Second, how many different polarizations are there?
There are more kinds, circular for example. It means the electric field is rotating, either clockwise or counterclockwise.
But that won't work for screens. The liquid crystal will ROTATE a LINEAR polarization but won't reverse a circular polarization. The screen starts with a light source, linear-polarizes it, selectively rotates the polarization, then linear-polarizes again. Depending on the amount of rotation you get more or less light.
This ancient hack consists of taking the final linear polarizer off the front of the screen and wearing it as a pair of glasses. The screen now emits a constant-brightness, varying-LINEAR-polarization light, which isn't translated into variable intensity until it hits the polarized glasses.
But that means that if you get the polarization right you get the image, if you're off by 90 degrees you get a negative image, and at other angles you get an image that has an intended-versus-perceived intensity graph something like a check-mark. Unless you happen to be at the angle where the letters and the background match exactly it's still readable, and if you're at exactly that wrong angle just tilt your head a LITTLE bit and they reappear.
So stock polarizing sunglasses read all these screens, no problem.
If you could come up with a final filter for the screen that converted, say, the vertical component of linearly-polarized light into right-circular and the horizontal into left-circular, you could then use circularly polarized glasses and defeat linearly-polarized. But I don't know of any physical mechanism (let alone one that could be turned into a cheap thin film) that would do this, even for monochrome, let alone the near-octave of light used by color displays or the full-octave for black-and-white.
Even if you DID come up with a circularly-polarized hack you'd only have TWO possibilities for the glasses - and viewing the display with the wrong one would just give you a negative, but readable, image.
You might as well ask for politicians who have never lied. (That's a bunch I'd like to see take the lie detector test upon swearing to uphold the constitution)
Such politicians would no doubt pass with flying colors - because they're pathological liars.
The "lie detector" is not actually a lie detector. It is a "polygraph", graphing several physiological indicators of stress, so that a trained operator MAY be able to interpret them to determine when the subject is lying. And it operates on the principle that the subject will be under more stress when lying than when telling the truth - either from guilt or fear of being caught.
But a pathological liar won't be under stress. Because he doesn't CARE about whether he tells the truth. MAYBE he'll care about being caught - but maybe not - or maybe he understands polygraphs well enough to recognize that he won't be caught.
The "calibration" questions at the start are both an attempt to convince the subject that he'll be caught if lying (to cause someone who doesn't care to worry when lying) and to guage how much, if any, stress the subject exhibits when lying (so that pathological liars can just be graded "inconclusive").
I recall such a fellow telling me about his run-in with a lie-detector screening of a population at his job site, looking for a thief. Calibration in this test was to let him pick one of a set of three cards, put it back, then be asked "Is it the [such-and-such]?" and to silently think "No, it is not the [such-and-such]." Then the operator would tell him which card it was. The subject in question was enough of a stage-magician to recognize that the game was honest.
So as the three cards were turned, he thought something like:
"No, it is not the jack of hearts." "NO, IT IS NOT THE QUEEN OF SPADES!" "Yes, it is the king of diamonds."
The operator said that there was a curious little blip for the king, but that the card was obviously the queen. "GOTCHA!" thought my acquaintence, who had just been shown that he could beat the machine.
Not that it mattered since he wasn't the thief - he says, in a perfectly calm voice. B-)
In his fictional story, both methods have problems. The problems are more than fictional, since one of the methods relies on the nonsense supposition that since black is the absence of light, the only reason you can see something that's black is that the black isn't PERFECTLY black, and that if you could achieve perfect blackness you could achieve invisibility.
And the other process was to make the subject transparent. Would work if possible but also impractical.
But a "cloak" that either records the view on one side, small patch by small patch, and reconstructs it on the other side ditto, or actually pipes the light around and re-emits it, has been used repeatedly in science fiction since the Golden Age of Campbell's editorship of Astounding/Analog magazine.
I THINK some of 'em even got the need for networking each "camera" to multiple "displays", to account for the virtual passage of light through the thickness of the cloaked space, though I don't recall any of 'em explicitly mentioning the need for the network connectivity to be dynamic, to account for a flexing body.
(I'd dig through my collection to find a few samples but it would take a while. If you want to dig through yours, start with Randall Garret.)
Now if somebody has come up with a particular WAY to pipe the light or its signal around that's worthy of a patent. But if they've just patented the idea of mimicing a transparency (light emission) or do what an octopus does (variable absorbtive color cells to mimic the surface behind), it's been described repeatedly.
An aside: One of the funnier throwaways in a fantasy novel (Too Many Magicians?) was the presentation at a magician's conference of a spell for making EVERYTHING BUT THE EYES invisible. The disadvantage of the previous spells was that they made the subject blind, because the light didn't interact with his eyes. It is easier to hide a floating pair of eyes than a whole body, and easier to be unnoticed if you aren't constantly bumping into things. B-)
Back in the days when computing revolved around IBM mainframes, Amdahl was a plug-compatible mainframe manufacturer.
Still is. I worked for 'em a couple projects, the last just before Fujitsu sucked 'em in.
There was a saying that just having an Amdahl mug on your desk was worth a significant discount when the IBM salesman came calling.
B-)
I see the x86 version of MacOS X as just a bargaining chip - given the huge hassle of converting to x86, and the danger of commoditising Mac hardware, I think this is really a way of getting a better deal out of Motorola and IBM.
Sounds right to me.
A secondary goal might be to keep the rust out of the multi-platform build environment and processor-independence code, in case they ever need to port to some THIRD archetecture. Having your code working solidly cross-platform between a Power PC and something as hysterically asymmetric and other-endian as the Intel archetecture should make it a breeze to port to any other chip - or any future variant of either.
Back when PC boards were designed with red, blue, and black tape on mylar sheets, and UARTs were the cutting edge, there were two vendors of UARTs who had somewhat different designs. A small manufacturer of terminals had designed for one of 'em. But they were new and cutting edge, and the plant capacity was limited. So the vendor was being obstinate about giving them sufficient allocation to make their production targets.
Well the alternative chip was about the same side and functionality but had different pinout. And there was some extra room on the board. So a few days before the salesman was due to visit they hauled out the mylar master for the PC board, laid out the pad pattern of the alternate chip, and started taping up something that looked like reasonable circuitry.
Sure enough, the salesman saw the work in progress, concluded that the terminal was being designed so it could be built with either UART, and paniced. After that there was never a problem getting allocation.
