1. The Report on the language used a formal syntax specification, one of the first, if not the first, to do so. Semantics were specfied with prose, however.
Unfortunately this is the case with all programming languages (with the exception of standard ML).
Not all others -- for example, LISP 1.5 originally had its semantics defined in terms of actions taken by a LISP interpreter (written in LISP, of course).
There have been a few more with formally defined semantics as well. SPARK and the current Scheme spec (R5RS) both have formally defined semantics. A few others are open to some question -- for example, the VLISP project did a formal definition of the semantics of Scheme, and then did a verified implementation. Unless I'm badly mistaken, that's what led to the formal semantics in the current Scheme spec. Whether VLISP qualified as its own language or not is open to some question though.
Attempts have even been made for C. During the C standardization process, some work was done on a (non-normative) appendix defining its semantics formally as well, but this didn't make it into the standard. I don't know if the last version is still avaiable, but I believe it was based on this paper by Michael Norrish
The designer of Algol-60 is only getting this recognition in 2006? What?
This is to help it fit into the history of the language in general. Even though it's almost always referred to as Algol 60, the ISO standard wasn't approved until 1984!
RTFA. They mention BNF as well -- though they certainly don't give it as much time and space as it deserves. ALGOL was a tremendous accomplishment, but IMO, BNF far greater still. Then again, it's open to argument that John Backus really deserves most of the credit for BNF. At one time, BNF was an abbreviation for "Backus Normal Form" and only later was Peter Naur's name added in.
Interestingly, Naur didn't seem quite as impressed with the success of Algol 60 as many people currently seem to be. In a comment on a draft for the Algol 68 report, Naur said: "...nothing seems to have been learned from the outstanding failure of the Algol 60 report..."
'Affect' is a verb, as in "search engines affect the quality of information on the web".
'Effect' is a noun, as in cause-and-effect: "the effect that search engines have on the quality of information on the web is...".
I agree that the word he wanted was "affecting".
That said, there are perfectly legitimate uses of "affect" as a noun, and of "effect" as a verb. Using "affect" as a noun is mostly restricted to psychologists, but "effect" as a verb is reasonably widespread -- for example, a person might "effect a change". Likewise, "effecting a change" is perfectly legitimate usage as well.
So let's see. This story comes down to the fact that people are generally lazy, so given a choice, they'll try to accomplish their goal as easily as possible. What an amazing revelation!
What's amazing to me is that a newspaper reporter would have the gall to try to act like this is anything new or different at all.
The reality is that the vast majority of the "original content" in the average newspaper has (for decades) been created in nearly the same way. The majority of what they publish is no more than mildly edited versions of stories coming from outside sources. Most "business news" is no more than very mildly edited versions of press releases -- in fact, press releases often come with prewritten stories for the papers (and magazines, etc.) to publish. They'll often even have two or three stories to cover the "event" from a business angle, a human angle, etc. They'll make sure they throw in versions of a couple of different lengths as well, so it's trivial for the newspaper to carry it no matter how much or little space they need to fill.
So what's really new here? About all I can think of is the fact that the web makes a lot of it much more transparent. It's much easier for most people to look at a dozen web sites and see they're all carrying essentially identical stories than for somebody reading a newspaper in Minnesota to see that people reading different newspapers in Alabama, California, and London are all reading essentially identical stories, each with a different "reporter's" name in the by-line.
Submitted: that on the evidence of the SCO case, the USPTO should review its ban on claims to have developed perpetual motion machines.
Unless memory serves me even worse than usual today, your premise is false. You can file a patent on a perpetual motion machine if you choose -- but to do so, you have to submit a working model to the PTO with the application.
Note that at one time, submitting a working model was required for all patent applications. They removed this requirement for other patents, but retained it for perpetual motion machines.
Silly patent trivia: just recently (on Valentine's day, in case anybody cares) the US PTO granted patent number seven million. For a bit of interesting irony, the first (truly) seven-million series patent (700000001) was granted to Research In Motion -- the Blackberry people who are (of course) currently in the lawsuit with NTP over patents...
We should all go back to plain text mode consoles...
I think we should go one further -- I really miss the times on the Control Data mainframe, with its 6-bit character codes, so (at least in the "scientific" character set) you didn't have to deal with that mamby-pamby lower-case text either. Hollerith cards and fan-fold printouts -- now that's programming!
To really upgrade your graphics experience, replace your ASR-33 with a DECWriter LA-20 and watch those frame rates soar!
I remember reading about this undefeatable encryption on slashdot a few months ago.
Seriously, that had to be the most short-lived security scheme ever.
Quantum cryptography (more accurately, quantum key distribution) has been around a bit longer than that -- there was an article in the July 1992 issue of Scientific American discussing work Charles Bennet was already doing with it then. A quick search shows there was a short thread about it on Usenet shortly after publication (though I'll admit, it probably wouldn't be easy to find unless you already knew what to look for).
That means it's been around for a bit over 13 years (maybe 14), wich is a lot longer than many forms of cryptography last. Of course, it is a bit different since, as mentioned above, quantum "cryptography" isn't really a form of cryptography at all, but that's a whole different question. Perhaps more importantly, quantum cryptography has never really been been much more than a theoretical thing anyway, so from a practical viewpoint, this doesn't mean a whole lot.
