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Slashback: Centrinissimo, Damages, Software 190

Posted by timothy from the what-state-is-this-again dept.
Slashback with more on open code in government, Intel's new low-power mobile chips, the nature of the engineers, craftsmen or whatchamacallims who spend their days forging software, the CD price-fixing settlement, and more -- read on for the details.

Formalization schmormalization. kaisyain's review today of Software Craftsmanship raised a spirited conversation about the nature of software, software engineering, and related disciplines. cconnell conveniently submits a great companion piece: "I wrote this article a couple years ago but it has continued to get good readership within the software engineering community. Should provoke some interesting discussion..."

The bleeding edge costs money. JeffyVernon writes with an followup to CNET's early review of Centrino laptops: "AnandTech published two articles on Centrino today, an overview of the CPU architecture (including some interesting history behind the chip) and a roundup of four notebooks including the new Dell that wasn't in CNet's roundup. It looks like the 4.9lbs IBM T40p ended up winning the roundup, it lasted over 6 hours on battery!"

What scarcity was this exactly? RadBlock writes "Lawrence Lessig is addressing the issue of radio spectrum on CIO Insight... something that was talked about on Slashdot the other day. Lessig states that the spectrum has been defined too generally as if there can only be one message per frequency, when better equipment will vastly increase the amount of 'spectrum' that is usable."

I like that phrase "general welfare." We've mentioned eGovOS several times before -- now, here's a last-minute announcement that may be of interest: free registration is still open for next week's (March 17-19) eGovOS conference in Washington D.C., "Open Standards/Open Source for National and Local eGovernment Programs in the U.S. and EU." Perhaps some folks there ought to consider the question eugene ts wong raised the other day, namely, Which North American government offices won't move to Linux? Someone needs to set up a big map with different colored countries and states!

Who's laughing and where is his bank? deelowe writes "From ars. Back in September we reported on a class action suit leveled at a number of Music industry players that accused them of anti-competitive price-fixing. Back in January, we reported that victims of said price fixing could hit this website and sign up (too late now), and eventually receive up to $20 in the settlement, provided of course that you had actually purchased a CD between January 1 1995 and December 22, 2000. 3.5 million Americans made their way to the on-line form, and it appears that victims will receive $12.60 apiece, should a judge approve it."

They still have a while to go ... sp1nl0ck writes CNet News.com.com.com are reporting that The Neo Project guys have restarted the attempt to crack the 2048-bit XBox key following advice from their lawyers. CNet are citing a link to Operation Project X, but it was a bit temperamental in loading earlier. Maybe it's been CNetted..."

I'll still think of it as the GIMP for a few years ;) Agermain writes "CinePaint has just released its first Windows build. From their website: "CinePaint is an open source painting program used by motion picture studios to retouch images in 35mm films. It was formerly called Film Gimp. It has been used in a dozen feature films including Harry Potter, Scooby-Doo, and the Fast & the Furious... This first Windows beta release is mainly intended for developers and testers.""
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Slashback: Centrinissimo, Damages, Software More

Slashback: Centrinissimo, Damages, Software

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  • How will you spend your settlement money? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Metallic Matty ( 579124 ) on Thursday March 13, 2003 @08:03PM (#5507865)
    I fully intend to reinvest that 12.60 back into my music collection =)

    Although; thats probably what they want you to do..

  • $12.60! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 13, 2003 @08:07PM (#5507895)
    That's not even enough to buy some new CD's!

  • ya the victims (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 13, 2003 @08:08PM (#5507901)
    The victims will receive $12.60 each.

    The lawyers will receive $20 million each.

    There's no justice like american justice!

    Ya baby!

  • What to do with the $12.60 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by The Bungi ( 221687 ) <thebungi@gmail.com> on Thursday March 13, 2003 @08:09PM (#5507906) Homepage
    Donate it to the guy that runs Kazaa Lite.

  • Operation Project X (Score:5, Informative)

    by kiwirob ( 588600 ) on Thursday March 13, 2003 @08:11PM (#5507919) Homepage
    Operation Project X is a project to run linux on the x-box. But to run the client to crack the code you have to be running windows!!! Where the hell is my linux hack the evil empire client??