I think the circuitry was never finished and tested. The pads made it onto the final PC board (no point in ripping the tape back off the master) but weren't even dirlled (at 1/2 cent per hole per board). And they came to be known as "The Blackmail Pads". B-)
... look at the older Silicon Valley companies that did make it. How many of those were born from huge efforts by their staff? Apple. Cisco. Palm. Intel. HP. Sun. The list goes on; all companies that were and/or still are legendary for the long hours they expected of their employees.
They were also legendary for the amenities they provided their employees, so they COULD work long hours.
For starters: Free food. Good, solid, delicious meals. (This is a simple equation: Put on a good dinner feed - like a banquet from a different high-quality restaurant's catering operation - every evening - and the engineers stay to eat. Then some of them stay on for several more hours on that hot project. Even if most of 'em eat and run you get several extra hours from your most fanatic personnel and/or those with a hot project or not yet at a good stopping place for the day. It's a LOT cheaper than hiring enough extra people to get a similar amount of added work out, and more manhours by your core team is a LOT more productive than a similar number of hours divided among extra staff.
I've watched more than one company decide that the dinners were an extravagence and cut them - resulting in the loss of about a third of their manhours (and a drop in efficiency of the rest, due to fewer working hours between mental "state reloads") as people left for dinner each night and didn't return. It's like cutting a third of your workforce but still paying their salaries. All but one of those companies went belly-up. (The remaining one is still running, but it delivered products late and its stock is now at 1/200th of its peak.)
But two things to note about the long hours:
- The people had mucho stock options at pennies - like founders' cuts or early-hire cuts. Say a tenth of a percent of the company, each, minimum, for the latter, MUCH more for the former. They were working for "THEIR company", not "THE company".
- You can only do this for a little while. Then you have to back off or you burn out. Long hours for part of a week is more efficient than shorter hours over more days. Long hours for weekdays AND weekends breaks the body and the mind - two weeks tops just before a deadline or when getting a design together, then a week off for recovery and don't do it again for at least a half-year and preferably a year.
15 hour days AND weekends is insane, even for "startup mode". This administrator obviously has a project in trouble and he's trying to set things up to blame the staff - like by setting up impossible conditions then accusing anybody who doesn't leave on his own of "insubordination".
Either he's in CYA mode for a doomed project or he's trying to reduce staff without incuring unemployment-related costs by getting everybody to quit or firing them "for cause".
What about the old theory that AIDS was a lab-created (aka. genetically modified) virus?
It primarily attacks a bunch of outgroups - homosexuals, promiscuous persons, several african tribes (due to their sexual mores), intravenous drug users - plus a few exposed through medical misadventure.
It is pretty much impossible to come up with a vaccine - mutates too rapidly ("noisy" copying mechanism, several errors per copy, needs two chromosomes per particle to work at all, several active strains from local mutations in a single individual)
Anybody really believe a lab (government or otherwise) - especially with the state-of-the-art in molecular biology at the time - could design something that specific and effective - and get it RIGHT - and KEEP IT SECRET?
No way.
Yes, that's how it's taught.
on
Want Freedom?
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· Score: 2
Why is it that there seem to be many Americans that believe that the USA invented the concepts of democracy, freedom and liberty? The issue comes up time and time again. Is it something that is taught in schools in the USA?
Yes, that's about how it's taught in the government-operated schools here. Or at least those of them that still teach it at all, rather than prattling about "Dead White Men who owned Slaves".
What they actually did is perhaps much better: They ENGINEERED an ideology that led to a governmental system that has driven toward increasing freedom for two centuries - putting over things (like abolition of slavery) that were impossible at the time.
Some of the theory was already around. Republics were known from history -and used as a canonical example of a self-destroying system proving that you needed a king. Until the colonists found the Iroquois Confederacy operating quite well in North America, across language barriers, religious differences, and land areas comparable to the whole of Europe.
What they built is now one of the oldest governments around (most of Europe got re-organized during WW II).
With an ideological framework that says "all (hu)men are equal" it has evolved from election by landowners-and-artisans to all men, to women also, add non-whites, add 18-to-20 year olds.
"Can not be compelled to testify against onself" led to miranda warnings, "fruit of the poisoned tree" conviction-overturns, and near-complete extinction of tortured-confessions.
And so on for a multitude of facets of freedom.
Who you calling "us"?
on
Want Freedom?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Makes us look like wusses, throwing it all away in the face of the relatively very minor threats we face in 2002.
Who you calling "us"?
The bulk of the population was ALWAYS willing to throw this stuff away - even (perhaps especially) during the period where those documents were composed. The revolution was run by a tiny fraction of the population even then.
The rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights were largely put there by a coalition of radical (for the time) pressure groups and state legislators. These people were the "anti-federalist" faction of the Founding Fathers and were concerned that the Federalists were staging a coup and setting up a super-state by hijacking an articles-of-confederation-revision committee of the Continental Congress.
The pressure for the freedom of religion clause came primarily from protestant ministers - concerned that the government might select a state religion - other than theirs - and restart the religious wars that led to the founding of several of the colonies by refugees of various religious factions.
Interestingly, Moslems were common in the former colonies (especially near the seaports - lots of sailors). Islam was the canonical example of a non-Christian religion that produced moral people, used in the debates whenever the question of whether "freedom to chose a Christian religion" was what was meant.
The Bill of Rights exists EXPLICITLY to protect unpopular rights of unpopular minorities from trampling by a hostile-to-indifferent majority. And these days the establishment-of-religion clause of the First Amendment has been used for everything from defending abortionists to blocking the Pledge of Allegiance and moments-of-silence in public schools. And the country is still reeling from an act of war by a political sect attempting to start a religious war. Yet a poll finds less than half of the population polled will say "The First Amendment goes too far".
Seems to me that the current US population is MUCH more understanding of, and in favor of, the ideas behind our freedom than the population at the time of the revolution.
So if I figure out how to create a robot that can dance a ballet or a new algorithm to beat the Turing Test I can't patent it?
I think you should be able to.
Me too. More in a moment. (I think we're agreeing, but in different words.)
But then again, IMHO patents on "doing X with a computer when people are already doing X by hand" should be unpatentable
Look, the reason why congress established the patent office in the first place was to "foster innovation". [etc.]
Right.
And if there's something significantly innovative about the WAY you got the computer to pass the turing test, or dance a ballet, that should be patentable.
"Innovative" includes figuring out and replicating the function of how people do something that's not well-understood already - like dancing or "thinking".
But "innovative" does NOT include taking, for instance, a well-understood business process (i.e. "Record the customer's billing and delivery information. Then when he orders something, don't bother asking for it again - just deliver it and bill him.") and automating it in a straightforward way (the "one-click purchase" patent).
