in your face and another guy or corporation who is sitting on it looking to make his quick fortune. That is why REAL innovation is slowing down so much in the mobile market. Either you innovate and risk the lawsuits, or you try and work around the patents, and you never get anything done.
And if you don't like it, then get up and do something about the US patent system.
It's not fascism, it's basic human survival. What's that? You don't believe in global warming? Well, I personally don't feel comfortable betting my progeny's survival on your beliefs. Sorry bout that, but I don't know you and probably disagree with you anyway.
Anyway, folks have frequently banned outdated, wasteful technologies in the past in the name of the greater good. The incandescent light is definitely one of those. With it's pathetically short lifespan, it's extremely wasteful use of power, and it's propensity to burst when flicked with a little cold water, it's a horrible light source. It's more of a heat source than a light source. It's like repurposing a space heater as a light bulb. This was all so GE could make huge bank selling lots and lots of them back in the day because they burn out so fast. "See, look how fast it turns on! And such warm light!". Incandescents are originally a lowtech scam that is contributing to abuse of the power grid and potentially the degradation of the quality of our planet. Fluorescents and LEDs are far better and get the job done fine. Been using them for years, and I wouldn't even be tempted to go back. When I replaced all my incandescents with them, my power bill very noticeably dropped.
Is the officer defending his guy for "just doing his job" to abuse privately owned and operated websites and spread misinformation. His job? I'm sorry, but spreading (mis)information is what the whole.gov domain was created for. There's no need to deface private websites and spam comments pages...and be paid to do it with our tax dollars. You do that, you deserve what's coming to you and it should be the military's duty to make sure they aren't assigning soldiers to such incredibly wasteful activities.
As a mobile developer, your comment is hilarious. I'd mod it +5 funny, but few non-mobile software developers would get the joke. "Will be great"?
EVERYONE says that about their new upcoming mobile OS. Then it gets released, and we discover something seriously flawed about it. No APIs for custom hardware. Difficult path for porting pre-existing applications from other platforms over to it. Poor performance. Security flaws. Vendor lock-in. Insufficient API. Nonstandard. If you've ever seriously written an enterprise mobile app, you'd have a clue about this already. You frequently have to work with very custom hardware and software solutions, requiring a very major amount of flexibility and language/API maturity. So, if Google does it, that means everyone will just drop everything they're doing and furiously work to be compatible with it? Ha. Everyone will rewrite their application that their customers have been using for years because Google made a mobile OS? Nope...every company I've worked for in the past couple years decided when getting me to work on their project that Windows Mobile "might be worth investing the time into". It takes a heck of a long time to catch on, and an even longer time to get companies to devote resources into developing for it. If you aren't following an open standard with plenty of information readily available, it takes even longer.
That's most likely the road that Android is going to take. Just because Google is behind it doesn't mean that it will be used by anyone. Lots of Google's side projects end up by the wayside. And just because it comes from Google doesn't mean it'll be "great", either. Maybe Android will end up on Blackberries in a couple years or so.
For people to realize the obvious...that public databases like this are really only the equivalent of making people who have committed various crimes wear "Scarlet Letters" on their clothing as they did in the colonial era. Back then, if a woman was an adulterer, someone in the village would see her letter and attack her.
Not all people are rational or intelligent enough to sensibly deal with the concept of a scumbag living in their community. But that is the inherit assumption that these databases make. These databases exist so that parents can tell their kids to avoid certain areas and people...but that doesn't mean that the molester won't get up in disguise, go into a different neighborhood, and pretend to be someone else to trick a kid into coming with them. The real reason that these databases get so much support is because parents don't want to have to be accountable for where their kids go and what they do. They don't want to have to drive them too and from school, or drive them to their friends' houses. These parents want to do their own thing and they want something easy to reference, instead of being responsible and protecting their kids. These databases are also highly indiscriminate as well...there are cases of 19 year old kids getting put in these systems because they had sex with their 17 year old girlfriends and their parents found out and had the kid arrested. That kid would now technically be a sex offender for probably the rest of his life. It just then takes one paranoid parent who finds out that a "sex offender" lives in his neighborhood, and then goes after him. Or bosses that find out and just can him on the spot (and while that's a violation of labor law, we all know how creative employers can get at working the system).