  • $12.60 for your Opt-In (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ziggr ( 312280 ) on Thursday March 13, 2003 @08:12PM (#5507932) Homepage
    Sounds like a bargain! In exchange for a paltry $50M, they now have a confirmed list of 3.5 million music consumers, their names, email and physical addresses, birth dates, and last 4 digits of their social security numbers. I wonder how much they'll be recoup by reselling that list, or just using it themselves.

    As much as I wanted to see the RIAA's wrists slapped for being naughty, it felt like *I* was going to be the one to suffer if I filled out that form.

    • Re:$12.60 for your Opt-In (Score:5, Informative)

      by SirSlud ( 67381 ) on Thursday March 13, 2003 @08:23PM (#5508004) Homepage
      The kind of list you're charging them with suddenly being able to use to advertise, which even then is a pretty glib assumption, is not worth 50 million dollars.

      Email lists with 3.5 million opt-in targetted blue-chip collected address would costa tiny fraction of that money. The idea that 50 million dollars is a good price for that tiny amount of contacts, even if you *were* allowed to suddenly spam them, is insane. That kind of price would get you absolutely laughed out of any online advertising campaign sales meeting.

      Take off the tinfoil, buddy!
      • The idea that 50 million dollars is a good price...

        Indeed. Besides, the music industry is too busy corrupting the FCC to suppress Reed's revolutionary radio ideas. They can't be bothered spamming people.
      • Email lists with 3.5 million opt-in targetted blue-chip collected address would costa tiny fraction of that money.

        ...sigh... Two things in response:

        1. These aren't only email addresses, now, are they?
        2. This is their fricking *PUNISHMENT* for price-fixing. Geeze, I mean, if I were to be *punished* for something by paying money to get a large saleable list of music customers...
      • The real question isn't: "Is that list worth $50 Million to the RIAA?" but "Is having my name on that list worth $12.60 to me?"

        My answer was no.
    • What makes you think anybody in the music industry has that list?

      If you were as observant as you were mindlessly paranoid, you would have noticed that the website wasn't run by anybody even close to the music industry.
      • The music industry will get the list of names, addresses, etc, of the people involved in the class action suit.

        $50M is a lot for the list, but still, it is a list of music buyers. They may not recoup all of their money, but you can bet they'll try.
        • Unless anybody can prove that when you sign up, you are giving these companies permission to use that information for the purposes of advertising, its silly to speculate that they will do anything with a list of people who signed up.

          I mean, think about it .. do they really want the names of 3.5 million customers who are nitpicky enough about their money, or anti-riaa enough, or smart & engaged enough to proactively sign up to get a maximum of 20 back?

          This sounds like the list of people they *dont* wan

  • $12.60 (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 13, 2003 @08:13PM (#5507935)
    Great! I can finally afford to buy a CD now!

    Oh wait, I'm still a bit short, aren't I?

  • My $12.60 (Score:4, Funny)

    by dacarr ( 562277 ) on Thursday March 13, 2003 @08:15PM (#5507954) Homepage Journal
    Oh boy! Now I can buy socks!

  • pcmag has another review ... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by porky_pig_jr ( 129948 ) on Thursday March 13, 2003 @08:18PM (#5507967)
    pcmag has another review, this includes Dell and Acer. Dell D600 is recommended choice (performance/price balance). An interesting detail is that Dell did not use MS 802.11 component but something else, and they have achieved the best results in 'wireless' part of the test. Seems like the wireless part of Centrino is mediocre or worse.
    • I can't recall ever reading a review in PCMAG that didn't pick a Dell product as the recommended choice. I bet they hate it when they review items that Dell doesn't make so they actually have to make an informed decision. Unlike this wonderfully impartial site which is always fair and balanced when it comes to comparing products and services. Ehrm...sorry.
    • The fact is for 802.11b the Centrino part sucks, its behind Atheros and Proxim which are pretty cruddy. If you want a really good 802.11b card get a Cisco 350 card, by far the best range and highest noise ceiling of any of the 11b products, but they do cost more =)
  • This has been going on, there is just room for improvement. Back in the late '70's, my father was into radio-controlled airplanes and had a nice set-up. He got out of that hobby after a few years and the plane and controller went up in the attic. Ten years later, I thought I might try my hand at it, and he gave me his old stuff. I found out that while I could still use the model plane, I had to replace the controller and servos. They were too old and used to much of the spectrum. In the intervening years, more efficient equipment replaced the stuff my dad used. The old stuff used too much of the spectrum and interfered with other planes and other RF uses.

