I'm happy for Chip Rosenthal, but it seems to me that this decision is only a temporary victory, based on fairly narrow grounds (lack of jurisdiction). The merits of the case (or lack thereof) were apparently not considered yet.
Unicom Systems may decide to re-file their case in Texas, and as little as I wish a continued lawsuit on Mr. Rosenthal, for them to re-file and lose decisively would establish a far more useful precedent than this dismissal does.
That's an interesting article, but I've always had difficulties believing it. Ms Love does not exactly appear to be poor, and she was not exactly poor even before she had any success in her acting career.
She is involved in a heavy court battle with the surviving members of Nirvana. Why would they do that and involve scores of well paid lawyers, if the contracts really paid artists practically nothing?
Many of the comments here see HP's exit from calculators as a victory for TI, but personally, I'm wondering whether the real reason is not that the use of high end calculators as such is declining.
I still own 2 programmable calculators myself and use them with some regularity, but it must be more than 10 years since I last programmed a programmable calculator. It seems to me that by the time I would bother to write a calculator program for a task, I'm sufficiently out of the spontaneous use space of calculators that I might just as well sit down at a real computer and use a spreadsheet or perl or C for the job.
Is there anybody here who really writes and/or uses programs for programmable calculators on a daily basis?
Robert T. Morris, creator of the internet worm, which took down a lot more of the internet (which, granted, was a lot smaller then), and who was an adult, was sentenced to three years probation, 40 hours of community service, and a $10K fine.
8 months for a juvenile seems an adequate sentence to me.
Actually, my own experience with them ws sort of ok, although I'm a rather technical guy and I'm not sure whether a layperson could have made sense of their explanations.
Given that Cable bandwidth is shared, I figured that their support limitations were a good thing as they kept away others who would otherwise gobble up my bandwidth:-)
Interesting paper, but I don't entirely agree with your summary that python was one of the clear winners. My impression was that Perl was somewhat better in most of the comparisons (and, interestingly, there seems to have been more consistency within the Perl results on several of the comparisons).
Just for the record: the current stable version of MacPerl is based on perl 5.004 and was released in early 1998. A port of 5.6 is currently underway (check out the MacPerl project on SourceForge).
While there are certainly differences between 5.004 and 5.6, they are not all that substantial for many scripts (the main annoyance is that you can't update a 5.004 based MacPerl to the latest libraries).
As far as I know, the last really devastating[1] asteroid hit was some 60 million years ago, so I'd suggest that the next one might still be a while off. OTOH, there's a pretty good chance that Earth will become practically uninhabitable for humans witin the next 200-300 years, unless a massive effort is made.
Given the choice between spending $200e9 a year on colonizing space or on preserving Earth's ecosystem, I know where I'd put my money (and there's a good chance the latter would lead to spin-off technology benefiting the former in the long run).
[1] From the POV of the dinosaurs, of course. We mammals did quite well.
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I'm happy for Chip Rosenthal, but it seems to me that this decision is only a temporary victory, based on fairly narrow grounds (lack of jurisdiction). The merits of the case (or lack thereof) were apparently not considered yet.
Unicom Systems may decide to re-file their case in Texas, and as little as I wish a continued lawsuit on Mr. Rosenthal, for them to re-file and lose decisively would establish a far more useful precedent than this dismissal does.
She is involved in a heavy court battle with the surviving members of Nirvana. Why would they do that and involve scores of well paid lawyers, if the contracts really paid artists practically nothing?
Also, Octavia E. Butler's _Xenogenesis_ trilogy (_Dawn_, _Adulthood Rites_, and _Imago_).
The trilogy is a rather unusual twist on the ancient pulp fiction theme of Aliens Invade The Earth To Have Sex With Our Women.
I still own 2 programmable calculators myself and use them with some regularity, but it must be more than 10 years since I last programmed a programmable calculator. It seems to me that by the time I would bother to write a calculator program for a task, I'm sufficiently out of the spontaneous use space of calculators that I might just as well sit down at a real computer and use a spreadsheet or perl or C for the job.
Is there anybody here who really writes and/or uses programs for programmable calculators on a daily basis?
Robert T. Morris, creator of the internet worm, which took down a lot more of the internet (which, granted, was a lot smaller then), and who was an adult, was sentenced to three years probation, 40 hours of community service, and a $10K fine.
8 months for a juvenile seems an adequate sentence to me.
Actually, my own experience with them ws sort of ok, although I'm a rather technical guy and I'm not sure whether a layperson could have made sense of their explanations.
:-)
Given that Cable bandwidth is shared, I figured that their support limitations were a good thing as they kept away others who would otherwise gobble up my bandwidth
An ironic detail is that Perl regular expressions have not really been regular ever since backreferences were introduced.
Interesting paper, but I don't entirely agree with your summary that python was one of the clear winners. My impression was that Perl was somewhat better in most of the comparisons (and, interestingly, there seems to have been more consistency within the Perl results on several of the comparisons).
While there are certainly differences between 5.004 and 5.6, they are not all that substantial for many scripts (the main annoyance is that you can't update a 5.004 based MacPerl to the latest libraries).
As far as I know, the last really devastating[1] asteroid hit was some 60 million years ago, so I'd suggest that the next one might still be a while off. OTOH, there's a pretty good chance that Earth will become practically uninhabitable for humans witin the next 200-300 years, unless a massive effort is made.
Given the choice between spending $200e9 a year on colonizing space or on preserving Earth's ecosystem, I know where I'd put my money (and there's a good chance the latter would lead to spin-off technology benefiting the former in the long run).
[1] From the POV of the dinosaurs, of course. We mammals did quite well.