Once the general case of automating a well-known process is invented, automating any particular one is "obvious to a person versed in the art" unless there's something that is NOT well known and is NON-obvious about that particular process.
Further, there is a specific exemption to the patenting process for "mathematical algorithms" - and mathematics includes boolean logic, factorization, etc. This brings into question the patentability of "inventions" where the core of the invention is a new way to perform a computation, rather than, say, a new way to use a computation to solve a real-world problem.
But regarding the promotion of innovation: Patents are a two-edged sword. They advance innovation by rewarding the firstcomer but retard innovation by blocking the participation of additional innovators. IMHO when it comes to software the retarding effect FAR outweighs any benefit from the reward.
Copyrights, on the other hand, seem to be an appropriate level of protection. The prevent verbatim copying but allow reverse-engineering. This gives originators a couple years lead in time-to-market (in a VERY-fast moving industry with significant first-mover advantage) and requires that their competitors make a comparable development investment rather simply distributing verbatim copies of someone else's work. But it doesn't create a "MINE!"-field where the inventor of a tiny piece of the puzzle locks out all other players for a couple decades.
Commercial software became a lucrative industry while neither copyright nor patents could be had for software, and exploded into the multibillion-dollar range with copyrights but not patents. IMHO that alone shows that nothing more than copyrights are necessary. And the current collapse of hi-tek in the presence of software and business-practice patents, DMCA, and a host of other intellectual-"property" restrictions hints that the additional restrictions are a net impediment.
Get some PRIORITIES yourself.
on
Solar Surgery
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· Score: 2, Offtopic
[Litany of six off-topic "important" long-term news items deleted] and you people have the gall to be discussing scientists in Israel developing a device for solar eye surgery???? My *god*, people, GET SOME PRIORITIES!
If all other news reporting had to stop except the top six news items of the day we wouldn't have HEARD of:
The bombing of the asprin plant in attempt to hit Bin Laden - precursor to the attack on the Twin Towers.
Israel's handling of the Palestinian Occupation and the "Suicide/Homicide Bombers" - until the middle east was ACTUALLY at open war (which they aren't quite, unless you count the bombers and the missiling of the Palestinian infrastructure as war).
The friction between India and Pakistan until they were at actual war (which they also aren't yet).
Argentina's financial troubles (or Japan's, or Korea's, or...) let alone what attacks the US might be THINKING about.
The way you hear about what YOU consider important is for people to talk about EVERYTHING that THEY consider important - separated into appropriate venues for each class of topics, so you can find the ones you are looking for.
THIS venu is "News for Nerds - Stuff that Matters" (to Nerds).
It is for recent news - and time-limited discussions - about technical issues and other things that will immediately affect MY life (some of which MAY change the ground rules underlying regional and global wars as a side-effect).
It is NOT for an endless 15th-generation rehash of the establishment media's top six propaganda pieces about recent developments in decades, centuries, or millenia-old conflicts halfway around the world.
If you want a venu where slashdot-style discussions can be held on THOSE subjects, by all means START one. The slashcode is free and can be found here, or by following the "code" link on most pages of this site. Hosting is cheap until your traffic gets large - after which you have a lot of people you can dun for contributions or whose attention you can rent to interested parties to cover your costs.
Meanwhile get out of OUR faces. The imminent death of mankind has been predicted continuously for at least two millenia, and probably since language was invented. It hasn't happened yet. Most of us are only interested when an issue for Nerds arises in the latest developments, while the rest will visit other, more appropriate, venues when they ARE interested.
Once you get your site set up, its existence will be "News for Nerds" and suitable meat for an item announcing its presence, and an advertisement in a sigline on YOUR postings - which will remain visible if your postings here are on-topic for THIS venue and thus don't get moderated down.
This will set the UK back at least 10 years. Imagine if you invented something wonderful, and the courts stole it from you.
Sorry, A.C., but they didn't invent it.
Hyperlinking, as practiced on the internet, was described by Ted Nelson, in books published years before they applied for that patent.
Indeed, Ted is the one who coined and popularized the terms "Hypertext" and "Hyperlink".
What bugs me is that, as I read it, the judge's decisions about "central computer", "blocks of data", and "complete address" are all wrong. The patent should have applied to the Internet (by the doctrine of equivalences) and should have been struck due to the prior art.
But then again, IMHO patents on "doing X with a computer when people are already doing X by hand" should be unpatentable. (A generic patent on simulating human workflow would have been patentable shortly after the inventionn of the digital computer, but it's far too late for that now.)
And also IMHO essentially all software patents OTHER than "doing X by computer when people are already doing X by hand" should be struck as patenting "mathematical algorithms".
No sense wasting your time; I can all but guarantee you the conversation will go something like this:
Q: "Does Sigma Designs have any comment on the recent accusation from the XVID team that their MPEG-4 codec infringes on XVID's copyright?"
A: "We're not aware of any court filings pertaining to the matter, so no, we have no comment."
Perhaps you will get that answer, but you may make other shareholders aware of it and start thinking about if they should still own stock.
That will get the company's attention better then anything.
It's better than that.
Conference calls are for analysts, i.e. reporters for the financial media and stock brokers. ANYONE can call in. (But you'll be asked for your affiliation. I recommend one of our big guns be the questioner - like somebody from FSF.)
Ask that question and the whole financial media community will hear it as:
XVID says you stole your core technology from them. They're about to sue. Since it's a GPL case they may have a well-endowed foundation and several large companies that are dependent on GPL for their business models to front the fees and several law professors to do pro-bono work for them as they litigate the enforcability of the GPL, with you funding the anti-GPL side. They'll also have the entire software community spreading the word that your technology is stolen, to your customers and distributors.
What effect will this have on your stock price?
There IS no good answer. So:
The brokers will call their customers and tell 'em to dump ahead of the rush.
The funds will just dump right away and try to beat the brokers to the market.
The analysts will write scathing articles about the stock for the financial papers and shows.
And their stock tanks. Even if the company survives the executives' stock options turn into wallpaper.
And that's BEFORE you get around to actually filing a suit. B-)
I'd go out and short 'em right now (or buy puts) - except that the software codec is not their core product. So they can clean up their act by releasing the source to the software codec under GPL before the conference call.
And the news (including links to XVID's smoking gun and the fact that slashdot has this item already) is already on the Yahoo SIGM stock discussion board. So it will already be factored into the price by the time I could trade. B-(
Microsoft already does release GPL'ed code it did not write...
Not relevant.
