[sigh] The people that get modded +5:Insightful these days (and at 0 I don't expect anyone to see this, argh)...
A quick rundown about NTP. For more info, see the excellent article in The Washingtonian (DC's local magazine) debunking the crap RIM has been spreading.
NTP owns six patents that RIM is violating. These patents were submitted at the dawn of PDAs -- before the Newton, in fact -- and proposed the general notion of a wireless handheld which receives email, including protocols, long before this was an obvious notion.
The original patent submitter actually built devices based on these patents and hawked them at trade shows.
NTP's lawsuit includes the original inventor as one of its litigants. He's directly suing RIM.
RIM completely ignored NTP's requests for a year.
NTP wasn't formed to go after patents in general: it was largely formed to give the original patent submitters enough power to go after RIM for flaunting them -- and believe me, RIM was flaunting.
RIM behaved monstrously at court. They tried to starve NTP to death by dragging out everything, repeatedly lied to the judge (to the point that he issued a condemnation of them), and even appealed to Congress to throw out the case by fiat because they'd given Congressmen Blackberries and so if RIM lost the case it'd create a problem with "national defense".
RIM has been doing whatever they can to suggest that NTP is a patent whore.
I hate patent whores. They are evil. But NTP is not one of themI. They invented the concepts, produced products based on them, and were screwed by RIM. RIM deserves to fry.
It doesn't matter who Naughton's muse was, Java's object model is close to C++, and very different from Objective-C.
What the hell? Do you know anything about Java?
Java has:
Single Inheritance
Interfaces (a direct copy from Obj-C's Prototypes)
Wrapper classes for basic data objects (another direct copy)
All virtual methods
Late binding
Late method calls which throw an exception on call-time if the object cannot respond to it.
No stack allocation
No pass-by-reference
In what way does this remotely resemble C++'s object model? Java is very very far away from how C++ does things internally. Don't get wrapped up with the intentionally similar syntax.
Haskell has really taken off in comparison, while Lisp continues to flounder.
That explains that giant Haskell industry then.
Languages come and go. Lisp was before its time, and now that hardware has caught up, Lisp is already in the "going" stage. That's the only reason why Lisp "continues to flounder".
Wake me up when Haskell has an actual optimizing compiler.
Don't be so dense. Yeah, technically what he does is illegal.
It's never a good debate tactic to start by conceding that you're wrong.:-)
The guy proposed an illegal solution to the problem. I don't care how illegal it is (if such a thing can be measured). What matters is that his moral system led him to propose an illegal solution instead of a legal one. It tells me a lot about the kind of person he is. And you are, AC.
It's nice to see that your moral system permits you to commit a crime as long as it "leaves no trail". Remind me to not cross your path at dark.
The point: your answer to not having to pay you felt was too-high a price was to break the law and risk your own personal karma. Well, duh. That's a solution to a great many problems. It doesn't make it a good one.
You do not control the rights to a URL beyond the grace offered by your registrar. What you can control is the rights to a trademark. IANAL, but here you go:
Make certain that your company's name is (a) trademarked, (b) in use well before the offending website started using the mark, (c) valid.
Make certain that the offending website is (a) not trademarked and (b) either in the same field as your own, or obviously attempting to profit from your mark.
Contact an intellectual property lawyer (sorry, you have to do this at least once until you get the hang of things).
Have him draft a trademark violation notification letter and formal complaint as detailed here.
Issue the letter to the website, and more importantly, to the registrar which issued the domain name, naming the registrar, and requesting that the registrar yank the domain name in question in return for not being named in a forthcoming suit.
Wait for the registrar to respond. They have 20 days to do so.
I can go to $USED_CD_STORE and buy $ALBUM used for $3.99-$9.99. I walk outside, sit on the curb and rip it to my powerbook in a higher bit rate than the downloadable version. Three minutes later, I walk back into the store and sell the disc back for $2.50.