    • Re:Improved equipment == improved use of spectrum (Score:4, Informative)

      by Tailhook ( 98486 ) on Thursday March 13, 2003 @09:08PM (#5508229)
      This model aircraft spectrum change was motivated by two things. Get more channels so that more models could be flow simultaneously and improve standards in transmitters and receivers to reduce interference. If I remember correctly, they basically doubled the number of channels by creating a new channel between the existing channels. The standards for performance of the transmitters and receivers was toughened up quite a bit.

      Contemporary model aircraft radios are pretty sophisticated. High end radios use digital protocols over the air. Error correction, etc. I've been away from it for about 10 years. Anyone know if spread spectrum is in common (or any) use yet for model aircraft? Seems to me that would go a long way toward preventing unintended landings. I don't remember any provision for it in the new frequency allocations. Too bad I guess.

  • Nice one (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 13, 2003 @08:19PM (#5507979)
    CNet are citing a link to Operation Project X [operationprojectx.com], but it was a bit temperamental in loading earlier. Maybe it's been CNetted...
    So you decided to submit it to Slashdot?

    Wow.

  • Centrinissimo, Damages, Software (Score:5, Funny)

    by kEnder242 ( 262421 ) on Thursday March 13, 2003 @08:22PM (#5507993)
    Did anyone read that as "Centrinissimo damages software."?

    I know the crusoe mangles assebly a bit but...

  • No $12.60 for me (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Powercntrl ( 458442 ) on Thursday March 13, 2003 @08:22PM (#5507995) Homepage
    With all the, ahem, interesting stuff I have downloaded off P2P, I think it's best to keep my mouth shut.

    Sure they have been price fixing, but I haven't been playing fair either. I call it even.

  • Centrino is way overrated (Score:5, Informative)

    by dracvl ( 541254 ) on Thursday March 13, 2003 @08:26PM (#5508022) Homepage
    It looks like the 4.9lbs IBM T40p ended up winning the roundup, it lasted over 6 hours on battery!

    I get 7 hours out of my widescreen Fujitsu P2120 sporting a Crusoe 933MHz, and it's 3.4lbs and half the price. If you're interested in more, here's the specs [fujitsupc.com].

    I'm not affiliated with Fujitsu, I just can't praise this laptop enough ;)

    You should have 20/20 vision though, at 1280x768 in 10.4" widescreen, the pixels are small. But with sub-pixel rendering, the fonts are a visual orgasm for typography nerds like myself ;)

    • One less hour of battery life, but the Pentium-M is faster than an equally-clocked Pentium 4. The Crusoe would be a fraction the speed of the Pentium 4 yet that only buys you an extra hour of use. I think Transmeta is in _big_ trouble unless they've got something better up their sleeve.
    • What you say is true. But it is not fair to compare a P4 to a Crusoe. That's like comparing a Corvette and a Cavalier. You're talking pears vs. banana's!

    • Re:Centrino is way overrated (Score:5, Funny)

      by Tackhead ( 54550 ) on Thursday March 13, 2003 @08:51PM (#5508136)
      > I get 7 hours out of my widescreen Fujitsu P2120 sporting a Crusoe 933MHz, and it's 3.4lbs and half the price. If you're interested in more, here's the specs [fujitsupc.com].

      Yes, which is cool for ultra light/thin. But if you're going for a desktop replacement, getting 6 hours out of a 14-15 inch screen and the gaming performance of a 2.0 P4, r0x0rz.