Here's another thing Microsoft can't do with any government code put out in the public domain: it can't monopolize access to that code the way it does to Windows code it writes itself
But we're not talking about code in the public domain. We're talking about code under the GPL. Such code is "monopolized" by the Open Source Community.
If the code were in the public domain (or under some other licenses, such as BSD), Microsoft could integrate it, or its features, with the core of its own systems, and distribute them without revealing the source. They couldn't stop OTHER people from doing the same. But other people count't stop them, either.
But the code is under the GPL. The GPL is a RESTRICTIVE LICENSE, based on copyright. If Microsoft integrates such code into one of its OSes, that puts the whole OS under the GPL and requires Microsoft to release the source.
And the NSA's changes aren't ADDITIONS to Linux, but MODIFICATIONS to it. So they're a derived work, and if the NSA releases it it MUST release it under GPL. They don't have the option to release their enhancements into the public domain or under any other license.
Linux is under the GPL, a restirictive license that makes its internals useful to the Open Source Community but not Microsoft. Microsoft's OSes are under the Microsoft ELUA, a restrictive license that makes them useful to Microsoft (and to some extent to its customers) but not to the Open Source community. The NSA is just as much in the wrong when it uses taxpayer funds to enhance Linux and give the enhancements to the Open Source Community but not Microsoft as it would be if it used the same funds to enhance Windows 2000 and give the enhancements to Microsoft but not to the Open Source Community.
So Microsoft was right to squalk. And the NSA was right, once it was pointed out, to stop working on Security Enhanced Linux.
I don't like it either. And I understand that the viral terms of the GPL exist explicitly to prevent a variation of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish", to wit: "Embrace, Enhance, Exclude".
But if the Open Source Community licenses its work in a way that excludes the closed-source community from using the result, it must expect to work without government subsidies. (Or at least without more subsidies that Microsoft, and Sun, and Apple, and SGI, and HP, and IBM, and Amdahl, and SCO, and any other closed-source OS company receive.)
The cost to a closed-source company for using GPLed code has been characterized as "more expensive than money". Seems that catchphrase applies to the cost to the Open Source Community as well.
Unlike copper cables, fibers can be strung through wet and toxic paths (such as sewers) and work just fine.
Use 'em both to interconnect the buildings and to bring in the phone and data services. (You can get phone and data on a single fiber pair no problem.)
If you have to run 'em through a sewer just clean the ends with dilute bleach after the plumber gets 'em strung and sealed in.
Only downside is you have to be careful if you ever need to snake the drain to unclog it from tree roots - unless you're willing to re-string the fibers afterward. (Use a preventitive biocide instead if there are trees near the drainpipe.)
Third - What the government produces, all competitors share equally...
That's what's SUPPOSED to happen.
But if the government enhances a GPLed product and releases the result, the enhancement comes under the GPL.
So proprietary software vendors (like Microsoft) DON'T get to use the improvements - at least not verbatim. The improvements carry the Gnu Public Virus and can't be integrated into the vendor's code base without risking a suit from the FSF for GPL violation.
Of course Microsoft cried "foul". They have a valid point. (How would YOU like it if the CIA spent a lot of YOUR tax money helping Microsoft fix up their software and wouldn't let YOU have the result?)
What kind of idiot puts their most powerful processor at the end of a one way street?
the kind of idiots who know most people just want the best possible OUTPUT for gaming, and so don't want to add any overhead in card performance - or even additional design time - that isn't related to gaming performance. You know, the idiots who make cards that get award after award from gaming companies, then write near-perfect drivers,
here it comes...
port those drivers to linux...
Bingo!
The only problem is in the driver. Hardware's up to the job.
Integrating the language and the OS kills portability, robustness, and security.
If the language is well designed, it will have just the opposite effect. A good language can enforce program portability by abstracting away from low-level architectural details; it can increase robustness and security by statically detecting and rejecting programs that may crash or clobber each other's stores. OS performance can be expected to improve as well, since the OS need not dynamically check for (trap) such error conditions, so figures like context-switch frequency will plummet. [etc.]
Hear hear. Such a language/OS integration can indeed have the advantages you describe, and I'm all for it if/when it arrives.
It's just that I've never seen it successfully executed.
By the way: I notice your examples don't address the issue of porting FROM the integrated language/OS TO another platform - say the same language running on a foreign platform and thus WITHOUT the OS integration.
You also don't address integration with legacy code - in other languages or binary-only - within a single application. (See my story about the death of MAD near the end of this posting.) Looks to me like using foreign-language inclusions would require turning on the protection even for the compiler-vetted object code and thus sacrificing much of the advantage.
Strong typing means that it is not possible to write code which is not type safe. E.g. C does not have strong typing, since it is possible to say things like printf("%s", 5); and compile and run the code with undefined results.
While K&R C didn't have strong typing, ANSI C does. (ANSI cloned it from C++.) It isn't strong enough to meet the strict definiton you gave because it's static (i.e. no run-time checking) and the language allows the author to violate type-safety - mainly by explicitly declaring he wishes to do so (with "void" and typecasts).
In my opinion, strong typing is never bad per se, except that it may result in slightly slower execution because for most languages strong typing means that some level of run-time check need to be done.
Actually compilers can do a good enough job of type-checking statically to catch the bulk of the problems.
The advantage of strong and/or static typing is that it lets the compiler assist you in finding errors. Some people claim that the reduced flexibility impeeds them. But I've found that I can generally express my desires without interference from the language (at least in C and C++), while the people running into trouble were generally not giving adequate attention to their interface definitions. The compiler was just warning them about their confusion or their failure to specify what they wanted to do.
Integrating the language and the OS kills portability, robustness, and security. Integrating the development enviornment with the software under development risks breaking the environment as you develop your target application and sucking the whole environment, bugs and all, into the target.
How has lisp done either of these?
Lisp integrates the application with the development environment.
... behind every buzzword is a concept, sometimes a lump of bogus hype but much more often a key piece of understanding.
And when a whole flock of buzzwords describe different useful techniques that are similar in style but different in form, the underlying concept, if you can discover it and apply it generally, is likely to be EXTREMELY important.
FWIW, "buzzword" has no such connotation to me, and I hope I'm not alone.
You called it. That's exactly how I meant it. There are many buzzwords, common terms-of-art, referring to differrent applications of the same basic principle.
Buzzwords CAN be used to snow the uninitated. But they became buzzwords because they were actually used for something important enough to talk about a lot in serious discussion. So behind every buzzword is a concept, sometimes a lump of bogus hype but much more often a key piece of understanding.
Slashdot Mirror
Second, how many different polarizations are there?
