Hmm. I think that the result is two phrases that are both OK.
"I couldn't care less" is a perfectly reasonable, grammatically and logically 'true' statement (if said truthfully.
"I could care less" is a shorthand phrase derived from a longer original phrase. It can also be considered as assuming a prepended "as if", which adequately describes its ironic character.
I talked to someone who knows such things a few years ago - I forget who, but it might have been someone at Lenovo. They said that the screen mfgrs basically don't make them any more. Laptops are a tiny fraction of the TV market, and the screen makers primarily make TV screens. TV screens are all 16:9 (more or less). Basically to continue to provide 4:3 screens would require 'custom' production, at a huge cost.
I personally like the wide screens - I can usually put up two pages of text, or a webpage plus a page with slight overlap, etc. Actually most of the time these days I run two 1920x1080 screens side by side. At work I also use the Compiz desktop cube, and keep different applications and/or different projects open on different faces of the cube - effective resolution is 7920x1080. So for me, width is good.
That is a classic technology roll-out scenario - sell first to the 'early adopters' who are willing to pay a bit more who effectively pay for the front end development costs for you; then it's easy to start moving downmarket with lower cost packaging, and of course the mfg cost goes down as parts and methods get more integrated.
Once a hard drive mfgr makes an 'Apple' hard drive with Thunderbolt, they will be ready shortly thereafter to sell the same drive in other packaging for a bit less as the market opens up. So the prices will start dropping as the volume goes up. In two years they'll be at Walmart with a (nearly) single chip implementation.
Funny you should mention hard drives. A friend of mine used to work for Seagate, and told me that they have been trying to get the other makers to adopt a faster I/O technology standard (not a particular one - just SOMETHING), but with no success - other makers just don't see the need. As density goes up, with constant rotational speed in hard drives the potential throughput goes up essentially at the same rate (as the square root of the density?) but it's all being held up by max channel throughput.
I'm too lazy to work out the numbers, comparing channel I/O throughput and hard drive linear bit read rates over the last 10 years, so I'm enclosing a small scratchpad area for someone else to work it out: ===== start =====
People actually do get tired of upgrading technology at some point.
Yes, but those people are old and getting out of the market. The new young'uns will gladly adopt the new hotness, and laugh about your old RS232 and Centronix connectors!:) "Haha look at that old dinosaur - he's still using WIRES!!
Also, budgets generally cycle from tight to loose. Back in the day, I worked at a major electronics company. Their plan was - when going into a recession, start designing new high-end stuff, because it will be ready to go to market about the time that folks are ready to open their wallets again. Then when things are looking good for a while, design the new low-end stuff, to be ready for the next downturn. It worked pretty well in part because they had a long development cycle, but the timing can be adjusted accordingly.
I wasn't paying much attention, but I thought USB came out of Microsoft (or maybe Intel) - at the time Apple was all about Firewire. Weren't the earliest USB ports on Intel PCs?
My great-grandaddy was an engineer/doctor/botanist in India in the mid-1800s. One of his claims to fame was a bridge over a river canyon, which had been washed out repeatedly. So he walked 100 miles upstream and 100 miles downstream, and interviewed the chiefs and the elders of each village and tribe along the river, asking how high the water went in their lifetimes, in their ancestors lifetimes, and in their legends. He assembled a 500 year history of the river's floods. Then he had the new bridge built ten feet above that.
I believe the bridge was finally torn down a few years ago, to make way for one with higher capacity.:)
As we have seen lately, the keyword there is 'sane'. Unfortunately, sanity is not a prerequisite for having an army, running a country, or starting a war. (Sanity may not even be particularly useful in those scenarios.) Some parts of the world seem to my untrained eye as a basically a contest to see who's the craziest b.....d in the neighborhood. Whoever wins becomes boss - for a while.
True and I agree about performance tuning, but the complaint in MA was that legitimate mechanics were being shut out of the repair business by Toyota's (in particular) refusal to release codes essential to normal repair and maintenance. Toyota and other companies were simply using this argument to protect dealer monopolies - or so I understand. I confess I didn't pay much attention, as I don't tend to buy cars under ten years old - and the diesel in my boat is from the 1960s!:D
Until (IIRC) 1986, that was the case. Software is composed of algorithms, and algorithms are by definition mathematics, and mathematics can only be discovered, not invented. So until 1986 no software patents were awarded. I think the first one was a Honeywell patent for a combined hardware/software system for an air conditioning controller.