To respond to another comment elsethread: this would only mean something about tapping underwater (or wherever) optical cables if they were using quantum key distribution to start with. At least the vast majority aren't, so for them it changes nothing -- tapping into such a cable remains difficult but theoretically possible, just as it's always been. Doing it without being detected is considerably more difficult still, but that's mostly a practical thing, not a theoretical one (i.e. it's practically impossible to put in the tap and get the cable spliced back together before somebody notices the break in communication). Tapping an electrical cable is usually done by putting sensors next to the cable that sense the electrical/magnetic field generated by the transmissions in the cable, so the tap never causes any break in communication at all.
One other thing: the mention of Star Trek-like teleportation in TFA is basically a complete red herring -- the teleportation involved here has essentially nothing to do with anything that would transport significant amounts of matter from one place to another.
This is teleportation about the way a flashlight is -- if I turn on a flashlight and point it straight up, a few of those photons could at least theoretically travel for several light years before they hit something to absorb them -- and yes, at least from the viewpoint of the photons doing the traveling, the travel really is instantaneous. To an external observer, they're traveling at the speed of light, but the time dilation effect means that to them, no time elapses between leaving and arriving.
P.S. For the true pedants: yes, since even space isn't an absolute vacuum, they travel only travel close to the theoretical "speed of light" and some time elapses during the trip -- but drastically less than it looks to us as external observers.
Neuromancer began the whole shades-and-black cyberpunk style,
Nonsense! Heinlein (for one) did it better (e.g. Revolt in 2100), well before Gibson did -- in fact, probably before Gibson was even born. Gibson's sole real claim to fame is being the single most overrated author in history.
They might be major influences, but The Matrix had many, many more. That's not a bad thing - it's probably what made the first movie good, and the rest terrible.
I'd say they simply got carried away. They started out with a nice action film with some interesting physchological twists. Unfortunately, they got carried away with their own brilliance and making deep statements about the nature of reality and such.
Master Kung Fu say "There is great depth in subtlety." If you can make your point by asking a question, should you make a statement at all?
First of all, I'd like to note for the record that despite comments elsethread, C++/CLI is not actually a strict superset of C++. It appears that they've gone to considerable lengths to make it as close as they consider reasonable to a strict superset, but it's still true that some perfectly legitimate C++ code won't compile as C++/CLI.
Second, the official objection is only to the name, not the idea or implememtation of the language itself. In case somebody wants to hear the story more or less directly from the horse's mouth, consider reading one of Francis Glassborrow's Usenet posts where he tells about the situation. The subject's been under discussion to varying degrees for a while, but most of it sheds far more heat than light.
All the people talking about "use the best tool for the job" have probably not worked very long in the industry.
This should be modded "inciteful" rather than "insightful". It's nothing more than flamebait, saying "anybody who disagrees with me must be inexperienced and ignorant."
These days, you can do almost anything with any of the popular languages, so there's no point in using more than one or two of them.
I don't know how long the parent's author has been in the industry, but there's a big difference between having N years of experience, and having one year of experience repeated N times. In some cases, language choice can effect development efficiency by (at least) a couple of orders of magnitude.
If everything you do falls into a one (of a very small number of) specific categories, then it can be true that languages are essentially fungible. From the sound of things, his experience falls primarily or exclusively within these categories -- which is perfectly fine. Quite a few people have spent their entire careers writing code in a single language, and that's perfectly fine. Lack of experience outside a particular area, however, should hardly be taken as proof that no other area exists.
I'd say, standardize on Java, C#, or C++ (depending on your needs) as your primary language, add your scripting language of choice, then fire anyone who can't handle that.
This is one step short of sheer nonsense. Just for example, yesterday I worked on code in SQL, Flex, BYACC, C++ and AWK (and if you go along with OpenGL's claim to be a language, that would be another I used).
No one of the languages you've mentioned, on its own, is anywhere close to suitable for the work I did. Given the requirements, C++ would be the closest possibility, but writing the lexing/parsing code directly in C++ would be masochistic at best -- Spirit just can't handle what I'm doing (yet anyway). Lack of performance rules Java and C# out immediately.
As far as replacing the SQL goes, I suppose I could write something in one of the other languages, but when you get down to it, the data in question resides in a server that talks SQL -- you can wrap something else around it if you like, but one way or another, you're going to be using SQL to retrieve the data.
Any company that can't standardize on a language doesn't really have a coherent vision anyway, and probably is either a bunch of folks pretending to be a consulting firm or will disappear before too long.
By this standard, IBM and Microsoft (for only a couple of obvious examples) should have disappeared long ago. To make a long story short, your opinion simply seems to disagree rather strongly with reality.
...I don't see how any other approach is practical in the long term.
This sounds a great deal like a serious lack of vision on your part. There are quite a few approaches that can be entirely practical in the long term.
"The best tool for the job" is clearly the right way to go -- but you have to be careful about how you define "best."
The tactical viewpoint suggests using a large number of specialized tools that allow individual jobs to be done as efficiently as possible. The strategic viewpoint suggests using a small number of general purpose tools to allow the organization as a whole to run more efficiently.