      But the marketing... Gack. Disgusting. I gotta rant.

      "Centrino". A Pentium-M (and 855PM chipset) and an Intel WLAN card.

      So lemme get these three CPUs straight...

      Pentium-III-M: That icky old Pentium 3, yuk, you don't want a Pentium 3! That's old!

      Pentium-4-M: That awesome new Pentium 4, but mobile! That's new!

      Pentium-M: We spent millions to train people that "Pentium 4" was the hot new thing... And see, "Pentium III", that must suck, because "3" is less than "4". So what do we call our newest, bestest, fastest mobile chip? You know, the one that so handily beats a P4 on an IPC basis that at 1.6 GHz, it beats a 2.4 GHz Pentium-4-M? The one with the huge-azz 1M cache, and the 5-6 hour battery life? Well, we decided we should call that CPU the "Pentium-M"! You know, so it sounds like the mobile version of the 133 MHz thing you had back in 1995 or so!

      All this so that the consumer will ask for a "Centrino" instead of "the laptop with that newer, faster P3 that had the 1M cache, 400 MHz FSB, and P4's branch prediction unit, and insanely low power consumption" -- so that manufacturers, in order to say "Centrino! Comin' right up!" will sell them a laptop with an Intel WLAN card as opposed to any other manufacturer's WLAN card.

      (No Intel WLAN card? Sorry, not a cool fast buzzword-compliant Centrino! Icky slow Pentium-M that doesn't even have a "3" or "4" after it!)

      I want one of these things, awright, but I want it for the (Banias / Pentium-M) CPU and battery life. I don't give a rat's ass who makes the frickin' WLAN card! So if you also don't give a rat's ass about who makes the WLAN card, remember that "Pentium-M" is just as good as a "Centrino".

      In addition to (possibly) saving you a few bucks, there's the added benefit that with a non-Intel WLAN card, your laptop won't be branded with a logo that looks like it came off a box of tampons.

    • The P2120 is available from Emperor Linux [emperorlinux.com] with Linux preinstalled for $1950.00. (No, I don't work for them.)

  • WTF is a Latitude 8200? (Score:5, Informative)

    by McSpew ( 316871 ) on Thursday March 13, 2003 @08:34PM (#5508064)

    The AnandTech review [anandtech.com] made numerous comparisons between the Dell Latitude D800 and the Dell "Latitude 8200." There is no such product. I suspect the comparisons were to the Inspiron 8200, which is not being replaced by the Latitude D800. Ultimately, the Latitude D800 will replace the Latitude C8xx series, but the two products will coexist for a while, because a lot of companies (mine included) own a lot of Latitude Cxxx hardware for which all the docking stations, batteries and CD-ROM/CD-RW/DVD-ROM drives are interchangeable.

    In the meantime, the Dell Centrino-based product most comparable to the Inspiron 8200 is the Inspiron 600m [dell.com].

  • Is anyone else concerned that, since MS *knows* the Xbox key, they could poision the search by submitting work units for that key that are forged (and show a negative when infact it should be positive)?

    • Re:Xbox Concern? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SymLink-Dyn ( 122202 ) on Thursday March 13, 2003 @08:52PM (#5508151)
      Good lord. We're supposed to be geeks here, right? Let's do the math on this.

      The Xbox uses a keyspace of 2^2048. So far, the project has manage to do a little over 17 billion keys, call it 2^34 keys. That means, they have managed to test roughly fuck all. If Microsoft sent a negative result back for the actual key, the chances are higher that a couple of inopportune cosmic rays would change the result to positive, than they are that these guys are going to test even 3*(fuck all), before people figure out that the method is hopeless. Vague mumblings on their site about "a chaos thing" does not make brute force search in that sort of keyspace any less hopeless.

      You can make $10,000 by solving a problem that's 1/(2^1472) as difficult by cracking RSA-576. Why are we paying attention to these guys?
      • believe it or not, I realized that ... Its kind of like the movie Dumb and Dumber where jim carey asks this woman "honestly, what are my chances?" she replies, "1 in a million." and he says "So you're saying I have a chance!!"