These public sex offender database systems just lead to more trouble than they're worth. Parents should just be held accountable for not taking better care of their kids and protecting them from screwups. Hardcore sex offenders should be stuck in mental asylums and kept there. The rest should just be monitored privately by the police.
A standard is just a standard, not a mandate or rule or regulation. There's no mandate for developers to follow the standard, except for the number of customers they'll piss off by not making their sites completely standardized for all browsers to be able to access and handle content. Pissing off the customers is the risk you take when you decide you're better off doing things YOUR way instead of following standards. That's your damage control problem, buddy!
It's hilarious how stupid some people are that didn't get the joke at all. Man, modding this as a troll makes it a pain for all of us who had to click the parent link to read it. Jerks.
Here's a hint for those of you whom are comically impaired: Heresy sounds like...Horsey
Fry's: Where you always know you can find the most substandard of substandard computer and consumer products!
The trick with Fry's, for those who don't know, is that the good quality stuff is priced roughly the same as any Best Buy/CompUSA/Staples/etc., but the absolutely crappy imported stuff makes it all seem cheaper. It's like WalMart like that.
In simpler terms, every geek can relate to being blamed for the incompetence of their manager. It's Dilbert 101...guys who can't use computers hear a couple things, some ideas start firing in their brains, then when they abuse the tech and it doesn't work the way they envision it, they blame the geeks.
Any operating system that quietly has a downgrade-to- previous-edition option introduced for PC makers deserves to be classed as terrible technology.
Will they look at that and realize the reason, or will they just not include the ability to roll back next time? Or will they look at it, knowing full well why they allow rolling back, but then the beancounters just refuse to put the rollback option in fearing that it would "engender a sense of insecurity" in its purchasers? From what we've seen from Microsoft over the years, that level of stupidity almost has to be expected. In any case, it doesn't bother me any if Microsoft wants to keep shooting themselves in the feet until they can no longer walk, I develop for a lot more than one OS. But for the sake of just plain common sense...
Ummmm, the kids don't really have a choice about which one they get. They are ordered by the kids' respective governments.
Actually, it's more of a matter of committee. The government doesn't kick in your door and say "You WILL use the XO/Classmate/whatever or we will CUT you!" Well, maybe some governments. But those are governments where these laptops aren't going to EVER get down to poor kids.
The way it really works is that some committee either works the numbers, and says "we can get 100,000 XO's, and 45,000 Classmates" and at this point, either Microsoft/Intel reps show up and offer to pay off the difference, and either the committee takes them up on their offer or they don't.
See, things ain't run by the government anymore, unless you live in a dictatorship. They're run by money.
FTA: "a few lines of code could outthink your average testosterone challenged, uncivil Netizen"
Do they really mean that people that lack testosterone are uncivil? I mean, emoting does get pretty out of hand sometimes, but I'm sure anyone would agree that "testosterone fueled" angry posting is a bigger problem than being "testosterone challenged".
You do realize, that if people didn't keep signing these things, they wouldn't keep foisting them on us. As long as people think it's better to turn over their own individual rights than lose their jobs, then there isn't going to be any future for any of us in our own career beyond being canned in 10 years for a college grad with "fresher" knowledge.
The people who run these businesses hire technically skilled, creative folks because they can't do it all on their own and they know it.
Or at least, an industry standard to be able to totally disable both in the bios or via jumper.
I've got a Tyan Tomcat board where my rev 1.0 board had no jumper to disable the onboard graphics card. Which happens to be a dirty piece of junk ATI Rage card. Apparently the rev 1.1 DID have that jumper, but when we started to get all these nice little UI enhancements for Linux and I bought a new nVidia graphics card to take advantage of all that stuff, I couldn't. Of course, by then, the board was out of warranty and even when it was in warranty, they probably wouldn't have taken it back.
Because by trying to be backwards compatible, and they'll have to be backwards compatible no matter who wins the pissing match, it's just inevitably going to lead to more browser bloat.