There are more kinds, circular for example. It means the electric field is rotating, either clockwise or counterclockwise.
But that won't work for screens. The liquid crystal will ROTATE a LINEAR polarization but won't reverse a circular polarization. The screen starts with a light source, linear-polarizes it, selectively rotates the polarization, then linear-polarizes again. Depending on the amount of rotation you get more or less light.
This ancient hack consists of taking the final linear polarizer off the front of the screen and wearing it as a pair of glasses. The screen now emits a constant-brightness, varying-LINEAR-polarization light, which isn't translated into variable intensity until it hits the polarized glasses.
But that means that if you get the polarization right you get the image, if you're off by 90 degrees you get a negative image, and at other angles you get an image that has an intended-versus-perceived intensity graph something like a check-mark. Unless you happen to be at the angle where the letters and the background match exactly it's still readable, and if you're at exactly that wrong angle just tilt your head a LITTLE bit and they reappear.
So stock polarizing sunglasses read all these screens, no problem.
If you could come up with a final filter for the screen that converted, say, the vertical component of linearly-polarized light into right-circular and the horizontal into left-circular, you could then use circularly polarized glasses and defeat linearly-polarized. But I don't know of any physical mechanism (let alone one that could be turned into a cheap thin film) that would do this, even for monochrome, let alone the near-octave of light used by color displays or the full-octave for black-and-white.
Even if you DID come up with a circularly-polarized hack you'd only have TWO possibilities for the glasses - and viewing the display with the wrong one would just give you a negative, but readable, image.
You might as well ask for politicians who have never lied. (That's a bunch I'd like to see take the lie detector test upon swearing to uphold the constitution)
Such politicians would no doubt pass with flying colors - because they're pathological liars.
The "lie detector" is not actually a lie detector. It is a "polygraph", graphing several physiological indicators of stress, so that a trained operator MAY be able to interpret them to determine when the subject is lying. And it operates on the principle that the subject will be under more stress when lying than when telling the truth - either from guilt or fear of being caught.
But a pathological liar won't be under stress. Because he doesn't CARE about whether he tells the truth. MAYBE he'll care about being caught - but maybe not - or maybe he understands polygraphs well enough to recognize that he won't be caught.
The "calibration" questions at the start are both an attempt to convince the subject that he'll be caught if lying (to cause someone who doesn't care to worry when lying) and to guage how much, if any, stress the subject exhibits when lying (so that pathological liars can just be graded "inconclusive").
I recall such a fellow telling me about his run-in with a lie-detector screening of a population at his job site, looking for a thief. Calibration in this test was to let him pick one of a set of three cards, put it back, then be asked "Is it the [such-and-such]?" and to silently think "No, it is not the [such-and-such]." Then the operator would tell him which card it was. The subject in question was enough of a stage-magician to recognize that the game was honest.
So as the three cards were turned, he thought something like:
"No, it is not the jack of hearts."
"NO, IT IS NOT THE QUEEN OF SPADES!"
"Yes, it is the king of diamonds."
The operator said that there was a curious little blip for the king, but that the card was obviously the queen. "GOTCHA!" thought my acquaintence, who had just been shown that he could beat the machine.
Not that it mattered since he wasn't the thief - he says, in a perfectly calm voice. B-)
In his fictional story, both methods have problems. The problems are more than fictional, since one of the methods relies on the nonsense supposition that since black is the absence of light, the only reason you can see something that's black is that the black isn't PERFECTLY black, and that if you could achieve perfect blackness you could achieve invisibility.
And the other process was to make the subject transparent. Would work if possible but also impractical.
But a "cloak" that either records the view on one side, small patch by small patch, and reconstructs it on the other side ditto, or actually pipes the light around and re-emits it, has been used repeatedly in science fiction since the Golden Age of Campbell's editorship of Astounding/Analog magazine.
I THINK some of 'em even got the need for networking each "camera" to multiple "displays", to account for the virtual passage of light through the thickness of the cloaked space, though I don't recall any of 'em explicitly mentioning the need for the network connectivity to be dynamic, to account for a flexing body.
(I'd dig through my collection to find a few samples but it would take a while. If you want to dig through yours, start with Randall Garret.)
Now if somebody has come up with a particular WAY to pipe the light or its signal around that's worthy of a patent. But if they've just patented the idea of mimicing a transparency (light emission) or do what an octopus does (variable absorbtive color cells to mimic the surface behind), it's been described repeatedly.
An aside: One of the funnier throwaways in a fantasy novel (Too Many Magicians?) was the presentation at a magician's conference of a spell for making EVERYTHING BUT THE EYES invisible. The disadvantage of the previous spells was that they made the subject blind, because the light didn't interact with his eyes. It is easier to hide a floating pair of eyes than a whole body, and easier to be unnoticed if you aren't constantly bumping into things. B-)
Back in the days when computing revolved around IBM mainframes, Amdahl was a plug-compatible mainframe manufacturer.
Still is. I worked for 'em a couple projects, the last just before Fujitsu sucked 'em in.
There was a saying that just having an Amdahl mug on your desk was worth a significant discount when the IBM salesman came calling.
B-)
I see the x86 version of MacOS X as just a bargaining chip - given the huge hassle of converting to x86, and the danger of commoditising Mac hardware, I think this is really a way of getting a better deal out of Motorola and IBM.
Sounds right to me.
A secondary goal might be to keep the rust out of the multi-platform build environment and processor-independence code, in case they ever need to port to some THIRD archetecture. Having your code working solidly cross-platform between a Power PC and something as hysterically asymmetric and other-endian as the Intel archetecture should make it a breeze to port to any other chip - or any future variant of either.
Back when PC boards were designed with red, blue, and black tape on mylar sheets, and UARTs were the cutting edge, there were two vendors of UARTs who had somewhat different designs. A small manufacturer of terminals had designed for one of 'em. But they were new and cutting edge, and the plant capacity was limited. So the vendor was being obstinate about giving them sufficient allocation to make their production targets.
Well the alternative chip was about the same side and functionality but had different pinout. And there was some extra room on the board. So a few days before the salesman was due to visit they hauled out the mylar master for the PC board, laid out the pad pattern of the alternate chip, and started taping up something that looked like reasonable circuitry.
Sure enough, the salesman saw the work in progress, concluded that the terminal was being designed so it could be built with either UART, and paniced. After that there was never a problem getting allocation.
I think the circuitry was never finished and tested. The pads made it onto the final PC board (no point in ripping the tape back off the master) but weren't even dirlled (at 1/2 cent per hole per board). And they came to be known as "The Blackmail Pads". B-)
This reminds me of the Domino Theory as the USA applied it to SE Asia in the 1960's, as the main excuse to go into Vietnam.