Almost anybody can learn the syntax of a programming language. Most people can learn to translate algorithms into code that will execute those algorithms correctly. Quite a few can even learn to select more or less optimal algorithms for specific conditions.
To be a really good programmer, however, you must be able to look at the human system into which a program will be injected, and find not only the requirements but also the desires fo
Well, it's not the code, per se, that's protected; it's really executing the code on some sort of data processing system that's protected.
Or the method of operating the data processing system (using the code) -- which sounds like the same thing, but turns out (from a legal viewpoint) to be somewhat different. An apparatus claim covers an actual phsyical implementation, where a method claim covers its operation. There are legal limitations on how each type of claim can be enforced.
A method claim can be enforced against pre-existing (past) damages, but requires that you prove the infringement took place -- i.e. that the accused infringer not only produced a device that could infringe, but that they actually operated it in the infringing fashion.
An apparatus claim is a bit easier to enforce, since you only have to show that the apparatus includes all the elements of the claim, not that anybody has necessarily ever used it in the infringing fashion. OTOH, using an apparatus claim, you can only collect damages from the time that the accused infringer was actually warned of the possible infringement.
Of course, IANAL either -- and if I was, I probably wouldn't be handing out free legal advice on/. anyway, so you'd have to be insane to believe this was intended as legal advice even if IWAL.
So if the boundary for patent legitimacy is to be "things you can physically protect," how does that jive with the fact that completely independent discovery/invention can run afoul of existing utility patents?
How are the two related at all? I can touch things like car parts, but how does that have anything to do with who invented them?
The fact of the matter is that at the present time, patents that are applied to software really still apply to tangible products -- things like a CD-ROM (tape, hard drive, whatever manner of storage device) holding a program that does X, or a computer system executing a program to do X, etc.
The fact is that code really is tangible -- you may not be able to "touch" the individual bits themselves (or at least directly sense things like the magnetic domains their bits form on a hard drive) but you can certainly touch the storage device, and without that tangible storage, the code can't exist. Likewise, the code doesn't really do anything until or unless it runs on another tangible device (a computer).
The bottom line is that while it's difficult to do, the idea espoused in TFA is really already a fact WRT computer software.
OTOH, things like business method patents are a whole different story -- here there's generally nothing tangible involved. It's really quite a large step from "may seem intangible as long as you don't think about it much" to "really and truly intangible."
TFA is imprecise enough that it's hard to be sure, but seems to be talking about a combination of Silicon On Insulator (SOI) and strained silicon. In the x86 world, neither of these is terribly new.
Intel announced their use of strained silicon back in 2002, and I'm pretty sure all new Pentiums for at least the last couple of years have used this technology. It's essentially certain that every Intel-based Macintosh already uses strained silicon in its CPU.
As an aside, TFA only talks about "squeezing" silicon, but it's actually possible to either tighten or loosen the lattice. CMOS uses complementary pairs of NMOS and PMOS transistors, and for best results you (normally) want to strain the silicon in opposite directions for each -- though NMOS generally has slightly better characteristics to start with, so IBM may have decided to apply the strain only to the PMOS transistors (or the article may simply be incomplete, and they're really doing both, just like Intel and others do).
OTOH, AMD has been using SOI (also since they went to 90 nm). I'm reasonably certain that all their current x86 processors use this technology. Their dual core processors certainly do, though some of their low-end processors may not use it (I'm afraid I've lost track of which cores use what technology anymore).
What IBM has announced is (apparently) successfully using both of these technologies in the same chip. AFAIK, that hasn't been done in an x86 CPU before, but it's not entirely new either. One thing that should be kept in mind is that x86 CPUs are (mostly) built for the mass-market -- that means using fabrication technology that you can dependably produce in large quantities with decent yields. The IBM POWER series chips have a drastically smaller market and substantially higher price tags. A yield level that's perfectly reasonable for that market would virtually put an x86 supplier out of business. As such, both Intel and AMD are somewhat conservative in what they use in production chips, as opposed to what they can manage to do under lab conditions and such (though their volume also lets them put lots of money into R&D to really push the technology as well).
it's not like Bill Gates didn't manage to get rich without software patents.
This is probably the single biggest and most widely voiced misconception about patents in general. The idea of patents is not primarily to get people to invent things or help them get rich -- it's to get them to publish what they've invented, and turn it over to the public in general after a (fairly) limited period of time.
IOW, the question isn't whether Bill (or Larry, etc.) got rich, but whether any technology they invented will eventually become openly available. Without patents, the answer is generally no -- at least not legally. Admittedly, you could argue (and in the case of Windows many would) that most of us don't want the technology, but in that case the patent didn't really cost you anything either -- in theory in deprived you of using some technology for a while, but if you didn't want that technology, that doesn't really matter a lot.
It is people like this that one day realize the world changed and go, wow, I didn't see that coming.
ROFL. It's far more common for me to see the latest and greatest fad die an ignominious death, and say "Wow, I didn't see that going." Unfortunately, that hint of sarcasm in my voice as I'm saying it usually ruins the effect.
You base your entire point around this; however, my point was not Microsoft's ARB membership, but OpenGL support.
Microsoft was a strong proponent of OpenGL and even added OpenGL to NT natively in the early 90s.
When Microsoft realized OpenGL had no intention of supporting new hardware and gaming concepts, Microsoft jumped ship with DirectX to provide these features.