The most egregiously bad deal about software patents is the huge list of software inventions going back to the dawn of computing, for really important stuff like virtual memory, dozens of compiler methods, the windowing GUI, many different aspects of the systems that underlie the internet, etc., that could not be patented - in retrospect those thousands of real inventors got a raw deal. I made several advances in my work in the late 1970s and early 1980s that could now be patented. All those innovations back then were either shared effectively as open source, or protected for a while as trade secrets. Now trolls can patent silly trivialities and make zillions of dollars, depending on a huge edifice of real work that they get to use for free.
And, of course, if those innovations could have been patented the entire industry would be 30 years behind where we are now.
What I'm afraid of is that the car manufacturers (and the blender manufacturers, etc.) will take a leaf from the ink jet printer makers' manual, start embedding chips in everything from engine parts to door panels to who-knows-what, and set up the cars' computers to not start if the embedded chips don't agree - then assert a copyright violation if aftermarket makers try to duplicate the logic. IIRC Lexmark's attempt to assert copyright this way got squashed in court - I hope so. In the past, the real situation was that if you could physically design a part that matched the bolt pattern, the car makers really couldn't stop you. Now by abusing IP law in similar ways, they may be able to essentially prevent car owners from modifying the cars, just as the computer and software companies have been striving (and mostly succeeding).
It's already pretty much impossible to tune an engine differently without buying someone's reverse-engineered hotrod chip for the computer. This is legally the case officially to satisfy Federal anti-pollution laws, but it's also very much to the benefit of the car makers and the dealers. In fact that was the justification used to oppose the MA law I mentioned - the car makers were "concerned that non-certified third party mechanics might not keep the car within official pollution standards". Of course that's mostly hogwash.
I will tell you what I miss - back in the day I used MacProject. Today I have been unable to find a product, open source or commercial, that does everything as well as MacProject did.
If we compare this to the car industry (as it used to be before it got all digified as well), there is/was a big industry making aftermarket parts - everything from brake shoes and taillights to radios. AFAIK nobody ever got sued by Ford for making a Ford-compatible steering wheel. I think the car makers basically felt that the accessory market (i.e. 'bells and whistles') helped their market. They were never particularly thrilled about aftermarket replacement parts, but they didn't stop it. Folks had, and still have, the choice to go to the dealer or go to NAPA - or JC Whitney. And sometimes it's better going to the dealer. Of course, while it's under warranty some things still have to be done by the dealer - but in most states the car makers can not disallow the warranty under if you get your oil change done by someone else.
Of course, that's changing nowadays. Here in MA, Toyota successfully fought off an attempt to pass a state law requiring car makers to release the computer repair codes to third party repair shops, so they could hook up their expensive diagnostic machines and find what was wrong. (I don't recall if this was a legislative thing or a court thing.)
While I agree that Apple may have the right to charge a toll for everyone crossing their bridge, I disagree that it's a good idea. Case in point was the recent article on/. about the demise of independent music because of Apple's 30% rake off the top. Another case in point - I haven't bought an Apple product since 1996, so that's about $30,000 worth of business they haven't gotten. I published software for the NeXT, and had Macs through the early 1990s, but I don't want to be locked into either them or MS. I want the on-ramps to the highway to allow ALL traffic that fits the lanes - I don't want separate ramps for MS, Apple, Google or whatnot.
It's also very large, and very expensive. Being a silverback, I remember when the cost dropped below 1 cent per bit - that's $10,000 per megabit! I think it was about 1975. And IIRC the highest density 1024-byte core card at that time was about eight inches on a side. I think they were all still hand-assembled at least until then.
In 1980, the price of a 16 kW (kiloword, equivalent to 32kB) core memory board that fitted into a DEC Q-bus computer was around US$3,000. At that time, core array and supporting electronics fit on a single printed circuit board about 25 x 20 cm in size, the core array was mounted a few mm above the PCB and was protected with a metal or plastic plate.
These days it might be possible to use chip-making techniques or 3D printing to 'print' very tiny core memory units, building up the conductors and ferrite a layer at a time.