Hilarious. When you install Divx, don't you ever have to go through a couple screens first? I recall going through an installer. Now some codecs just get automatically installed in some players, but some don't and don't install things for you. Codec packs also use an installer, as they just bundle several codecs together and install them for your players that don't install them automatically when needed.
If the steps were 1. Touch both hands to the top of your head, 2. Jump up and down, 3. Make noises like a monkey, and 4. Have your best friend click the button "Install Virus"...then yes, that would take an idiot to go through that. However, most software out there has an installer. In fact, most companies take the time to develop installers because they make them feel like their software is more professional and legit.
You "should" be able to sync your dad's Palm with it using jpilot, unless the OS doesn't support it. I don't know anything about this customized Ubuntu gOS build, however. I normally use gnome-pilot or kpilot, depending on the desktop manager. I don't know offhand what Enlightenment uses for sure other than jpilot.
As for the powerpoint deal, you're out of luck unless you can make them use that Google Preso thing, unless you can get them to learn to use OpenOffice Impress. Then again, there's a lot of learning and configuration in order to save a couple hundred bucks, and even then, I'm highly suspicious of how up to date this gOS deal is. If they've been wanking around with the usb settings, then it could end up costing you more time just getting your Palm to sync than it would be just to get a cheap Dell or something.
Considering what a pain it is these days just to get your foot in the door in this industry, who'd blame them? The new fad is to work for a company, located in India, that is accepting contracts from countries in the US. By the time the cash gets down to the actual developer, it's not even enough to skate by on. You literally have to latch on as an indentured slave, and there's only so many deferments one can take on student loans before you HAVE to start paying them back.
When I got into this field, half of the kids getting jobs were geeky high school grads that were getting their college degrees paid for by dot coms. Nowadays, most adequate paying contracts, let alone salaried positions, require a lot of experience doing very specialized things. And by and large, they don't count "playing around with a few things" at home "experience".
For me to achieve a degree of success in this industry, I had to take a salary that caused me to go into debt out of college, then I had to go through some pretty demeaning stuff...plenty of trips to the employment department...early on during the dot com bust. I didn't start making a good salary until I was almost 30. Contrast that with the legal or medical professions, and it's not a tough decision to make for a kid getting out of high school. You can do all the technical stuff you want as a hobby, but as a career, it's just not what it used to be.
Ha! I recall sending an HR person my resume in.rtf after I put it together in OO.o a few years back. He actually didn't even try to open it, he just replied to my email demanding it in Microsoft.doc format. Some folks probably use some sort of intranet/sharepoint/garbage to file resumes in some agencies that require MS doc format. As I've never worked for a headhunter agency, I'd have no idea though, so it's just an assumption (though I think the HR guy was blabbering about something like that).
Is mindblowing to the average person. This is the sort of paper that really needs to be distributed as much as possible (but rewritten to be understandable to the layman), because there really needs to be a great deal of political support for such an exemption from the patent process here. The biggest problem is that the software industry has already defined a piece of software as a patentable product, similar to a car or a monitor, and the general populace believes that to be true. However, you don't make a new car by tearing out the carburetor of a 1995 Ford, clean it up, add a couple parts from a 2002 Chevy to it, and stick it into your new car. However, that is precisely how software is generally made. There's your layman's explanation right there.
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What you're not taking into account is what was available when Netscape 3.x and 4.x were around. What you're doing is almost like as comparing Doom to Half-Life 2. The notion of pumping ads constantly into your browser, spamming your cache full of garbage, back then, was widely seen as a "good idea". There were a lot of ideas like that during the late 90's.
Lynx was the free browser alternative of choice right up until Opera came out, but back then, either your browser was bloated, broken, didn't render html right, would get regularly rejected by security schemes, and it would inundate you with ads until you paid for the ad-free version. I recall switching browsers frequently due to one stupid problem or another...and generally ended up sucking it up and dealing with Netscape's bloat instead of IE's incredible insecurity or having to use two browsers just to do anything.
In that kind of landscape, bloated wasn't so bad. I think we all remember all this, but maybe not. I am noticing a lot of folks getting modded a 5 for stuff like the parent post.