So when exactly do you propose that this took place? The previous post claimed that it was what led to WinG, which came out in 1994. Microsoft, by contrast, at least claimed (and provided reasonable backing for the claim) that they were serious about supporting OpenGL substantially later than that -- e.g. in a rather long Usenet thread years after that, Stephen Wright talked about Microsoft's wonderful new OpenGL 1.1 implementation.
You can wrestle your argument on the point of Microsoft's official ARB membership, but the fact is OpenGL would NOT BE providing what it is doing today if Microsoft hadn't jumped and created DirectX demonstrating the need for gaming and upcoming popularity on the PC.
Any claim that the world would have been different if X had not happened is obviously speculation, not fact. If you want to make such speculative claims, the very least you need to do is provide some information about the things you think Microsoft originated, that were then adopted by OpenGL. Right now, your claims are not only speculatively, but seem to be entirely unsupported as well.
If you actually want some facts, try reading through this Usenet thread. The posts from Stephen Wright and Mark Kilgard are particularly interesting WRT the Direct3D vs. OpenGL question.
Just as Microsoft has with the WPF, no one else was writing high level language 3D interfaces, this has left a big world open once again for Microsoft.
What's supposed to be so innovative about WPF again? I seem to have missed whatever it is. Specifying graphical objects to be rendered is certainly nothing new -- that goes at least as far back as Renderman. Remote rendering isn't new either; that's been around since VRML. Doing it in XML isn't new either -- Adobe's SVG has done that for a while too. What are we left with? I don't see a lot beyond support from Microsoft, ensuring that it'll be widely used.
And at that time do you even realize the limited functionality that was hardware support in GPUs? Do you realize how important CPU was with games even with the most advanced GPUs at the time?
If you bother to read the thread cited above, you'll note that I've not only read it now, but clearly read it at the time (having posted to it).
One of the links I previously provided talked about the fact that at the time, Direct3D didn't support hardware acceleration of T&L -- even though cards that supported it were available. As for knowing what was done in software, consider my post from a few years later discussing exactly that.
The bottom line is pretty simple: for your argument to make sense, DirectX would have to have consistently supported 3D capabilities of popular hardware well before OpenGL did so. That's simply not the case. In a few cases, it's been ahead, but in other cases it's been behind. OpenGL has been revised far fewer times than DirectX (seven vs. about a dozen) but in most cases, the larger number of revisions has not really reflected adding new capabilities more quickly -- it has primarily reflected features being defined at en
Microsoft did not even have an alternative to OpenGL in development when Microsoft pulled out of OpenGL.
Microsoft was a member of the ARB until early 2003. Offhand, I don't recall whether DirectX 9 was truly "released" by then, but it had been available at least to developers for quite a while at that point.
Microsoft pressed for OpenGL to enhance low level hardware support with intention of doing more than cad/engineering and supporting 3D rendering environment conducive to gaming and directly access video card hardware for gaming.
What sorts of things that games needed did the ARB (supposedly) tell Microsoft they wouldn't support? I seem to remember going through situations like this Usenet thread discusses.
If you look really carefully, you can find a few points in time at which DirectX has supported something that was slightly more difficult with OpenGL -- just for one example, rendering to a bitmap (instead of the frame buffer). None of these, however, was anything that the ARB told MS (or nVidia, ATI, et al) to pound sand on or anything like it. Quite the contrary -- OpenGL has always had a mechanism for extensions that let people integrate new capabilities into the existing framework. In addition, the ARB has moved reasonably quickly to provide (usually cleaner versions of) those capabilities in the core of newer versions as well.
Microsoft started stringing together a set of technologies that were called WinG, mainly a 2D form of rendering with plans for a new model that was a 3D rendering solution with direct video access on par of what the current DOS based games were used to, but in the Windows environment.
Well, you're at least partly right. WinG was certainly 2D in nature -- in fact, its basic idea was only to allow fast display of device independent bitmaps (as opposed to the device dependent bitmaps they'd primarily supported previously). It was not, however, replaced by DirectX or OpenGL or anything similar. Its real replacement was CreateDIBSection, which is still part of GDI (and takes relatively little advantage of graphics hardware).
If you really want to look into the history of OpenGL vs. DirectX, I'd recommend going to Paul Hsieh's OpenGL Vs. DirectX page. This has blow-by-blow documentation of things that were really happening at the time, including references to other articles, Usenet threads, etc., making it pretty easy to track down things like dates, so you have an idea of when things happened in relation to each other (such as the fact that all of this happened long before MS quit the OpenGL ARB).
When DirectX first existed it was the only game in town for any standardized interface to video for accelerated graphics in gaming. Now it is more than just Video...
This much is true -- OpenGL has stuck to more or less the UNIX philosophy -- do one thing, and do it well. Unsurprisingly, DirectX seems to follow the Microsoft philosophy much more, attempting to integrate everything. Unfortunately, (as usual) it only does the job halfway -- on one hand, DirectX has bits and pieces of almost everything, but on the other, the pieces aren't really very well integrated together. It's branded as a single "product", but it's really separate pieces with little real integration, and even with quite a few dissimilarities between the pieces that are entirely gratuitous.
The head of Bill Gates Charity is Mr. Gates ie Billy's father.