I didn't mean to imply it was boring for everyone - just me!:)
I wouldn't say I'm a bad loser - I am a bit competitive but I'm also pretty empathic. And I used to somewhat enjoy nickel-dime-quarter poker with friends (but we would avoid anyone who wasn't drinking - they were there to WIN!) I've been known to lighten up on a chess game to allow the other person a chance at winning. (I haven't played in 30 years - my attention span isn't what it used to be.) But there's something particularly about gambling in general, and slots in particular - some weird part of my leetle brain really does think I should have known the answer - which slot machine to pull, or which way to go in blackjack, or which number in roulette. It doesn't make sense, but that's the way it feels. It's like I was taking a multiple choice test, and I picked the wrong answer when I knew the subject. As noted, it makes no sense, it's just my brain.
I'm not much for sports either. Or computer games - I always preferred writing games to playing them. (I've written a couple of computer games a long time ago - a 4D version of asteroids with gravity was interesting, and I recently found a line printer listing of the old BASIC code.) Oddly enough, I do sometimes like watching golf - not often, but occasionally (and for about 1/2 hour max). And I'll watch football occasionally - whatever teams are playing when I turn the TV on (and I root for whoever's losing at half time). But I can sit on a boat and watch the ocean for hours on end - always changing yet always the same. I'm sure most people would consider that a form of torture!
Exactly, at a casino, you SPEND money. It's just that every once in a while they give you some back to take home.
The thing is, that's all you do - spend money, don't see a movie, don't get a dinner, don't receive anything. It's about as exciting as watching paint dry, generally in the company of people I would not want to meet. Then once in a while you (or somebody) you get some back. I would get more amusement out of passing money out on the street, and keeping bus money. (Actually I've read that about 1/4 people leaves Las Vegas ahead. That bit of hope keeps folks coming back.)
I used to tell people, "I don't MIND winning, but I REALLY HATE losing. It's like there is this part of my brain that thinks I should have known the answer."
Likewise, books are language. Can books be copyrighted? No one owns language.
Copyright is not patent, and trademarks are neither copyright nor patent. Each protects a different kind of intellectual property. Concepts or ideas can not be copyrighted, only a particular arrangement of words (or symbols, or whatever) - a way of describing something. When the same ideas are described in another way (generally not a difficult proposition), there is no copyright violation.
Your point about the power drill is well taken. 'Power drill' is too far from 'metal and plastic' to be considered a natural progression that anyone could think of. Nobody ever saw a lump of metal and another lump of plastic, and said, 'Aha - I have just invented electric motors, three-blade chucks, twist drill bits, variable speed power electronics, etc.' There were thousands of patents that marked our progress from said lumps to the present day drill. But I think the point about match and computer implementations is that under patent law, math is natural law, and is discovered, not invented. A different implementation of a mathematical algorithm is still the same algorithm.
Don't forget that until (IIRC) 1986, all software was unpatentable specifically because 'software is algorithms, algorithms are math, and (since math is natural law, and is discovered, not invented) math is unpatentable', preventing the many 'heroes' of the computer industry and academia from patenting the seminal ideas upon which all computing is founded from taking out patents. Ideas such as virtual memory, paging systems, superscalar architecture, push-down stacks, queues, the many seminal ideas upon which all computer graphics is based, all the various parts of an arithmetic logic unit, TCP/IP, HTTP, FTP, SMTP and thousands of other ideas were developed without any expectation of patentability. The entire structure of modern computing was developed without patents, except for certain hardware details. Therefore, for the reason of fairness alone, allowing patents for one-click ordering and the other trivialities that all depend on these unpatentable core ideas should never have been allowed. How can an HTML trick be patentable, when HTML itself was not patentable at the time? All of XML, and the many other MLs that were derived from SGML, would have been patentable had they only been created twenty years later. Shouldn't Berners-Lee have made a zillion dollars before Amazon, or Twitter, or Facebook? Shouldn't they have all been made to pay license fees? Allowing patents for trivial 'improvements' (if that is what they are) of implementations on these core ideas and implementations has always been a travesty.
