Journalism sucks when it comes to computing

A very popular site rediff.com in my country is pretty much filled with some journalists who do not have any authenticity. To add more to the pain they seem to be people with terribly low IQ level. Lets dig into many recent articles on Bill Gates and his retirement saga.

It is hilarious that the journalist seem to be some ill informed a computer monkey who does not know anything about computers beyond a keyboard and perhaps some few word document tricks. Since when Gates became the Ultimate Geek? Ask Gates and I am sure he ll say No. He is a shrewd business man rather than some uber cool geek. What he did may be great, but lets not worship someone blindly. And same goes true for any other person related to computing be it Linus, Prof Don Knuth, great Alan Turing or John McCarthy. Infact this whole concept of blind following is not only pointless but it is also dangerous. People spread this dangerous stupidity across and then result in a steady unrest among different sects of computing. Example GPL vs BSD, Linux Vs Windows, Procedural Languages Vs Function Languages and what not. Let you be the sole decider for you. Why should you follow what some supposedly shoddy journalist( who does not even know basics of computers), dazzle you with few slides and impressive write up.

Another rather “big” example Vmware Vs Microsoft’s Hyper-V. Okay MS has released a hypervisor and has cleverly forged facts in its own favour but they in now way are a match to Vmware’s better products. All aritificially create hype around a lousy product to make sure they can make inroads into datacenters and workstations. Well what will happen is to be seen but still Hyper-V needs to do a lot of catch up. It will be great if MS developers can start improving techincally rather than spreading usual marketing shit, for which MS is world renowned.

Mr Gates are you listening?…oh nevermind

I want to use Linux(or not)

One of the interviewers in my recent appearance for a pretty big company landed me in a rather awkward situation. He gave me a big lecture on how GPL is not good for protecting IP of the company. And also how patents will be revealed if they release the source code for their software. BTW isn’t your patent available via google patent search?:)

Actually I felt like “Gosh! is this guy living in some prehistoric era or what?”. Seriously since when people have jeopardised their work by making their code GPL? Example see FsmLabs RTLinux. Or for that matter RCU mechanism in Linux kernel. Sure original companies have generously donated it but this makes it even more difficult to copy the patentable idea. Surprisingly they still want to use Linux kernel and thus use kernel but run closed drivers in userspace. Neat but horrible trick. It can be viewed as a classic example of what happens when some braindead management people start taking charge about techincal predicaments.

This brings us to yet another debate “Are software patents valid?” . My answer a big “NO”. Software patents are idiotic. Software/Algorithms is logically mathematics and patenting mathematics is ridiculous.

Imagine your kid comes to you and says – ” See Dad!, I found a way to solve this problem using my own Algorithm”. And you reply – ” Sorry Son, forget it… because my company has a patent on this Algorithm and thus you cannot use it, else you will be sued”.  “How do you know it Dad? “… “Because I filed it, Son”. Trust me he will curse you for a moment for filing that patent for something which is nothing but logically Mathematics.

Think over this.