There's more prior art than that. A whole freaking lot more. I've personally interviewed and worked with several companies that have practically patented almost the exact same concept. Using a mobile device to buy stuff wirelessly is a concept that has been around for many years. There are patents all over the place in regards to this idea, and the biggest problem is actually implementing something without tripping one of them off. You need to do such and such for security scheme x, but that's already patented by so and so...etc.
It's a bloody mess, so Mac fans...don't get your hopes up. I know a lot of you are suddenly all pumped about this smartphone revolution that has been around a lot longer than your iPhone...but this particular market is a minefield. Wonder why you haven't seen much out of Palm lately? Everywhere you turn, there's another freaking patent in your face and another guy or corporation who is sitting on it looking to make his quick fortune. That is why REAL innovation is slowing down so much in the mobile market. Either you innovate and risk the lawsuits, or you try and work around the patents, and you never get anything done.
And if you don't like it, then get up and do something about the US patent system.
It's not fascism, it's basic human survival. What's that? You don't believe in global warming? Well, I personally don't feel comfortable betting my progeny's survival on your beliefs. Sorry bout that, but I don't know you and probably disagree with you anyway. Anyway, folks have frequently banned outdated, wasteful technologies in the past in the name of the greater good. The incandescent light is definitely one of those. With it's pathetically short lifespan, it's extremely wasteful use of power, and it's propensity to burst when flicked with a little cold water, it's a horrible light source. It's more of a heat source than a light source. It's like repurposing a space heater as a light bulb. This was all so GE could make huge bank selling lots and lots of them back in the day because they burn out so fast. "See, look how fast it turns on! And such warm light!". Incandescents are originally a lowtech scam that is contributing to abuse of the power grid and potentially the degradation of the quality of our planet. Fluorescents and LEDs are far better and get the job done fine. Been using them for years, and I wouldn't even be tempted to go back. When I replaced all my incandescents with them, my power bill very noticeably dropped.
Is the officer defending his guy for "just doing his job" to abuse privately owned and operated websites and spread misinformation. His job? I'm sorry, but spreading (mis)information is what the whole .gov domain was created for. There's no need to deface private websites and spam comments pages...and be paid to do it with our tax dollars. You do that, you deserve what's coming to you and it should be the military's duty to make sure they aren't assigning soldiers to such incredibly wasteful activities.
As a mobile developer, your comment is hilarious. I'd mod it +5 funny, but few non-mobile software developers would get the joke. "Will be great"?
EVERYONE says that about their new upcoming mobile OS. Then it gets released, and we discover something seriously flawed about it. No APIs for custom hardware. Difficult path for porting pre-existing applications from other platforms over to it. Poor performance. Security flaws. Vendor lock-in. Insufficient API. Nonstandard. If you've ever seriously written an enterprise mobile app, you'd have a clue about this already. You frequently have to work with very custom hardware and software solutions, requiring a very major amount of flexibility and language/API maturity. So, if Google does it, that means everyone will just drop everything they're doing and furiously work to be compatible with it? Ha. Everyone will rewrite their application that their customers have been using for years because Google made a mobile OS? Nope...every company I've worked for in the past couple years decided when getting me to work on their project that Windows Mobile "might be worth investing the time into". It takes a heck of a long time to catch on, and an even longer time to get companies to devote resources into developing for it. If you aren't following an open standard with plenty of information readily available, it takes even longer.
That's most likely the road that Android is going to take. Just because Google is behind it doesn't mean that it will be used by anyone. Lots of Google's side projects end up by the wayside. And just because it comes from Google doesn't mean it'll be "great", either. Maybe Android will end up on Blackberries in a couple years or so.