That's only sort of true. Bill Gates Senior is one of the three co-chairs of the charity (along with Melinda and Bill himself). As co-chairs, I'd be surprised if any of the three receives any salary from the foundation.
I'm sure most of the normal staff do receive salaries -- working for a charitable foundation doesn't relieve them from having to eat and such. The foundation website lists their executives. According to the foundation's tax return the total salary for all executives of the foundation totalled just over eight hundred thousand dollars. The rest of the employees received a total of about $18.7 million in salaries (though I've no idea how many employees that is, so it's hard to guess how well they're paid).
The foundation's web site also has links to various other financial info for anybody who really cares -- things like how the foundation has its money invested, but take careful note of the file sizes. The listing of the foundation's investments is over 2200 pages long, and is an 80+ megabyte download.
I've formed a rule of thumb that seems applicable here. Anytime somebody starts out by saying something like: "That's a great question", you can be nearly certain that the accurate ending to the sentence would be: "but I'm not going to answer it." Usually there could also be "instead, I'm going to apply spin in the hopes of controlling the damage."
What amazes me is the high level of uniformity to this particular behavior. In psychology, nearly the only rule is that there are exceptions to the exceptions to the exceptions (infinitely repeating). This seems different though -- I've been watching it carefully for a few years now, and I've virtually never seen anything that could even be counted as a partial exception (i.e. giving a partial answer to the question that was actually asked).
If you question the validity of this observation, I'd just like to say: "That's a great question!"
What compels people to make the leap from "I've grasped the basics of a large and complex field" to "I think I'll write an article about it for the Slashdot crowd" via "I'm sure it doesn't matter that I'm not a good writer" and "I think I'll go with a self-satisfied tone"?
If he really understood the basics, he'd undertand how the concept of "hard link" means the file name is not stored in the inode.
There's an old maxim (usually attributed to Butler Lampson) that says almost any problem in programming can be solved with another level of indirection. The reverse is true as well: almost any solution in programming will be broken if a level of indirection is removed -- and that's exactly what he's done in his explanation.
Slashdot Mirror
Not all others -- for example, LISP 1.5 originally had its semantics defined in terms of actions taken by a LISP interpreter (written in LISP, of course).
There have been a few more with formally defined semantics as well. SPARK and the current Scheme spec (R5RS) both have formally defined semantics. A few others are open to some question -- for example, the VLISP project did a formal definition of the semantics of Scheme, and then did a verified implementation. Unless I'm badly mistaken, that's what led to the formal semantics in the current Scheme spec. Whether VLISP qualified as its own language or not is open to some question though.
Attempts have even been made for C. During the C standardization process, some work was done on a (non-normative) appendix defining its semantics formally as well, but this didn't make it into the standard. I don't know if the last version is still avaiable, but I believe it was based on this paper by Michael Norrish
This is to help it fit into the history of the language in general. Even though it's almost always referred to as Algol 60, the ISO standard wasn't approved until 1984!
RTFA. They mention BNF as well -- though they certainly don't give it as much time and space as it deserves. ALGOL was a tremendous accomplishment, but IMO, BNF far greater still. Then again, it's open to argument that John Backus really deserves most of the credit for BNF. At one time, BNF was an abbreviation for "Backus Normal Form" and only later was Peter Naur's name added in.
Interestingly, Naur didn't seem quite as impressed with the success of Algol 60 as many people currently seem to be. In a comment on a draft for the Algol 68 report, Naur said: "...nothing seems to have been learned from the outstanding failure of the Algol 60 report..."
4. If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.
I agree that the word he wanted was "affecting".
That said, there are perfectly legitimate uses of "affect" as a noun, and of "effect" as a verb. Using "affect" as a noun is mostly restricted to psychologists, but "effect" as a verb is reasonably widespread -- for example, a person might "effect a change". Likewise, "effecting a change" is perfectly legitimate usage as well.
What's amazing to me is that a newspaper reporter would have the gall to try to act like this is anything new or different at all.
The reality is that the vast majority of the "original content" in the average newspaper has (for decades) been created in nearly the same way. The majority of what they publish is no more than mildly edited versions of stories coming from outside sources. Most "business news" is no more than very mildly edited versions of press releases -- in fact, press releases often come with prewritten stories for the papers (and magazines, etc.) to publish. They'll often even have two or three stories to cover the "event" from a business angle, a human angle, etc. They'll make sure they throw in versions of a couple of different lengths as well, so it's trivial for the newspaper to carry it no matter how much or little space they need to fill.
So what's really new here? About all I can think of is the fact that the web makes a lot of it much more transparent. It's much easier for most people to look at a dozen web sites and see they're all carrying essentially identical stories than for somebody reading a newspaper in Minnesota to see that people reading different newspapers in Alabama, California, and London are all reading essentially identical stories, each with a different "reporter's" name in the by-line.
If it happens, the headline should read:
SCO turns from UNIX into eunuchs.
Unless memory serves me even worse than usual today, your premise is false. You can file a patent on a perpetual motion machine if you choose -- but to do so, you have to submit a working model to the PTO with the application.
Note that at one time, submitting a working model was required for all patent applications. They removed this requirement for other patents, but retained it for perpetual motion machines.