This reminds me of a funny experience I had in school a long time ago. The school had a brand new 'Harris 220' (formerly Perkin Elmer) timesharing machine. It used a timesliced architecture where every task gets its little slice of the CPU every so many milliseconds. I was helping a math student implement a small program to produce ten values of a particular function - I recall it was a Bessel function but I'm not sure - to 7 or 8 decimal places. The function converges very slowly, so we kept adding iterations to the inner loop.
We started with 100 iterations, and got 2 digits. Increasing ever higher, we got to 1 million iterations in the inner loop, and were finally getting sufficient decimal accuracy. Each result took about a minute, so we just watched.
Then the phone in the lab rang - it was the sysadmin, hollering "What did you do to my machine!!!???" It turns out that the inner loop was small enough to fit into the processor's hardware cache, and the timeslice logic was outside the CPU so could only get executed once before the CPU went back into the inner loop. Since the computer handled the I/O for every terminal on campus directly, all over campus the terminals were typing one character out, then waiting a minute, then another character, then wait a minute,...:D
I wouldn't use Haskell (or Erlang) to write a device driver; I wouldn't use C to write much of anything else. Just as we have automotive vehicles that range from scooters to huge Terex earthmovers, it's important to use the right tool for the job. A friend of mine used to have a Volkswagen bug that had been converted to a pickup truck. It wasn't pretty!:D I wouldn't run a million row relational database on your 4MB device either.
I think you're behind the curve a bit - some review of the features of functional languages may be in order. Haskell really is fast, from what I've read and seen. Some of the 'program some standard thing in a zillion languages' websites have example Haskell implementations that are pretty performant.
The key to the 'no loops' issue is simple - tail recursion. I quote excerpts:
In computer science, a tail call is a subroutine call that happens inside another procedure and that produces a return value, which is then immediately returned by the calling procedure. [...] Tail calls are significant because they can be implemented without adding a new stack frame to the call stack. Most of the frame of the current procedure is not needed any more, and it can be replaced by the frame of the tail call, modified as appropriate. The program can then jump to the called subroutine. [...] in functional programming languages, tail call elimination is often guaranteed by the language standard, and this guarantee allows using recursion, in particular tail recursion, in place of loops.
I personally like Erlang better - it's more of a 'real world' rather than 'ivory tower' language in its approach and I find it easier to program. Erlang was designed as a useful, extremely reliable language that supports tens of thousands of threads on multiple processors (not even in the same location). Since it was designed as the language to program Ericsson telephone switches with downtime of one or two seconds per year, it had to be good at these things. (It also allows replacement of any part of the code without stopping.) Practicality was more important than theoretical purity. Erlang is slower than Haskell, but I still like it better.
While I haven't written anything serious in Erlang, I was able to write multi-threaded programs that dynamically allocated threads on multiple machines, within a few hours of reading the book, _without_ worrying about most of the usual parallel programming issues such as semaphores, memory mapping, etc. Since image processing is a highly parallel problem, most IP problems are very amenable to such easy-to-do multiprocessing. So also, many types of databases (see CouchDB), and many problems that require rapid dynamic scaling, (see Jabber server). If your program can dynamically decide how much resources it can use and needs, and spawn as many threads on as many processors as is appropriate, I would say that's an order of magnitude more potential than a FORTRAN program. Of course highly-parallel programs by nature tend to require systems that are structured appropriately for the program. Vector processors like Cray (at least the old ones) are good for 'rectangular' problems; but not so good for tree-structured problems, database systems, dynamic I/O handling and other problems that functional languages do very well on.
Imagine implementing something like Jabber or Twitter in FORTRAN! I don't miss programming in FORTRAN - my first 3D graphics programs were in FORTRAN, and it was neither easy, nor very productive. FORTRAN was pushed well beyond its real competence to make the SIGGRAPH Core 3D graphics library standard a workable system. The influential Tektronix "Interactive Graphics Library" 3D Core library was actually programmed using MORTRAN, a structured macro preprocessor, in order to provide a better big-system programming structure.
Of course, since these newer languages' compilers are all written in C or C++, one can argue they are just fancy-schmancy C programs, at least until compiler optimization for functional programming takes these language implementations to a new level.:)
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Hmm. I think that the result is two phrases that are both OK.
"I couldn't care less" is a perfectly reasonable, grammatically and logically 'true' statement (if said truthfully.
"I could care less" is a shorthand phrase derived from a longer original phrase. It can also be considered as assuming a prepended "as if", which adequately describes its ironic character.