Speaking of The Domino Theory: Did you notice the list of related stories?
Linux Journal: Pakistan Government Looks to the Linux Users Group(Jul 15, 2002)
Update: Linux Bill Introduced in Finland(Jun 18, 2002)
Update: Ending Microsoft FUD: An Interview with Peruvian Congressman Villanueva(May 21, 2002)
GNU.org.pe: Peruvian Congressman's Open Letter to Microsoft(May 07, 2002)
Enterprise Linux Today: Venezuelan Bank Marks Major Financial Deployment of Linux for S/390(May 03, 2001)
Looks like a row of dominoes to me. B-)
... look at the older Silicon Valley companies that did make it. How many of those were born from huge efforts by their staff? Apple. Cisco. Palm. Intel. HP. Sun. The list goes on; all companies that were and/or still are legendary for the long hours they expected of their employees.
They were also legendary for the amenities they provided their employees, so they COULD work long hours.
For starters: Free food. Good, solid, delicious meals. (This is a simple equation: Put on a good dinner feed - like a banquet from a different high-quality restaurant's catering operation - every evening - and the engineers stay to eat. Then some of them stay on for several more hours on that hot project. Even if most of 'em eat and run you get several extra hours from your most fanatic personnel and/or those with a hot project or not yet at a good stopping place for the day. It's a LOT cheaper than hiring enough extra people to get a similar amount of added work out, and more manhours by your core team is a LOT more productive than a similar number of hours divided among extra staff.
I've watched more than one company decide that the dinners were an extravagence and cut them - resulting in the loss of about a third of their manhours (and a drop in efficiency of the rest, due to fewer working hours between mental "state reloads") as people left for dinner each night and didn't return. It's like cutting a third of your workforce but still paying their salaries. All but one of those companies went belly-up. (The remaining one is still running, but it delivered products late and its stock is now at 1/200th of its peak.)
But two things to note about the long hours:
- The people had mucho stock options at pennies - like founders' cuts or early-hire cuts. Say a tenth of a percent of the company, each, minimum, for the latter, MUCH more for the former. They were working for "THEIR company", not "THE company".
- You can only do this for a little while. Then you have to back off or you burn out. Long hours for part of a week is more efficient than shorter hours over more days. Long hours for weekdays AND weekends breaks the body and the mind - two weeks tops just before a deadline or when getting a design together, then a week off for recovery and don't do it again for at least a half-year and preferably a year.
15 hour days AND weekends is insane, even for "startup mode". This administrator obviously has a project in trouble and he's trying to set things up to blame the staff - like by setting up impossible conditions then accusing anybody who doesn't leave on his own of "insubordination".
Either he's in CYA mode for a doomed project or he's trying to reduce staff without incuring unemployment-related costs by getting everybody to quit or firing them "for cause".
What about the old theory that AIDS was a lab-created (aka. genetically modified) virus?
It primarily attacks a bunch of outgroups - homosexuals, promiscuous persons, several african tribes (due to their sexual mores), intravenous drug users - plus a few exposed through medical misadventure.
It is pretty much impossible to come up with a vaccine - mutates too rapidly ("noisy" copying mechanism, several errors per copy, needs two chromosomes per particle to work at all, several active strains from local mutations in a single individual)
Anybody really believe a lab (government or otherwise) - especially with the state-of-the-art in molecular biology at the time - could design something that specific and effective - and get it RIGHT - and KEEP IT SECRET?
No way.
Why is it that there seem to be many Americans that believe that the USA invented the concepts of democracy, freedom and liberty? The issue comes up time and time again. Is it something that is taught in schools in the USA?
Yes, that's about how it's taught in the government-operated schools here. Or at least those of them that still teach it at all, rather than prattling about "Dead White Men who owned Slaves".
What they actually did is perhaps much better: They ENGINEERED an ideology that led to a governmental system that has driven toward increasing freedom for two centuries - putting over things (like abolition of slavery) that were impossible at the time.
Some of the theory was already around. Republics were known from history -and used as a canonical example of a self-destroying system proving that you needed a king. Until the colonists found the Iroquois Confederacy operating quite well in North America, across language barriers, religious differences, and land areas comparable to the whole of Europe.
What they built is now one of the oldest governments around (most of Europe got re-organized during WW II).
With an ideological framework that says "all (hu)men are equal" it has evolved from election by landowners-and-artisans to all men, to women also, add non-whites, add 18-to-20 year olds.
"Can not be compelled to testify against onself" led to miranda warnings, "fruit of the poisoned tree" conviction-overturns, and near-complete extinction of tortured-confessions.
And so on for a multitude of facets of freedom.
Makes us look like wusses, throwing it all away in the face of the relatively very minor threats we face in 2002.
Who you calling "us"?
The bulk of the population was ALWAYS willing to throw this stuff away - even (perhaps especially) during the period where those documents were composed. The revolution was run by a tiny fraction of the population even then.
The rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights were largely put there by a coalition of radical (for the time) pressure groups and state legislators. These people were the "anti-federalist" faction of the Founding Fathers and were concerned that the Federalists were staging a coup and setting up a super-state by hijacking an articles-of-confederation-revision committee of the Continental Congress.
The pressure for the freedom of religion clause came primarily from protestant ministers - concerned that the government might select a state religion - other than theirs - and restart the religious wars that led to the founding of several of the colonies by refugees of various religious factions.
Interestingly, Moslems were common in the former colonies (especially near the seaports - lots of sailors). Islam was the canonical example of a non-Christian religion that produced moral people, used in the debates whenever the question of whether "freedom to chose a Christian religion" was what was meant.
The Bill of Rights exists EXPLICITLY to protect unpopular rights of unpopular minorities from trampling by a hostile-to-indifferent majority. And these days the establishment-of-religion clause of the First Amendment has been used for everything from defending abortionists to blocking the Pledge of Allegiance and moments-of-silence in public schools. And the country is still reeling from an act of war by a political sect attempting to start a religious war. Yet a poll finds less than half of the population polled will say "The First Amendment goes too far".
Seems to me that the current US population is MUCH more understanding of, and in favor of, the ideas behind our freedom than the population at the time of the revolution.
I think you should be able to.
Me too. More in a moment. (I think we're agreeing, but in different words.)
Look, the reason why congress established the patent office in the first place was to "foster innovation". [etc.]
Right.
And if there's something significantly innovative about the WAY you got the computer to pass the turing test, or dance a ballet, that should be patentable.