        What I was trying to convey was that, with a trivial ammount of work MS could make *sure* the search would fail. Would probably take less then a week for a couple of their programmers to analyze the source and complete the job.

        • "What I was trying to convey was that, with a trivial ammount of work MS could make *sure* the search would fail. Would probably take less then a week for a couple of their programmers to analyze the source and complete the job.

          Yes, but it's too likely that knowledge of their tampering would leak. After that, it would be known that the key resides in the relatively small amount of space that's been checked. It would be trivial to go through it again using trusted systems and find the key that MS so gra

        • That is what they are counting on... the whole effort is a giant ruse to get Microsoft to send them the real key! Much easier than the brute force approach.
      • Let's see, a little math:
        2^2048 is about 3.23 x 10^616
        They've tried about 17 billion keys, which is approximately none of that.
        There are, as a higher estimate, 10^81 atoms in the universe.
        If they tried 10 trillion keys a day, it would take them only 8.85 x 10^597 years.
        There becomes a point where hope should be considered idiocricy.
    • I am now!
  • Project founder Mike Curry said in an e-mail interview (...) "We will not actually break any laws until we crack the code," he said.

    (rofl)

    I hope these were not his exact words, because it's an "intention" of breaking the law, plain and simple.

    The problem with this distributed project is that both Microsoft and Mod Chips manufacturers/resellers are going to be against them. And that was not the case for SETI.
    (oh.. wait.. yes it was... (insert link to favorite alien race that does not want to be discovered))

  • Cameltino alert (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Has anyone noticed that the Centrino logo bears a striking resemblance [cpbotha.net] to the Cameltoe logo?

  • frequency reuse (Score:5, Informative)

    by throwaway18 ( 521472 ) on Thursday March 13, 2003 @08:42PM (#5508100) Journal
    >as if there can only be one message per frequency

    There are already systems allowing radio users such as taxi's and security guards to use the same frequencys.

    The same frequency is often allocated to firms in geographically seperate locations. A system called CTCSS [udel.edu] is used so that even if a signal from the base transmitter of a building reaches the walkie talkie of a security guard miles away it dosn't come out of the speaker. CTCSS sends a low frequency tone along with the voice, the receivers only turn on the audio output when the correct tone is detected.

    Security guards don't talk on their radio all the time and the wanted signal are usually closer and stronger so it works well.

    Digital trunked radio systems, similar to cellular phone systems are also gaining ground.

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday March 13, 2003 @08:59PM (#5508185)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • ...Read the title as "Centrinissimo Damages Software"?

  • Remember those old "100x compression" claims? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Christopher Thomas ( 11717 ) on Thursday March 13, 2003 @09:33PM (#5508355)
    When the world of personal computing was young, and new compression utilities seemed to be coming out every week, every so often you'd hear someone claim that they'd achived the holy grail - written a compression program that could compress its own output, or compress arbitrary files 100x, or perform some other impossibility. Wise people didn't believe them, because information theory strongly limits your ability to compress arbitrary data.

    In recent years, we've started hearing similar claims about the spectrum. Remember when impulse-based signal transmission was going to give us limitless bandwidth? This is more of the same.

    First, I'll explain the limits to transmission bandwidth. Then, I'll explain how Mr. Lessig is planning to get around them. Finally, I'll explain why it doesn't work.

    The spectrum, at the location of any given broadcast transmitter or broadcast receiver, is limited. The bandwidth - range of frequencies - available is fundamentally limited by the receiver's sampling rate (or frequency cutoff, for analog signals). There is no way to get around this, short of using more of the spectrum (by having a higher frequency cutoff). In the past, it was difficult to access even this much, due to the nature of the electronics used (response wasn't perfect, filtering wasn't perfect), but modern electronics are much better (as Mr. Lessig points out in his radio airplane example). The bandwidth limit, however, remains.