So, they're both right! :D
Of course, I could[n't] care less. :)
And if two people do it, it's a game ... :D
And if three people do it, it's a ladyboy movement!!
I talked to someone who knows such things a few years ago - I forget who, but it might have been someone at Lenovo. They said that the screen mfgrs basically don't make them any more. Laptops are a tiny fraction of the TV market, and the screen makers primarily make TV screens. TV screens are all 16:9 (more or less). Basically to continue to provide 4:3 screens would require 'custom' production, at a huge cost.
I personally like the wide screens - I can usually put up two pages of text, or a webpage plus a page with slight overlap, etc. Actually most of the time these days I run two 1920x1080 screens side by side. At work I also use the Compiz desktop cube, and keep different applications and/or different projects open on different faces of the cube - effective resolution is 7920x1080. So for me, width is good.
[oblig]Oooh, Shiny!![/oblig] :D
I challenge you to mention ladyboys in every comment you make from here on out -- It would be epic.
Totally! :D
Haha! I saw what you did there. :)
That is a classic technology roll-out scenario - sell first to the 'early adopters' who are willing to pay a bit more who effectively pay for the front end development costs for you; then it's easy to start moving downmarket with lower cost packaging, and of course the mfg cost goes down as parts and methods get more integrated.
Once a hard drive mfgr makes an 'Apple' hard drive with Thunderbolt, they will be ready shortly thereafter to sell the same drive in other packaging for a bit less as the market opens up. So the prices will start dropping as the volume goes up. In two years they'll be at Walmart with a (nearly) single chip implementation.
Funny you should mention hard drives. A friend of mine used to work for Seagate, and told me that they have been trying to get the other makers to adopt a faster I/O technology standard (not a particular one - just SOMETHING), but with no success - other makers just don't see the need. As density goes up, with constant rotational speed in hard drives the potential throughput goes up essentially at the same rate (as the square root of the density?) but it's all being held up by max channel throughput.
I'm too lazy to work out the numbers, comparing channel I/O throughput and hard drive linear bit read rates over the last 10 years, so I'm enclosing a small scratchpad area for someone else to work it out:
===== start =====
==
====== end ====== :D
Thanks!
Haha I was just replying with essentially the same point!
People actually do get tired of upgrading technology at some point.
Yes, but those people are old and getting out of the market. The new young'uns will gladly adopt the new hotness, and laugh about your old RS232 and Centronix connectors! :) "Haha look at that old dinosaur - he's still using WIRES!!
Also, budgets generally cycle from tight to loose. Back in the day, I worked at a major electronics company. Their plan was - when going into a recession, start designing new high-end stuff, because it will be ready to go to market about the time that folks are ready to open their wallets again. Then when things are looking good for a while, design the new low-end stuff, to be ready for the next downturn. It worked pretty well in part because they had a long development cycle, but the timing can be adjusted accordingly.
I wasn't paying much attention, but I thought USB came out of Microsoft (or maybe Intel) - at the time Apple was all about Firewire. Weren't the earliest USB ports on Intel PCs?
My great-grandaddy was an engineer/doctor/botanist in India in the mid-1800s. One of his claims to fame was a bridge over a river canyon, which had been washed out repeatedly. So he walked 100 miles upstream and 100 miles downstream, and interviewed the chiefs and the elders of each village and tribe along the river, asking how high the water went in their lifetimes, in their ancestors lifetimes, and in their legends. He assembled a 500 year history of the river's floods. Then he had the new bridge built ten feet above that.
I believe the bridge was finally torn down a few years ago, to make way for one with higher capacity. :)
As we have seen lately, the keyword there is 'sane'. Unfortunately, sanity is not a prerequisite for having an army, running a country, or starting a war. (Sanity may not even be particularly useful in those scenarios.) Some parts of the world seem to my untrained eye as a basically a contest to see who's the craziest b.....d in the neighborhood. Whoever wins becomes boss - for a while.