Silly patent trivia: just recently (on Valentine's day, in case anybody cares) the US PTO granted patent number seven million. For a bit of interesting irony, the first (truly) seven-million series patent (700000001) was granted to Research In Motion -- the Blackberry people who are (of course) currently in the lawsuit with NTP over patents...
I think we should go one further -- I really miss the times on the Control Data mainframe, with its 6-bit character codes, so (at least in the "scientific" character set) you didn't have to deal with that mamby-pamby lower-case text either. Hollerith cards and fan-fold printouts -- now that's programming!
To really upgrade your graphics experience, replace your ASR-33 with a DECWriter LA-20 and watch those frame rates soar!
Quantum cryptography (more accurately, quantum key distribution) has been around a bit longer than that -- there was an article in the July 1992 issue of Scientific American discussing work Charles Bennet was already doing with it then. A quick search shows there was a short thread about it on Usenet shortly after publication (though I'll admit, it probably wouldn't be easy to find unless you already knew what to look for).
That means it's been around for a bit over 13 years (maybe 14), wich is a lot longer than many forms of cryptography last. Of course, it is a bit different since, as mentioned above, quantum "cryptography" isn't really a form of cryptography at all, but that's a whole different question. Perhaps more importantly, quantum cryptography has never really been been much more than a theoretical thing anyway, so from a practical viewpoint, this doesn't mean a whole lot.
To respond to another comment elsethread: this would only mean something about tapping underwater (or wherever) optical cables if they were using quantum key distribution to start with. At least the vast majority aren't, so for them it changes nothing -- tapping into such a cable remains difficult but theoretically possible, just as it's always been. Doing it without being detected is considerably more difficult still, but that's mostly a practical thing, not a theoretical one (i.e. it's practically impossible to put in the tap and get the cable spliced back together before somebody notices the break in communication). Tapping an electrical cable is usually done by putting sensors next to the cable that sense the electrical/magnetic field generated by the transmissions in the cable, so the tap never causes any break in communication at all.
One other thing: the mention of Star Trek-like teleportation in TFA is basically a complete red herring -- the teleportation involved here has essentially nothing to do with anything that would transport significant amounts of matter from one place to another.
This is teleportation about the way a flashlight is -- if I turn on a flashlight and point it straight up, a few of those photons could at least theoretically travel for several light years before they hit something to absorb them -- and yes, at least from the viewpoint of the photons doing the traveling, the travel really is instantaneous. To an external observer, they're traveling at the speed of light, but the time dilation effect means that to them, no time elapses between leaving and arriving.
P.S. For the true pedants: yes, since even space isn't an absolute vacuum, they travel only travel close to the theoretical "speed of light" and some time elapses during the trip -- but drastically less than it looks to us as external observers.
It popularized a new genre about the way each page of a four year old's coloring book introduces us to a new and brilliant genre of art.
Nonsense! Heinlein (for one) did it better (e.g. Revolt in 2100), well before Gibson did -- in fact, probably before Gibson was even born. Gibson's sole real claim to fame is being the single most overrated author in history.
I'd say they simply got carried away. They started out with a nice action film with some interesting physchological twists. Unfortunately, they got carried away with their own brilliance and making deep statements about the nature of reality and such.
Master Kung Fu say "There is great depth in subtlety." If you can make your point by asking a question, should you make a statement at all?
Second, the official objection is only to the name, not the idea or implememtation of the language itself. In case somebody wants to hear the story more or less directly from the horse's mouth, consider reading one of Francis Glassborrow's Usenet posts where he tells about the situation. The subject's been under discussion to varying degrees for a while, but most of it sheds far more heat than light.
This should be modded "inciteful" rather than "insightful". It's nothing more than flamebait, saying "anybody who disagrees with me must be inexperienced and ignorant."
I don't know how long the parent's author has been in the industry, but there's a big difference between having N years of experience, and having one year of experience repeated N times. In some cases, language choice can effect development efficiency by (at least) a couple of orders of magnitude.
If everything you do falls into a one (of a very small number of) specific categories, then it can be true that languages are essentially fungible. From the sound of things, his experience falls primarily or exclusively within these categories -- which is perfectly fine. Quite a few people have spent their entire careers writing code in a single language, and that's perfectly fine. Lack of experience outside a particular area, however, should hardly be taken as proof that no other area exists.
This is one step short of sheer nonsense. Just for example, yesterday I worked on code in SQL, Flex, BYACC, C++ and AWK (and if you go along with OpenGL's claim to be a language, that would be another I used).
No one of the languages you've mentioned, on its own, is anywhere close to suitable for the work I did. Given the requirements, C++ would be the closest possibility, but writing the lexing/parsing code directly in C++ would be masochistic at best -- Spirit just can't handle what I'm doing (yet anyway). Lack of performance rules Java and C# out immediately.
As far as replacing the SQL goes, I suppose I could write something in one of the other languages, but when you get down to it, the data in question resides in a server that talks SQL -- you can wrap something else around it if you like, but one way or another, you're going to be using SQL to retrieve the data.
By this standard, IBM and Microsoft (for only a couple of obvious examples) should have disappeared long ago. To make a long story short, your opinion simply seems to disagree rather strongly with reality.
