Not to mention SGI's Reality Engine graphics accelerator. i860's were used in several companies' graphics accelerators / image generators in the early 90s.
Okay, with that out of the way -- yes, we have a little bit of Lisp code here. No, this was not a good idea, and no it is not a good
way to get rich in the future. I have it on good authority that every single scrap of Lisp code we have is quickly being rewritten from
scratch in C++, because there are so few engineers competent in Lisp here (read: zero).
Well who's problem is that? If Yahoo! claims that it's impossible to hire competent Lisp programmers, then they aren't trying very hard at all.
It was a good idea for Graham to write the system in Lisp - Yahoo! bought his company and made him a rich man. Sounds like Yahoo!'s IT is in a pretty wretched state if it can't maintain a system in which they invested millions of dollars.
It's easy to get hung up in the authors Marxist / anarchist politics. Put aside for a minute his tired rhetoric about how much someone deserves to be compensated for their labor; I certainly don't want to live in a world where Marxist academics decide how much I'm worth. The essential point is this: capitalism and markets work because goods have value, in part because of scarcity. IP laws artificially create scarcity where there isn't any. For a capitalist (like me), this is an unstable situation and can't last.
If you are a creative person, you probably think you should have some ownership over your output. Fair enough. But think about a society where every idea, every expression that you could put into your work is potentially owned by someone else and denyed to you through patent protection. How would you produce anything creative?
Hypothetical situation. I as an independant software developer create a revolutionary peice of software and create innovative new ways of using it. I work my butt off and build a company which is entire based off this sole product. This product is incrediably successful and so easy to use that it requires virtually no support. We charge a meger amount of money for it, $60 which covers advertising, etc. We don't have the money to support Unices, so Open Source developers clone the application and give it away for free.
Are you saying this is a bad thing? The developer hasn't lost any sales, has he? But that's not really the point...
Open Source developers do this every day. From the point of view of the original developer, you are outright stealing his intellectual property. Because the application is so easy to use there is very little revenue that can be gained via support or documentation.
The original developer has a view of intellectual property that is neither supported by the law nor by centuries of culture and practice. The notion that one completely owns every idea or utterance that s/he comes up with is nuts. Were these fabulous inventions somehow created in isolation, cut off from the thousands of years of mathmatics, literature and science that have come before? I doubt it.
There is a perplexing moral issue which has to be thought about. Is it ethical to take the hard work and sole means of living of another and clone it because you don't want to pay for it?
You bet. If one's sole means of support is so easy to copy, one has to question its worth in the first place.
This has already been the case for years for the serious players: the artist tools ran on SGIs, the development boxes were DOS or Windows based. Now things are coming full circle, with NT being the platform of choice for the modelling packages and Unix (Linux) as the development platform. Developers are used to dealing with this situation, I assure you.
Slashdot Mirror
You might look at Snake Wrangling for Kids or perhaps at How to Think Like a Computer Scientist.
I second Snake Wrangling for Kids. I've been working through it with my 8 year-old son and think it's great, especially for a free download.
There's no mention of Apple's most likely upgrade path in the next 12-18 months, the IBM PPC 970. Uh... hello?
Not to mention SGI's Reality Engine graphics accelerator. i860's were used in several companies' graphics accelerators / image generators in the early 90s.
It was a good idea for Graham to write the system in Lisp - Yahoo! bought his company and made him a rich man. Sounds like Yahoo!'s IT is in a pretty wretched state if it can't maintain a system in which they invested millions of dollars.
If you are a creative person, you probably think you should have some ownership over your output. Fair enough. But think about a society where every idea, every expression that you could put into your work is potentially owned by someone else and denyed to you through patent protection. How would you produce anything creative?
Are you saying this is a bad thing? The developer hasn't lost any sales, has he? But that's not really the point...
Open Source developers do this every day. From the point of view of the original developer, you are outright stealing his intellectual property. Because the application is so easy to use there is very little revenue that can be gained via support or documentation.
The original developer has a view of intellectual property that is neither supported by the law nor by centuries of culture and practice. The notion that one completely owns every idea or utterance that s/he comes up with is nuts. Were these fabulous inventions somehow created in isolation, cut off from the thousands of years of mathmatics, literature and science that have come before? I doubt it.
There is a perplexing moral issue which has to be thought about. Is it ethical to take the hard work and sole means of living of another and clone it because you don't want to pay for it?
You bet. If one's sole means of support is so easy to copy, one has to question its worth in the first place.
This has already been the case for years for the serious players: the artist tools ran on SGIs, the development boxes were DOS or Windows based. Now things are coming full circle, with NT being the platform of choice for the modelling packages and Unix (Linux) as the development platform. Developers are used to dealing with this situation, I assure you.