    The amount of information you can transmit within a given region of the spectrum doesn't depend solely on the bandwidth - it depends on both the bandwidth and the fidelity of your sampling within the band of interest (how many levels you can decode without noise if you're quantizing, or what your signal-to-noise ratio is if you're using a fully analog system or a digital system with very high fidelity). The number of bits of information you can stuff into a spectrum region per second is the log to the base 2 of the number of levels you can reliably distinguish from each other.

    This limit applies to any limited-bandwidth signal, regardless of the encoding scheme used. Use spread-spectrum transmission to smear a narrow-band signal over a wider region of the spectrum, and the limit just tells you how many signals you can broadcast this way before the noise floor swamps all signals. The mention of spread-spectrum transmission in the article is a red herring - it doesn't gain you data capacity (it's used for other reasons).

    If your system is purely a broadcasting one - sending in all directions, receiving in all directions, no wormholes or relays - this is the best you can do.

    You can improve the situation somewhat by trying to beamcast messages instead of broadcasting them. However, this still has problems. Firstly, your "beam" is really a cone. Secondly, your transmitter/receiver is larger, as you need a dish or a carefully shaped antenna or a large array of antennas and some signal processing to get direction-selectivity. Both are caused by diffraction limits related to the wavelengths of the signals being used - a fundamental process that can't be avoided. Thus, while it's used for transmitters (take a look at a cell tower some time), it's not practical for receivers. Either way, you end up with a fixed, finite gain in capacity, as the narrowness of a transmitter's beam can't be made smaller than a certain amount without requiring an extremely large transmitter.

    So what about the idea of having short-range transmitters/receivers, and relaying between them? Well, this works to some extent. However, you must have a non-broadcast backbone. Solely relying on the short-range units for signal relaying bogs down very quickly. Consider an area with transceivers uniformly distributed in it, with source and destination points for any given communication chosen at random. Draw a line through the middle of the region. With N transceivers, the number of signals crossing the boundary goes up as O(N), but the number of nodes on the boundary that can do

  • Pentium-M (Score:3, Interesting)

    by afidel ( 530433 ) on Thursday March 13, 2003 @09:36PM (#5508372)
    This chip should be used in blade servers. Better performance at 1.6Ghz then the desktop 2.66Ghz P4 and thermal energy output of only 24.5W. It's a natural for blade servers. Compared to the Pentium 3 cpu's commonly found in blade servers today it's fast and produces less heat, so the only barrier would be cost, but whole laptops built around this don't cost much more than a blade server so it should be doable.

  • EFF-it (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mlknowle ( 175506 ) on Thursday March 13, 2003 @10:06PM (#5508489) Homepage Journal
    Here's my suggestions:

    everyone who receives their $12 check DONATE IT to the EFF right away - what a great gesture, and what a great fundraising opportunity.

  • I know I'll regret this... (Score:4, Informative)

    by morgajel ( 568462 ) on Thursday March 13, 2003 @10:28PM (#5508575)
    my poor webserver.

    I actually started mapping out which countries [homelinux.net] were implementing linux in their government, but it became too much of a hassle.

    please go easy on my server....

  • WOW! $12.60!! (Score:3, Funny)

    by DeVilla ( 4563 ) on Friday March 14, 2003 @12:28AM (#5509082)
    With that I can almost buy a new CD!

    BUYAH!

  • There is no "engineering" in software (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mitcharoni ( 222957 ) on Friday March 14, 2003 @05:49AM (#5510087)
    This is my bone to pick:

    As a student of mechanical engineering, I understand that engineering is the *physical* application of physics and real science to a particular problem. This is true of any engineering discipline, be it mechanical, electrical, chemical, civil, hydraulic, whatever. Computer engineering is considered a EE discipline since its focuses on hardware, not software, engineering.

    Professional engineers (PE's) must be licensed in their respective states to practice, similiar to a lawyer or doctor having a license to practice. Having a BSxE degree simply won't allow you to sign off and carry the professional liability that goes with building a very expensive highway, electrical subsystem, or water dam. I've never seen a programmer routinely/successfully sued for developing bad code that crashes a lot, but I've seen plenty of engineers lose their practices when structures they've designed collapse. Go read your state's PE licensing requirements and you'll see for yourself.

