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Education Programming Technology Science

The Next Big IT Projects From the University Labs (infoworld.com) 29

snydeq writes: From unstructured data mining to visual microphones, academic labs are bringing future breakthrough possibilities to light, writes InfoWorld's Peter Wayner in his overview of nine university projects that could have lasting impact on IT. 'Open source programmers can usually build better code faster, often because they have bosses who pay them to build something that will pay off next quarter, not next century. Yet good computer science departments still manage to punch above — sometimes well above — their weight. While a good part of the research is devoted to arcane topics like the philosophical limits of computation, some of it can be tremendously useful for the world at large. What follows are nine projects currently under development at university labs that [could] have a broad impact on the world of computing.'
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The Next Big IT Projects From the University Labs

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  • by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Monday November 16, 2015 @05:14PM (#50942973) Journal

    I don't believe universities are very good at delivering "finished" products. Those with their heads deep in the arcane theory and bits often forget or don't know how to think about how regular users interact with products. Good UI's and feature packaging is hard to get right.

    But, creating new algorithms or code libraries for those outside with a better "product sense" is certainly something universities can and have done well.

    • That entire sentence should have been deleted. It is senseless and highly subject to point of view. In my opinion (doing this for a living, in several different corporations), the absolute worst code is proprietary corporate generated code: from bosses who want something that works next month and doesn't give a shit about next year. Even bad open source, by comparison, is frequently better.

      • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

        All such opinions are subjective, until the point we can directly examine customer neurons in action, or at least have objective surveys. If my opinion is to be deleted because it's subjective, as you appear to request, then so should yours, and there would be no opinions nor objective info in existence either way. Nor does Slashdot preclude anecdotal and subjective evidence. It's not an academic research publication. Your complaint is baseless.

        That being said, "corporate" software tends to have better UI's

        • My favorite example is "The Gimp". Aside from a ridiculous name that's not suitable for a professional environment (like a lot of FOSS). They over estimate their target audience. They assume their target audience is a non-existent Professional Photoshop Refugee group [gimp.org] and not home users.

          In the end Paint.NET [getpaint.net] is an easier to use, more performant piece of software for Windows. Though I still use my version of Paint Shop Pro 5 from 1998 cause it runs like mad on my i5.

          • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

            Paint.NET crashed my PC. I'm gun-shy to try it again.

            However, I do agree that Gimp is overkill for a good many uses. I often use MS-Paint instead because it's less key/mouse-strokes. But Paint lacks gamma level, contrast, brightness, blur/sharp, save-quality-levels, and selected (cursor-controlled) blur/sharp/bright/darken. Add these, and Paint would satisfy 95% of my graphics needs. (I'm not a graphic artist, but do need to clean up and tweak photos and logos on occasion for web publish.)

            I use to use Paint

            • >> Paint Shop Pro in the 90's.

              Look for "paint shop pro 6.02 abandonware" - something like http://www.oldapps.com/Paint_S... [oldapps.com]

            • I do agree that Gimp is overkill for a good many uses. I often use MS-Paint instead

              There's something to add to my collection of "things I never thought I'd read on slashdot".

              • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

                I should qualify that. I use MS-Paint for a large portion of many types of image fiddling, and then GIMP to add adjustments not available in Paint. I've picked up some Paint shortcuts and tricks over the years. One can make shadowed text with Paint, for example, even though it's not a "direct" feature. Sometimes I work on a higher res version, and then scale it down for web pages etc. so that edge artifacts don't show up.

        • All such opinions are subjective, until the point we can directly examine customer neurons in action, or at least have objective surveys

          No, I am agreeing with you, thus sentence should have been deleted from TFS, even TFA: Open source programmers can usually build better code faster, often because they have bosses who pay them to build something that will pay off next quarter, not next century.

          Not because they are opinions, because it is senseless for the objective of the summary and article and distract

          • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

            Okay, I misunderstood your context. No hard feelings.

            Note I didn't see where the article gave evidence that the listed projects were already successful. It seems more of a forecast, like a stock broker recommending what they feel will be growing stocks in the future.

            And, some of them are kits and/or API's that others could use to build polished products with. That's probably the best hope.

            And you are right that OSS doesn't necessarily mean "free" or "low cost". If you really want certain features or strong

  • by dmomo ( 256005 ) on Monday November 16, 2015 @05:15PM (#50942981)

    Did anyone else have trouble following the quoted text in this summary? I hesitantly clicked through, but couldn't bear to even make myself scroll through to see what the click-bait list items were. InfoWorld is like the Buzzfeed of tech, only without the proofreading.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    "Open source programmers can usually build better code faster, often because their have bosses who pay them to build something that will pay off next quarter, not next century"

    Can someone fix the grammar and logical errors in this sentence?

    • by U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M ( 4212163 ) on Monday November 16, 2015 @05:34PM (#50943107)

      "Closed-source programmers usually have to build code faster, even though it's barely compiling, because their bosses pay them to build something that will go on sale next quarter even if it's not ready to ship and will require monthly patches for years after that."

    • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Its open-sorce grammer and spailing, whaddya expekt

    • "Open source programmers can usually build better code faster, often because their have bosses who pay them to build something that will pay off next quarter, not next century"

      Seriously. WTF????

  • >> Open source programmers can usually build better code faster, often because their have bosses who pay them to build something that will pay off next quarter, not next century

    Huh? Open source is the "paid" side of the coding world? Commercial products take centuries to release? Please show me the straw man you're trying to build.

    • Open source sure is magic sauce. I thought agile would help improve development but now I find out that we could have just changed the license.

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