For people to realize the obvious...that public databases like this are really only the equivalent of making people who have committed various crimes wear "Scarlet Letters" on their clothing as they did in the colonial era. Back then, if a woman was an adulterer, someone in the village would see her letter and attack her. Not all people are rational or intelligent enough to sensibly deal with the concept of a scumbag living in their community. But that is the inherit assumption that these databases make. These databases exist so that parents can tell their kids to avoid certain areas and people...but that doesn't mean that the molester won't get up in disguise, go into a different neighborhood, and pretend to be someone else to trick a kid into coming with them. The real reason that these databases get so much support is because parents don't want to have to be accountable for where their kids go and what they do. They don't want to have to drive them too and from school, or drive them to their friends' houses. These parents want to do their own thing and they want something easy to reference, instead of being responsible and protecting their kids. These databases are also highly indiscriminate as well...there are cases of 19 year old kids getting put in these systems because they had sex with their 17 year old girlfriends and their parents found out and had the kid arrested. That kid would now technically be a sex offender for probably the rest of his life. It just then takes one paranoid parent who finds out that a "sex offender" lives in his neighborhood, and then goes after him. Or bosses that find out and just can him on the spot (and while that's a violation of labor law, we all know how creative employers can get at working the system). These public sex offender database systems just lead to more trouble than they're worth. Parents should just be held accountable for not taking better care of their kids and protecting them from screwups. Hardcore sex offenders should be stuck in mental asylums and kept there. The rest should just be monitored privately by the police.
A standard is just a standard, not a mandate or rule or regulation. There's no mandate for developers to follow the standard, except for the number of customers they'll piss off by not making their sites completely standardized for all browsers to be able to access and handle content. Pissing off the customers is the risk you take when you decide you're better off doing things YOUR way instead of following standards. That's your damage control problem, buddy!
It's hilarious how stupid some people are that didn't get the joke at all. Man, modding this as a troll makes it a pain for all of us who had to click the parent link to read it. Jerks.
Here's a hint for those of you whom are comically impaired:
Heresy sounds like...Horsey
Fry's: Where you always know you can find the most substandard of substandard computer and consumer products!
The trick with Fry's, for those who don't know, is that the good quality stuff is priced roughly the same as any Best Buy/CompUSA/Staples/etc., but the absolutely crappy imported stuff makes it all seem cheaper. It's like WalMart like that.
In simpler terms, every geek can relate to being blamed for the incompetence of their manager. It's Dilbert 101...guys who can't use computers hear a couple things, some ideas start firing in their brains, then when they abuse the tech and it doesn't work the way they envision it, they blame the geeks.
Will they look at that and realize the reason, or will they just not include the ability to roll back next time? Or will they look at it, knowing full well why they allow rolling back, but then the beancounters just refuse to put the rollback option in fearing that it would "engender a sense of insecurity" in its purchasers? From what we've seen from Microsoft over the years, that level of stupidity almost has to be expected. In any case, it doesn't bother me any if Microsoft wants to keep shooting themselves in the feet until they can no longer walk, I develop for a lot more than one OS. But for the sake of just plain common sense...
Actually, it's more of a matter of committee. The government doesn't kick in your door and say "You WILL use the XO/Classmate/whatever or we will CUT you!" Well, maybe some governments. But those are governments where these laptops aren't going to EVER get down to poor kids.
The way it really works is that some committee either works the numbers, and says "we can get 100,000 XO's, and 45,000 Classmates" and at this point, either Microsoft/Intel reps show up and offer to pay off the difference, and either the committee takes them up on their offer or they don't.
See, things ain't run by the government anymore, unless you live in a dictatorship. They're run by money.
FTA: "a few lines of code could outthink your average testosterone challenged, uncivil Netizen" Do they really mean that people that lack testosterone are uncivil? I mean, emoting does get pretty out of hand sometimes, but I'm sure anyone would agree that "testosterone fueled" angry posting is a bigger problem than being "testosterone challenged".
You do realize, that if people didn't keep signing these things, they wouldn't keep foisting them on us. As long as people think it's better to turn over their own individual rights than lose their jobs, then there isn't going to be any future for any of us in our own career beyond being canned in 10 years for a college grad with "fresher" knowledge.
The people who run these businesses hire technically skilled, creative folks because they can't do it all on their own and they know it.
I'll join! Do I get a share of the kickback payment?
.txt as the new standard document format for everyone to use. My slogan is "It just works."
Or at least, an industry standard to be able to totally disable both in the bios or via jumper.