    Are programmers smart? Yes. Do they routinely make use of advanced math, physics, and logic? Yes. Do they put in late hours like a lot of engineers do? Yes. Do that make them an engineer? NO!

    Calling oneself a software engineer is simply a fraud and a way to trump up ones own self-importance by riding the coattails of others. Its like "sales engineers"...what the hell is that? That's a way to make a job sound more important than it really is.

    BTW, I'm much more the computer programmer type than I will ever be a mechanical engineer. But I will NEVER call myself a "software engineer". There's just no engineering in anything I do.
    • I would define engineering as the application of scientific knowledge to the solution of practical problems. In the field, "software engineering" implies knowledge of not just algorithms, but also of knowledge of how to organize people and processes so that they can solve large-scale problems. Dictionaries generally lag the use of the language, so it's not surprising that some dictionaries presume that science only includes the physical sciences.

      In short, there is a software engineering field, because th

    • Having a BSxE degree simply won't allow you to sign off and carry the professional liability that goes with building a very expensive highway, electrical subsystem, or water dam.

      You are a student, you have not tried to run high-end projects, so you may be forgiven for thinking that we can not be sued for producing bad systems. This is also why professional indemnity insurance is considered a good idea for consultants.

      Acceptance as a full member of certain professional organisations allows you to call yo

    • In the sited article, the author makes his most critical point:

      "The precision of traditional computer science has a drawback, however. The problems that are solved are those that are amenable to precise solutions. These problems are, by definition, tightly defined, with no mushy statements or an unacceptably high number of variables. In short, these problems are easier than real-world problems that aren't conveniently narrowed."

      This says it all to me. In reality, systems design and the resultant programm
    • To continue my thoughts:

      The main point I want to make is that regardless of what we call ourselves, we must recognize and teach what goes on in the real world, in addition to the purely theoretical and lofty concepts that reside in the ivory towers.

      Maybe a definition would help matters -

      To engineer: To plan, manage, and put through by skillful acts or contrivance.

      Given that definition, I don't see a problem with calling ourselves 'Software Engineers'.

      On the other hand my title has the word 'Developer'i
    • engineer n 1: a person who uses scientific knowledge to solve practical problems

      The term engineer used to mean "someone who operated an engine." The term has been expanded to involve those "who [use] scientific knowledge to solve practical problems." But the "hard sciences" community often wants to exclude software engineers because our science is entirely informational. Being informational is not the same as being theoretical. Our problems are practical, often times much more applied and practical t

  • I LOVE the GIMP, but... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cascadefx ( 174894 ) <morlockhq@@@gmail...com> on Friday March 14, 2003 @10:31AM (#5511072) Journal
    I'll still think of it as the GIMP for a few years ;)


    the name is offensive to some people.

    I use the GIMP all the time. I have my own copy of Grokking the GIMP. It is a great tool and I think it is an easy way to show people the power of Open Source programming.

    However, no matter who I mention it too (outside of people who use Open Source), they always take issue with the name in some way.

    Either they are crude: "Cool, they named that program after a sex slave|cripple|etc." Which I don't want to associate with Open Source.

    or, they are shocked and outraged: "Nice program, but I would never use it. The name is offensive to the disabled community."

    Some people look past the name and I explain that it is an acronym. Still, and a good point, they mention that any acronym could have been made up. "Whoever did it thought they were being clever."

    What do other people think of the name? This may be off-topic, but I am interested to find out. Could project names stop the widespread adoption of Open Source?

    Case in point. The Bootable Linux Forensic CD distro biatchux [dmzs.com] recently changed its name to F.I.R.E or (Forensic and Incident Response Environment) [dmzs.com]. I am not sure why, but my guess is to aid its adoption rate among the group (mostly security and law enforcement) that needs it most. The name biatchux may be off-putting in the company report after all.

    I put it to the /. community. What do you think about some of the project names out there? What are some of the quote-unquote worst and best? Have any others changed names for similar reasons?

    I am not passing judgement, mind you. I am just asking.

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