True and I agree about performance tuning, but the complaint in MA was that legitimate mechanics were being shut out of the repair business by Toyota's (in particular) refusal to release codes essential to normal repair and maintenance. Toyota and other companies were simply using this argument to protect dealer monopolies - or so I understand. I confess I didn't pay much attention, as I don't tend to buy cars under ten years old - and the diesel in my boat is from the 1960s! :D
Until (IIRC) 1986, that was the case. Software is composed of algorithms, and algorithms are by definition mathematics, and mathematics can only be discovered, not invented. So until 1986 no software patents were awarded. I think the first one was a Honeywell patent for a combined hardware/software system for an air conditioning controller.
The most egregiously bad deal about software patents is the huge list of software inventions going back to the dawn of computing, for really important stuff like virtual memory, dozens of compiler methods, the windowing GUI, many different aspects of the systems that underlie the internet, etc., that could not be patented - in retrospect those thousands of real inventors got a raw deal. I made several advances in my work in the late 1970s and early 1980s that could now be patented. All those innovations back then were either shared effectively as open source, or protected for a while as trade secrets. Now trolls can patent silly trivialities and make zillions of dollars, depending on a huge edifice of real work that they get to use for free.
And, of course, if those innovations could have been patented the entire industry would be 30 years behind where we are now.
What I'm afraid of is that the car manufacturers (and the blender manufacturers, etc.) will take a leaf from the ink jet printer makers' manual, start embedding chips in everything from engine parts to door panels to who-knows-what, and set up the cars' computers to not start if the embedded chips don't agree - then assert a copyright violation if aftermarket makers try to duplicate the logic. IIRC Lexmark's attempt to assert copyright this way got squashed in court - I hope so. In the past, the real situation was that if you could physically design a part that matched the bolt pattern, the car makers really couldn't stop you. Now by abusing IP law in similar ways, they may be able to essentially prevent car owners from modifying the cars, just as the computer and software companies have been striving (and mostly succeeding).
It's already pretty much impossible to tune an engine differently without buying someone's reverse-engineered hotrod chip for the computer. This is legally the case officially to satisfy Federal anti-pollution laws, but it's also very much to the benefit of the car makers and the dealers. In fact that was the justification used to oppose the MA law I mentioned - the car makers were "concerned that non-certified third party mechanics might not keep the car within official pollution standards". Of course that's mostly hogwash.
I will tell you what I miss - back in the day I used MacProject. Today I have been unable to find a product, open source or commercial, that does everything as well as MacProject did.
If we compare this to the car industry (as it used to be before it got all digified as well), there is/was a big industry making aftermarket parts - everything from brake shoes and taillights to radios. AFAIK nobody ever got sued by Ford for making a Ford-compatible steering wheel. I think the car makers basically felt that the accessory market (i.e. 'bells and whistles') helped their market. They were never particularly thrilled about aftermarket replacement parts, but they didn't stop it. Folks had, and still have, the choice to go to the dealer or go to NAPA - or JC Whitney. And sometimes it's better going to the dealer. Of course, while it's under warranty some things still have to be done by the dealer - but in most states the car makers can not disallow the warranty under if you get your oil change done by someone else.
Of course, that's changing nowadays. Here in MA, Toyota successfully fought off an attempt to pass a state law requiring car makers to release the computer repair codes to third party repair shops, so they could hook up their expensive diagnostic machines and find what was wrong. (I don't recall if this was a legislative thing or a court thing.)
While I agree that Apple may have the right to charge a toll for everyone crossing their bridge, I disagree that it's a good idea. Case in point was the recent article on /. about the demise of independent music because of Apple's 30% rake off the top. Another case in point - I haven't bought an Apple product since 1996, so that's about $30,000 worth of business they haven't gotten. I published software for the NeXT, and had Macs through the early 1990s, but I don't want to be locked into either them or MS. I want the on-ramps to the highway to allow ALL traffic that fits the lanes - I don't want separate ramps for MS, Apple, Google or whatnot.
It's also very large, and very expensive. Being a silverback, I remember when the cost dropped below 1 cent per bit - that's $10,000 per megabit! I think it was about 1975. And IIRC the highest density 1024-byte core card at that time was about eight inches on a side. I think they were all still hand-assembled at least until then.
Ahh, Here's better data (a bit later):
In 1980, the price of a 16 kW (kiloword, equivalent to 32kB) core memory board that fitted into a DEC Q-bus computer was around US$3,000. At that time, core array and supporting electronics fit on a single printed circuit board about 25 x 20 cm in size, the core array was mounted a few mm above the PCB and was protected with a metal or plastic plate.