This sounds a great deal like a serious lack of vision on your part. There are quite a few approaches that can be entirely practical in the long term.
"The best tool for the job" is clearly the right way to go -- but you have to be careful about how you define "best."
The tactical viewpoint suggests using a large number of specialized tools that allow individual jobs to be done as efficiently as possible. The strategic viewpoint suggests using a small number of general purpose tools to allow the organization as a whole to run more efficiently.
Almost anybody can learn the syntax of a programming language. Most people can learn to translate algorithms into code that will execute those algorithms correctly. Quite a few can even learn to select more or less optimal algorithms for specific conditions.
To be a really good programmer, however, you must be able to look at the human system into which a program will be injected, and find not only the requirements but also the desires fo
Or the method of operating the data processing system (using the code) -- which sounds like the same thing, but turns out (from a legal viewpoint) to be somewhat different. An apparatus claim covers an actual phsyical implementation, where a method claim covers its operation. There are legal limitations on how each type of claim can be enforced.
A method claim can be enforced against pre-existing (past) damages, but requires that you prove the infringement took place -- i.e. that the accused infringer not only produced a device that could infringe, but that they actually operated it in the infringing fashion.
An apparatus claim is a bit easier to enforce, since you only have to show that the apparatus includes all the elements of the claim, not that anybody has necessarily ever used it in the infringing fashion. OTOH, using an apparatus claim, you can only collect damages from the time that the accused infringer was actually warned of the possible infringement.
Of course, IANAL either -- and if I was, I probably wouldn't be handing out free legal advice on /. anyway, so you'd have to be insane to believe this was intended as legal advice even if IWAL.
How are the two related at all? I can touch things like car parts, but how does that have anything to do with who invented them?
The fact of the matter is that at the present time, patents that are applied to software really still apply to tangible products -- things like a CD-ROM (tape, hard drive, whatever manner of storage device) holding a program that does X, or a computer system executing a program to do X, etc.
The fact is that code really is tangible -- you may not be able to "touch" the individual bits themselves (or at least directly sense things like the magnetic domains their bits form on a hard drive) but you can certainly touch the storage device, and without that tangible storage, the code can't exist. Likewise, the code doesn't really do anything until or unless it runs on another tangible device (a computer).
The bottom line is that while it's difficult to do, the idea espoused in TFA is really already a fact WRT computer software.
OTOH, things like business method patents are a whole different story -- here there's generally nothing tangible involved. It's really quite a large step from "may seem intangible as long as you don't think about it much" to "really and truly intangible."
Intel announced their use of strained silicon back in 2002, and I'm pretty sure all new Pentiums for at least the last couple of years have used this technology. It's essentially certain that every Intel-based Macintosh already uses strained silicon in its CPU.
As an aside, TFA only talks about "squeezing" silicon, but it's actually possible to either tighten or loosen the lattice. CMOS uses complementary pairs of NMOS and PMOS transistors, and for best results you (normally) want to strain the silicon in opposite directions for each -- though NMOS generally has slightly better characteristics to start with, so IBM may have decided to apply the strain only to the PMOS transistors (or the article may simply be incomplete, and they're really doing both, just like Intel and others do).
OTOH, AMD has been using SOI (also since they went to 90 nm). I'm reasonably certain that all their current x86 processors use this technology. Their dual core processors certainly do, though some of their low-end processors may not use it (I'm afraid I've lost track of which cores use what technology anymore).
What IBM has announced is (apparently) successfully using both of these technologies in the same chip. AFAIK, that hasn't been done in an x86 CPU before, but it's not entirely new either. One thing that should be kept in mind is that x86 CPUs are (mostly) built for the mass-market -- that means using fabrication technology that you can dependably produce in large quantities with decent yields. The IBM POWER series chips have a drastically smaller market and substantially higher price tags. A yield level that's perfectly reasonable for that market would virtually put an x86 supplier out of business. As such, both Intel and AMD are somewhat conservative in what they use in production chips, as opposed to what they can manage to do under lab conditions and such (though their volume also lets them put lots of money into R&D to really push the technology as well).
This is probably the single biggest and most widely voiced misconception about patents in general. The idea of patents is not primarily to get people to invent things or help them get rich -- it's to get them to publish what they've invented, and turn it over to the public in general after a (fairly) limited period of time.
IOW, the question isn't whether Bill (or Larry, etc.) got rich, but whether any technology they invented will eventually become openly available. Without patents, the answer is generally no -- at least not legally. Admittedly, you could argue (and in the case of Windows many would) that most of us don't want the technology, but in that case the patent didn't really cost you anything either -- in theory in deprived you of using some technology for a while, but if you didn't want that technology, that doesn't really matter a lot.
RTFA. He spends a fair amount of time on exactly this.
ROFL. It's far more common for me to see the latest and greatest fad die an ignominious death, and say "Wow, I didn't see that going." Unfortunately, that hint of sarcasm in my voice as I'm saying it usually ruins the effect.
So when exactly do you propose that this took place? The previous post claimed that it was what led to WinG, which came out in 1994. Microsoft, by contrast, at least claimed (and provided reasonable backing for the claim) that they were serious about supporting OpenGL substantially later than that -- e.g. in a rather long Usenet thread years after that, Stephen Wright talked about Microsoft's wonderful new OpenGL 1.1 implementation.