"Innovative" includes figuring out and replicating the function of how people do something that's not well-understood already - like dancing or "thinking".
But "innovative" does NOT include taking, for instance, a well-understood business process (i.e. "Record the customer's billing and delivery information. Then when he orders something, don't bother asking for it again - just deliver it and bill him.") and automating it in a straightforward way (the "one-click purchase" patent).
Once the general case of automating a well-known process is invented, automating any particular one is "obvious to a person versed in the art" unless there's something that is NOT well known and is NON-obvious about that particular process.
Further, there is a specific exemption to the patenting process for "mathematical algorithms" - and mathematics includes boolean logic, factorization, etc. This brings into question the patentability of "inventions" where the core of the invention is a new way to perform a computation, rather than, say, a new way to use a computation to solve a real-world problem.
But regarding the promotion of innovation: Patents are a two-edged sword. They advance innovation by rewarding the firstcomer but retard innovation by blocking the participation of additional innovators. IMHO when it comes to software the retarding effect FAR outweighs any benefit from the reward.
Copyrights, on the other hand, seem to be an appropriate level of protection. The prevent verbatim copying but allow reverse-engineering. This gives originators a couple years lead in time-to-market (in a VERY-fast moving industry with significant first-mover advantage) and requires that their competitors make a comparable development investment rather simply distributing verbatim copies of someone else's work. But it doesn't create a "MINE!"-field where the inventor of a tiny piece of the puzzle locks out all other players for a couple decades.
Commercial software became a lucrative industry while neither copyright nor patents could be had for software, and exploded into the multibillion-dollar range with copyrights but not patents. IMHO that alone shows that nothing more than copyrights are necessary. And the current collapse of hi-tek in the presence of software and business-practice patents, DMCA, and a host of other intellectual-"property" restrictions hints that the additional restrictions are a net impediment.
If all other news reporting had to stop except the top six news items of the day we wouldn't have HEARD of:
The bombing of the asprin plant in attempt to hit Bin Laden - precursor to the attack on the Twin Towers.
Israel's handling of the Palestinian Occupation and the "Suicide/Homicide Bombers" - until the middle east was ACTUALLY at open war (which they aren't quite, unless you count the bombers and the missiling of the Palestinian infrastructure as war).
The friction between India and Pakistan until they were at actual war (which they also aren't yet).
Argentina's financial troubles (or Japan's, or Korea's, or ...)
let alone what attacks the US might be THINKING about.
The way you hear about what YOU consider important is for people to talk about EVERYTHING that THEY consider important - separated into appropriate venues for each class of topics, so you can find the ones you are looking for.
THIS venu is "News for Nerds - Stuff that Matters" (to Nerds).
It is for recent news - and time-limited discussions - about technical issues and other things that will immediately affect MY life (some of which MAY change the ground rules underlying regional and global wars as a side-effect).
It is NOT for an endless 15th-generation rehash of the establishment media's top six propaganda pieces about recent developments in decades, centuries, or millenia-old conflicts halfway around the world.
If you want a venu where slashdot-style discussions can be held on THOSE subjects, by all means START one. The slashcode is free and can be found here, or by following the "code" link on most pages of this site. Hosting is cheap until your traffic gets large - after which you have a lot of people you can dun for contributions or whose attention you can rent to interested parties to cover your costs.
Meanwhile get out of OUR faces. The imminent death of mankind has been predicted continuously for at least two millenia, and probably since language was invented. It hasn't happened yet. Most of us are only interested when an issue for Nerds arises in the latest developments, while the rest will visit other, more appropriate, venues when they ARE interested.
Once you get your site set up, its existence will be "News for Nerds" and suitable meat for an item announcing its presence, and an advertisement in a sigline on YOUR postings - which will remain visible if your postings here are on-topic for THIS venue and thus don't get moderated down.
This will set the UK back at least 10 years. Imagine if you invented something wonderful, and the courts stole it from you.
Sorry, A.C., but they didn't invent it.
Hyperlinking, as practiced on the internet, was described by Ted Nelson, in books published years before they applied for that patent.
Indeed, Ted is the one who coined and popularized the terms "Hypertext" and "Hyperlink".
What bugs me is that, as I read it, the judge's decisions about "central computer", "blocks of data", and "complete address" are all wrong. The patent should have applied to the Internet (by the doctrine of equivalences) and should have been struck due to the prior art.
But then again, IMHO patents on "doing X with a computer when people are already doing X by hand" should be unpatentable. (A generic patent on simulating human workflow would have been patentable shortly after the inventionn of the digital computer, but it's far too late for that now.)
And also IMHO essentially all software patents OTHER than "doing X by computer when people are already doing X by hand" should be struck as patenting "mathematical algorithms".
Q: "Does Sigma Designs have any comment on the recent accusation from the XVID team that their MPEG-4 codec infringes on XVID's copyright?"
A: "We're not aware of any court filings pertaining to the matter, so no, we have no comment."
Perhaps you will get that answer, but you may make other shareholders aware of it and start thinking about if they should still own stock.
That will get the company's attention better then anything.
It's better than that.
Conference calls are for analysts, i.e. reporters for the financial media and stock brokers. ANYONE can call in. (But you'll be asked for your affiliation. I recommend one of our big guns be the questioner - like somebody from FSF.)
Ask that question and the whole financial media community will hear it as:
There IS no good answer. So:
The brokers will call their customers and tell 'em to dump ahead of the rush.
The funds will just dump right away and try to beat the brokers to the market.
The analysts will write scathing articles about the stock for the financial papers and shows.
And their stock tanks. Even if the company survives the executives' stock options turn into wallpaper.
And that's BEFORE you get around to actually filing a suit. B-)
I'd go out and short 'em right now (or buy puts) - except that the software codec is not their core product. So they can clean up their act by releasing the source to the software codec under GPL before the conference call.
And the news (including links to XVID's smoking gun and the fact that slashdot has this item already) is already on the Yahoo SIGM stock discussion board. So it will already be factored into the price by the time I could trade. B-(
How would this effect the European ISP community?
One way it would affect the Europeans is to create a big incentive for individuals to adopt internet telephony. B-)
Microsoft already does release GPL'ed code it did not write ...
Not relevant.
Here's another thing Microsoft can't do with any government code put out in the public domain: it can't monopolize access to that code the way it does to Windows code it writes itself
But we're not talking about code in the public domain. We're talking about code under the GPL. Such code is "monopolized" by the Open Source Community.
If the code were in the public domain (or under some other licenses, such as BSD), Microsoft could integrate it, or its features, with the core of its own systems, and distribute them without revealing the source. They couldn't stop OTHER people from doing the same. But other people count't stop them, either.