These days it might be possible to use chip-making techniques or 3D printing to 'print' very tiny core memory units, building up the conductors and ferrite a layer at a time.
I didn't mean to imply it was boring for everyone - just me! :)
I wouldn't say I'm a bad loser - I am a bit competitive but I'm also pretty empathic. And I used to somewhat enjoy nickel-dime-quarter poker with friends (but we would avoid anyone who wasn't drinking - they were there to WIN!) I've been known to lighten up on a chess game to allow the other person a chance at winning. (I haven't played in 30 years - my attention span isn't what it used to be.) But there's something particularly about gambling in general, and slots in particular - some weird part of my leetle brain really does think I should have known the answer - which slot machine to pull, or which way to go in blackjack, or which number in roulette. It doesn't make sense, but that's the way it feels. It's like I was taking a multiple choice test, and I picked the wrong answer when I knew the subject. As noted, it makes no sense, it's just my brain.
I'm not much for sports either. Or computer games - I always preferred writing games to playing them. (I've written a couple of computer games a long time ago - a 4D version of asteroids with gravity was interesting, and I recently found a line printer listing of the old BASIC code.) Oddly enough, I do sometimes like watching golf - not often, but occasionally (and for about 1/2 hour max). And I'll watch football occasionally - whatever teams are playing when I turn the TV on (and I root for whoever's losing at half time). But I can sit on a boat and watch the ocean for hours on end - always changing yet always the same. I'm sure most people would consider that a form of torture!
Exactly, at a casino, you SPEND money. It's just that every once in a while they give you some back to take home.
The thing is, that's all you do - spend money, don't see a movie, don't get a dinner, don't receive anything. It's about as exciting as watching paint dry, generally in the company of people I would not want to meet. Then once in a while you (or somebody) you get some back. I would get more amusement out of passing money out on the street, and keeping bus money. (Actually I've read that about 1/4 people leaves Las Vegas ahead. That bit of hope keeps folks coming back.)
I used to tell people, "I don't MIND winning, but I REALLY HATE losing. It's like there is this part of my brain that thinks I should have known the answer."
Likewise, books are language. Can books be copyrighted? No one owns language.
Copyright is not patent, and trademarks are neither copyright nor patent. Each protects a different kind of intellectual property. Concepts or ideas can not be copyrighted, only a particular arrangement of words (or symbols, or whatever) - a way of describing something. When the same ideas are described in another way (generally not a difficult proposition), there is no copyright violation.
Your point about the power drill is well taken. 'Power drill' is too far from 'metal and plastic' to be considered a natural progression that anyone could think of. Nobody ever saw a lump of metal and another lump of plastic, and said, 'Aha - I have just invented electric motors, three-blade chucks, twist drill bits, variable speed power electronics, etc.' There were thousands of patents that marked our progress from said lumps to the present day drill. But I think the point about match and computer implementations is that under patent law, math is natural law, and is discovered, not invented. A different implementation of a mathematical algorithm is still the same algorithm.
Don't forget that until (IIRC) 1986, all software was unpatentable specifically because 'software is algorithms, algorithms are math, and (since math is natural law, and is discovered, not invented) math is unpatentable', preventing the many 'heroes' of the computer industry and academia from patenting the seminal ideas upon which all computing is founded from taking out patents. Ideas such as virtual memory, paging systems, superscalar architecture, push-down stacks, queues, the many seminal ideas upon which all computer graphics is based, all the various parts of an arithmetic logic unit, TCP/IP, HTTP, FTP, SMTP and thousands of other ideas were developed without any expectation of patentability. The entire structure of modern computing was developed without patents, except for certain hardware details. Therefore, for the reason of fairness alone, allowing patents for one-click ordering and the other trivialities that all depend on these unpatentable core ideas should never have been allowed. How can an HTML trick be patentable, when HTML itself was not patentable at the time? All of XML, and the many other MLs that were derived from SGML, would have been patentable had they only been created twenty years later. Shouldn't Berners-Lee have made a zillion dollars before Amazon, or Twitter, or Facebook? Shouldn't they have all been made to pay license fees? Allowing patents for trivial 'improvements' (if that is what they are) of implementations on these core ideas and implementations has always been a travesty.