Any claim that the world would have been different if X had not happened is obviously speculation, not fact. If you want to make such speculative claims, the very least you need to do is provide some information about the things you think Microsoft originated, that were then adopted by OpenGL. Right now, your claims are not only speculatively, but seem to be entirely unsupported as well.
If you actually want some facts, try reading through this Usenet thread. The posts from Stephen Wright and Mark Kilgard are particularly interesting WRT the Direct3D vs. OpenGL question.
What's supposed to be so innovative about WPF again? I seem to have missed whatever it is. Specifying graphical objects to be rendered is certainly nothing new -- that goes at least as far back as Renderman. Remote rendering isn't new either; that's been around since VRML. Doing it in XML isn't new either -- Adobe's SVG has done that for a while too. What are we left with? I don't see a lot beyond support from Microsoft, ensuring that it'll be widely used.
If you bother to read the thread cited above, you'll note that I've not only read it now, but clearly read it at the time (having posted to it).
One of the links I previously provided talked about the fact that at the time, Direct3D didn't support hardware acceleration of T&L -- even though cards that supported it were available. As for knowing what was done in software, consider my post from a few years later discussing exactly that.
The bottom line is pretty simple: for your argument to make sense, DirectX would have to have consistently supported 3D capabilities of popular hardware well before OpenGL did so. That's simply not the case. In a few cases, it's been ahead, but in other cases it's been behind. OpenGL has been revised far fewer times than DirectX (seven vs. about a dozen) but in most cases, the larger number of revisions has not really reflected adding new capabilities more quickly -- it has primarily reflected features being defined at en
I do too -- and yours are better than most.
Microsoft was a member of the ARB until early 2003. Offhand, I don't recall whether DirectX 9 was truly "released" by then, but it had been available at least to developers for quite a while at that point.
What sorts of things that games needed did the ARB (supposedly) tell Microsoft they wouldn't support? I seem to remember going through situations like this Usenet thread discusses.
If you look really carefully, you can find a few points in time at which DirectX has supported something that was slightly more difficult with OpenGL -- just for one example, rendering to a bitmap (instead of the frame buffer). None of these, however, was anything that the ARB told MS (or nVidia, ATI, et al) to pound sand on or anything like it. Quite the contrary -- OpenGL has always had a mechanism for extensions that let people integrate new capabilities into the existing framework. In addition, the ARB has moved reasonably quickly to provide (usually cleaner versions of) those capabilities in the core of newer versions as well.
Well, you're at least partly right. WinG was certainly 2D in nature -- in fact, its basic idea was only to allow fast display of device independent bitmaps (as opposed to the device dependent bitmaps they'd primarily supported previously). It was not, however, replaced by DirectX or OpenGL or anything similar. Its real replacement was CreateDIBSection, which is still part of GDI (and takes relatively little advantage of graphics hardware).
If you really want to look into the history of OpenGL vs. DirectX, I'd recommend going to Paul Hsieh's OpenGL Vs. DirectX page. This has blow-by-blow documentation of things that were really happening at the time, including references to other articles, Usenet threads, etc., making it pretty easy to track down things like dates, so you have an idea of when things happened in relation to each other (such as the fact that all of this happened long before MS quit the OpenGL ARB).
This much is true -- OpenGL has stuck to more or less the UNIX philosophy -- do one thing, and do it well. Unsurprisingly, DirectX seems to follow the Microsoft philosophy much more, attempting to integrate everything. Unfortunately, (as usual) it only does the job halfway -- on one hand, DirectX has bits and pieces of almost everything, but on the other, the pieces aren't really very well integrated together. It's branded as a single "product", but it's really separate pieces with little real integration, and even with quite a few dissimilarities between the pieces that are entirely gratuitous.
That's only sort of true. Bill Gates Senior is one of the three co-chairs of the charity (along with Melinda and Bill himself). As co-chairs, I'd be surprised if any of the three receives any salary from the foundation.
I'm sure most of the normal staff do receive salaries -- working for a charitable foundation doesn't relieve them from having to eat and such. The foundation website lists their executives. According to the foundation's tax return the total salary for all executives of the foundation totalled just over eight hundred thousand dollars. The rest of the employees received a total of about $18.7 million in salaries (though I've no idea how many employees that is, so it's hard to guess how well they're paid).
The foundation's web site also has links to various other financial info for anybody who really cares -- things like how the foundation has its money invested, but take careful note of the file sizes. The listing of the foundation's investments is over 2200 pages long, and is an 80+ megabyte download.
What amazes me is the high level of uniformity to this particular behavior. In psychology, nearly the only rule is that there are exceptions to the exceptions to the exceptions (infinitely repeating). This seems different though -- I've been watching it carefully for a few years now, and I've virtually never seen anything that could even be counted as a partial exception (i.e. giving a partial answer to the question that was actually asked).
If you question the validity of this observation, I'd just like to say: "That's a great question!"
If he really understood the basics, he'd undertand how the concept of "hard link" means the file name is not stored in the inode.
There's an old maxim (usually attributed to Butler Lampson) that says almost any problem in programming can be solved with another level of indirection. The reverse is true as well: almost any solution in programming will be broken if a level of indirection is removed -- and that's exactly what he's done in his explanation.