But the code is under the GPL. The GPL is a RESTRICTIVE LICENSE, based on copyright. If Microsoft integrates such code into one of its OSes, that puts the whole OS under the GPL and requires Microsoft to release the source.
And the NSA's changes aren't ADDITIONS to Linux, but MODIFICATIONS to it. So they're a derived work, and if the NSA releases it it MUST release it under GPL. They don't have the option to release their enhancements into the public domain or under any other license.
Linux is under the GPL, a restirictive license that makes its internals useful to the Open Source Community but not Microsoft. Microsoft's OSes are under the Microsoft ELUA, a restrictive license that makes them useful to Microsoft (and to some extent to its customers) but not to the Open Source community. The NSA is just as much in the wrong when it uses taxpayer funds to enhance Linux and give the enhancements to the Open Source Community but not Microsoft as it would be if it used the same funds to enhance Windows 2000 and give the enhancements to Microsoft but not to the Open Source Community.
So Microsoft was right to squalk. And the NSA was right, once it was pointed out, to stop working on Security Enhanced Linux.
I don't like it either. And I understand that the viral terms of the GPL exist explicitly to prevent a variation of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish", to wit: "Embrace, Enhance, Exclude".
But if the Open Source Community licenses its work in a way that excludes the closed-source community from using the result, it must expect to work without government subsidies. (Or at least without more subsidies that Microsoft, and Sun, and Apple, and SGI, and HP, and IBM, and Amdahl, and SCO, and any other closed-source OS company receive.)
The cost to a closed-source company for using GPLed code has been characterized as "more expensive than money". Seems that catchphrase applies to the cost to the Open Source Community as well.
Digging is not allowed.
Are there drains or sewers?
Unlike copper cables, fibers can be strung through wet and toxic paths (such as sewers) and work just fine.
Use 'em both to interconnect the buildings and to bring in the phone and data services. (You can get phone and data on a single fiber pair no problem.)
If you have to run 'em through a sewer just clean the ends with dilute bleach after the plumber gets 'em strung and sealed in.
Only downside is you have to be careful if you ever need to snake the drain to unclog it from tree roots - unless you're willing to re-string the fibers afterward. (Use a preventitive biocide instead if there are trees near the drainpipe.)
Third - What the government produces, all competitors share equally...
That's what's SUPPOSED to happen.
But if the government enhances a GPLed product and releases the result, the enhancement comes under the GPL.
So proprietary software vendors (like Microsoft) DON'T get to use the improvements - at least not verbatim. The improvements carry the Gnu Public Virus and can't be integrated into the vendor's code base without risking a suit from the FSF for GPL violation.
Of course Microsoft cried "foul". They have a valid point. (How would YOU like it if the CIA spent a lot of YOUR tax money helping Microsoft fix up their software and wouldn't let YOU have the result?)
the kind of idiots who know most people just want the best possible OUTPUT for gaming, and so don't want to add any overhead in card performance - or even additional design time - that isn't related to gaming performance. You know, the idiots who make cards that get award after award from gaming companies, then write near-perfect drivers,
here it comes...
port those drivers to linux
Bingo!
The only problem is in the driver. Hardware's up to the job.
The driver has been ported to Linux.
So fix it!
Closed source? Reverse engineer it.
Integrating the language and the OS kills portability, robustness, and security.
If the language is well designed, it will have just the opposite effect. A good language can enforce program portability by abstracting away from low-level architectural details; it can increase robustness and security by statically detecting and rejecting programs that may crash or clobber each other's stores. OS performance can be expected to improve as well, since the OS need not dynamically check for (trap) such error conditions, so figures like context-switch frequency will plummet. [etc.]
Hear hear. Such a language/OS integration can indeed have the advantages you describe, and I'm all for it if/when it arrives.
It's just that I've never seen it successfully executed.
By the way: I notice your examples don't address the issue of porting FROM the integrated language/OS TO another platform - say the same language running on a foreign platform and thus WITHOUT the OS integration.
You also don't address integration with legacy code - in other languages or binary-only - within a single application. (See my story about the death of MAD near the end of this posting.) Looks to me like using foreign-language inclusions would require turning on the protection even for the compiler-vetted object code and thus sacrificing much of the advantage.
Strong typing means that it is not possible to write code which is not type safe. E.g. C does not have strong typing, since it is possible to say things like printf("%s", 5); and compile and run the code with undefined results.
While K&R C didn't have strong typing, ANSI C does. (ANSI cloned it from C++.) It isn't strong enough to meet the strict definiton you gave because it's static (i.e. no run-time checking) and the language allows the author to violate type-safety - mainly by explicitly declaring he wishes to do so (with "void" and typecasts).
In my opinion, strong typing is never bad per se, except that it may result in slightly slower execution because for most languages strong typing means that some level of run-time check need to be done.
Actually compilers can do a good enough job of type-checking statically to catch the bulk of the problems.
The advantage of strong and/or static typing is that it lets the compiler assist you in finding errors. Some people claim that the reduced flexibility impeeds them. But I've found that I can generally express my desires without interference from the language (at least in C and C++), while the people running into trouble were generally not giving adequate attention to their interface definitions. The compiler was just warning them about their confusion or their failure to specify what they wanted to do.
Integrating the language and the OS kills portability, robustness, and security. Integrating the development enviornment with the software under development risks breaking the environment as you develop your target application and sucking the whole environment, bugs and all, into the target.
How has lisp done either of these?
Lisp integrates the application with the development environment.
... behind every buzzword is a concept, sometimes a lump of bogus hype but much more often a key piece of understanding.
And when a whole flock of buzzwords describe different useful techniques that are similar in style but different in form, the underlying concept, if you can discover it and apply it generally, is likely to be EXTREMELY important.
Buzzwords" has the connotation of empty talk,
FWIW, "buzzword" has no such connotation to me, and I hope I'm not alone.
You called it. That's exactly how I meant it. There are many buzzwords, common terms-of-art, referring to differrent applications of the same basic principle.
Buzzwords CAN be used to snow the uninitated. But they became buzzwords because they were actually used for something important enough to talk about a lot in serious discussion. So behind every buzzword is a concept, sometimes a lump of bogus hype but much more often a key piece of understanding.
I suspect he's right about factorial.
Nope, I calculate it at n(n-1). Which is equal to n^2 - n.
Two-way interactions go with n(n-1)/2, order N squared.
N-way interactions go with N!.
(Either one is too big if you can avoid it. B-) )