Re:Programming languages, operating systems, despair and ang...
by tinco on Monday June 30, 2014 @06:24PM
(#7968077)
Your analogy sounds nice, but your examples of epic failures do not hold up at all, they just show a lack of familiarity with their respective fields.
AAA game studios spending tens of millions of dollars on extremely complex game engines. The rendering part of it is significant but not nearly the largest part of it. You can take the Unreal Engine 4 for a spin now for just $20, and you'll see the incredible engineering feat that it is, and that's just the core engine. Almost every AAA title is an engineering marvel the industry as a whole can be proud of.
Demoscene demos can be brilliant and intricate, but they are just tricks in comparison.
I'm not expert on database technology, but it is a field worth millions in investments no doubt. Yes, open source technology is giving the big corps a run for their money, but you can't be seriously thinking CouchDB comes even close to the breadth of features and business solutions Oracle offers its customers.
I'm not an IC designer either, but have you ever seen a graphics card run Linux? FPGA's and GPU's can't do what CPU's do, and there's good reasons for it, again these products just don't compare in complexity. Besides, Intel's CPU's nowadays integrate GPUs that can render a mean scene.
So I'm not sure what your point is anymore. In my opinion these are not the plumbers, these are the ones designing the new materials and techniques that enable the plumbers to do their thing.
AAA game studios spending tens of millions of dollars on extremely complex game engines. The rendering part of it is significant but not nearly the largest part of it. You can take the Unreal Engine 4 for a spin now for just $20, and you'll see the incredible engineering feat that it is, and that's just the core engine. Almost every AAA title is an engineering marvel the industry as a whole can be proud of.
Demoscene demos can be brilliant and intricate, but they are just tricks in comparison.
I'm not expert on database technology, but it is a field worth millions in investments no doubt. Yes, open source technology is giving the big corps a run for their money, but you can't be seriously thinking CouchDB comes even close to the breadth of features and business solutions Oracle offers its customers.
I'm not an IC designer either, but have you ever seen a graphics card run Linux? FPGA's and GPU's can't do what CPU's do, and there's good reasons for it, again these products just don't compare in complexity. Besides, Intel's CPU's nowadays integrate GPUs that can render a mean scene.
So I'm not sure what your point is anymore. In my opinion these are not the plumbers, these are the ones designing the new materials and techniques that enable the plumbers to do their thing.