This reminds me of a funny experience I had in school a long time ago. The school had a brand new 'Harris 220' (formerly Perkin Elmer) timesharing machine. It used a timesliced architecture where every task gets its little slice of the CPU every so many milliseconds. I was helping a math student implement a small program to produce ten values of a particular function - I recall it was a Bessel function but I'm not sure - to 7 or 8 decimal places. The function converges very slowly, so we kept adding iterations to the inner loop.
We started with 100 iterations, and got 2 digits. Increasing ever higher, we got to 1 million iterations in the inner loop, and were finally getting sufficient decimal accuracy. Each result took about a minute, so we just watched.
Then the phone in the lab rang - it was the sysadmin, hollering "What did you do to my machine!!!???" It turns out that the inner loop was small enough to fit into the processor's hardware cache, and the timeslice logic was outside the CPU so could only get executed once before the CPU went back into the inner loop. Since the computer handled the I/O for every terminal on campus directly, all over campus the terminals were typing one character out, then waiting a minute, then another character, then wait a minute, ... :D
I wouldn't use Haskell (or Erlang) to write a device driver; I wouldn't use C to write much of anything else. Just as we have automotive vehicles that range from scooters to huge Terex earthmovers, it's important to use the right tool for the job. A friend of mine used to have a Volkswagen bug that had been converted to a pickup truck. It wasn't pretty! :D I wouldn't run a million row relational database on your 4MB device either.
I think you're behind the curve a bit - some review of the features of functional languages may be in order. Haskell really is fast, from what I've read and seen. Some of the 'program some standard thing in a zillion languages' websites have example Haskell implementations that are pretty performant.
The key to the 'no loops' issue is simple - tail recursion. I quote excerpts:
In computer science, a tail call is a subroutine call that happens inside another procedure and that produces a return value, which is then immediately returned by the calling procedure.
[...]
Tail calls are significant because they can be implemented without adding a new stack frame to the call stack. Most of the frame of the current procedure is not needed any more, and it can be replaced by the frame of the tail call, modified as appropriate. The program can then jump to the called subroutine.
[...]
in functional programming languages, tail call elimination is often guaranteed by the language standard, and this guarantee allows using recursion, in particular tail recursion, in place of loops.
I personally like Erlang better - it's more of a 'real world' rather than 'ivory tower' language in its approach and I find it easier to program. Erlang was designed as a useful, extremely reliable language that supports tens of thousands of threads on multiple processors (not even in the same location). Since it was designed as the language to program Ericsson telephone switches with downtime of one or two seconds per year, it had to be good at these things. (It also allows replacement of any part of the code without stopping.) Practicality was more important than theoretical purity. Erlang is slower than Haskell, but I still like it better.
While I haven't written anything serious in Erlang, I was able to write multi-threaded programs that dynamically allocated threads on multiple machines, within a few hours of reading the book, _without_ worrying about most of the usual parallel programming issues such as semaphores, memory mapping, etc. Since image processing is a highly parallel problem, most IP problems are very amenable to such easy-to-do multiprocessing. So also, many types of databases (see CouchDB), and many problems that require rapid dynamic scaling, (see Jabber server). If your program can dynamically decide how much resources it can use and needs, and spawn as many threads on as many processors as is appropriate, I would say that's an order of magnitude more potential than a FORTRAN program. Of course highly-parallel programs by nature tend to require systems that are structured appropriately for the program. Vector processors like Cray (at least the old ones) are good for 'rectangular' problems; but not so good for tree-structured problems, database systems, dynamic I/O handling and other problems that functional languages do very well on.
Imagine implementing something like Jabber or Twitter in FORTRAN! I don't miss programming in FORTRAN - my first 3D graphics programs were in FORTRAN, and it was neither easy, nor very productive. FORTRAN was pushed well beyond its real competence to make the SIGGRAPH Core 3D graphics library standard a workable system. The influential Tektronix "Interactive Graphics Library" 3D Core library was actually programmed using MORTRAN, a structured macro preprocessor, in order to provide a better big-system programming structure.
Of course, since these newer languages' compilers are all written in C or C++, one can argue they are just fancy-schmancy C programs, at least until compiler optimization for functional programming takes these language implementations to a new level. :)