I've got a Tyan Tomcat board where my rev 1.0 board had no jumper to disable the onboard graphics card. Which happens to be a dirty piece of junk ATI Rage card. Apparently the rev 1.1 DID have that jumper, but when we started to get all these nice little UI enhancements for Linux and I bought a new nVidia graphics card to take advantage of all that stuff, I couldn't. Of course, by then, the board was out of warranty and even when it was in warranty, they probably wouldn't have taken it back.
Because by trying to be backwards compatible, and they'll have to be backwards compatible no matter who wins the pissing match, it's just inevitably going to lead to more browser bloat.
Hilarious. When you install Divx, don't you ever have to go through a couple screens first? I recall going through an installer. Now some codecs just get automatically installed in some players, but some don't and don't install things for you. Codec packs also use an installer, as they just bundle several codecs together and install them for your players that don't install them automatically when needed. If the steps were 1. Touch both hands to the top of your head, 2. Jump up and down, 3. Make noises like a monkey, and 4. Have your best friend click the button "Install Virus"...then yes, that would take an idiot to go through that. However, most software out there has an installer. In fact, most companies take the time to develop installers because they make them feel like their software is more professional and legit.
You "should" be able to sync your dad's Palm with it using jpilot, unless the OS doesn't support it. I don't know anything about this customized Ubuntu gOS build, however. I normally use gnome-pilot or kpilot, depending on the desktop manager. I don't know offhand what Enlightenment uses for sure other than jpilot.
As for the powerpoint deal, you're out of luck unless you can make them use that Google Preso thing, unless you can get them to learn to use OpenOffice Impress. Then again, there's a lot of learning and configuration in order to save a couple hundred bucks, and even then, I'm highly suspicious of how up to date this gOS deal is. If they've been wanking around with the usb settings, then it could end up costing you more time just getting your Palm to sync than it would be just to get a cheap Dell or something.
From Fallout. I don't want my handheld to mop the floor with me at chess!
Could be a result of less entry level salaries among the workforce. I know when I broke into the industry, I made probably 1/3rd of what I make today.
Considering what a pain it is these days just to get your foot in the door in this industry, who'd blame them? The new fad is to work for a company, located in India, that is accepting contracts from countries in the US. By the time the cash gets down to the actual developer, it's not even enough to skate by on. You literally have to latch on as an indentured slave, and there's only so many deferments one can take on student loans before you HAVE to start paying them back.
When I got into this field, half of the kids getting jobs were geeky high school grads that were getting their college degrees paid for by dot coms. Nowadays, most adequate paying contracts, let alone salaried positions, require a lot of experience doing very specialized things. And by and large, they don't count "playing around with a few things" at home "experience".
For me to achieve a degree of success in this industry, I had to take a salary that caused me to go into debt out of college, then I had to go through some pretty demeaning stuff...plenty of trips to the employment department...early on during the dot com bust. I didn't start making a good salary until I was almost 30. Contrast that with the legal or medical professions, and it's not a tough decision to make for a kid getting out of high school. You can do all the technical stuff you want as a hobby, but as a career, it's just not what it used to be.
Ha! I recall sending an HR person my resume in .rtf after I put it together in OO.o a few years back. He actually didn't even try to open it, he just replied to my email demanding it in Microsoft .doc format. Some folks probably use some sort of intranet/sharepoint/garbage to file resumes in some agencies that require MS doc format. As I've never worked for a headhunter agency, I'd have no idea though, so it's just an assumption (though I think the HR guy was blabbering about something like that).
Is mindblowing to the average person. This is the sort of paper that really needs to be distributed as much as possible (but rewritten to be understandable to the layman), because there really needs to be a great deal of political support for such an exemption from the patent process here. The biggest problem is that the software industry has already defined a piece of software as a patentable product, similar to a car or a monitor, and the general populace believes that to be true. However, you don't make a new car by tearing out the carburetor of a 1995 Ford, clean it up, add a couple parts from a 2002 Chevy to it, and stick it into your new car. However, that is precisely how software is generally made. There's your layman's explanation right there.