As long as we're doing illegal things, I've got an even better idea. I can go to $USED_CD_STORE at night, break in, dump as many CDs as I can in a trash bag, and run away in three minutes. And all for free! I'm not going to pay $14 to $25 for a digital album again either!
Not really, any more than any dynamic language is "Lisp-like". AppleScript is a direct descendant of one of the most verbose languages every created: HyperTalk. HyperTalk is *far* from a Lisp-like language.
It's worthwhile being more clear there: Python does *not* have native, fast list operations. It has native, occasionally fast but more often than not unnecessarily O(n) *array* operations. Lisp's "lists" are singly linked lists.
IMHO, Python is far from elegant. Its OO subsystem is a mess, combining the lack of dynamism and simplicity inherent in class-based OO with the slowness of proto-style OO. It's amazing, Python managed to combine the worst features of both approaches to OO.
And functions as first-class objects counts for very little indeed if you don't have a clean, consistent, complete approach to closures. Only recently Python got (with an add-on) a complete closure mechanism. Consistent and clean, no.
Metaprogramming also doesn't count for much if you don't have macros.
I myself think "strongly influenced by Lisp" is too strong. Instead, I'd describe Python as "dumbed-down Lisp". No macros, poor closures, no efficient mechanism for compilation, no continuations, no real numerical tower, no general functions, and a poorly-thought-out (IMHO) OO subsystem. But hey, look, no parentheses!
For a language closer to Lisp's beauty (though only a bit thus), see Ruby.
Re:What about successes?
on
Palm's Mistakes
·
· Score: 1, Informative
Their only mistake was not breaking the law, like RIMM did. Basically, NTP is holding a very vague patent and trying to extort manufacturers who want to make very obvious products.
It's worthwhile calling shenanigans on this. As a great article in this month's Washingtonian (table of contents only) points out, NTP's patents aren't just created for extortion: the patent-holder had actually made and demonstrated, at actual trade shows, actual products of theirs on which the patent was based. In the late '80s and early '90s to boot -- before GRiD, before Apple's Newton, when the concept was not obvious that you could make a small, handheld device which sent and received email using a wireless network. And this isn't some holding firm which buys patents and then tries to yank your chain: the firm's partners include the original patent submitters.
NTP isn't holding a "very vague patent" either. They're holding a half-dozen patents which RIM has violated. Last but not least, RIM's actions in court have been, not to put too fine a point on it, mendacious. The citations they've received from the judge are nothing short of astonishing. At one point they appealed to Congress to throw the case out of court because Congressmen make heavy use of the Blackberries RIM gave them, and thus fining RIM would somehow create -- get ready -- a dent in national security.
Remember when PDAs first came out? We were paying $300+ for something with 8MB RAM and a black-and-white LCD.
Actually, I do remember when PDAs first came out. I even bought a second-generation Palm Pilot Personal (back when they were still "U.S. Robotics"). US$200...
Let's turn on the wayback machine properly. The term PDA ("Personal Digital Assistant") was coined by John Scully, CEO of Apple, to describe how the Newton MessagePad was going to fulfill his dream of the Knowledge Navigator. By definition, PDAs first came out when the Newton came out.
The first Newton MessagePad was $800.
Also, the first Palm device, the Pilot, was shipped by a company called Palm Computing, Inc., whose CEO was Jeff Hawkins. The company started in 1992 developing software for the GRiDPad, then later for the Newton and also for the Zoomer. Only rather later did they decide to go it on their own, after Apple kept going for more advanced machines rather than smaller, simpler, cheaper ones. At that point they got a $44 million stock infusion from US Robotics to put out the Pilot.
Ok, where exactly did you here that the Beetle is bad in a crash? Since when is Four stars considered "bad"?
Hmmm... my Mazda Protege5 (unranked) is a bit heavier/safer car than the Protege 4-door, which gets 5/4/3/5 compared to the Beetle's mere 4/4/5/3. And I think that's less safe than I'd like. And let's be serious: a 2005 Honda Civic 4-door gets 5/5/4/4. Now that's a safe car.
It's true that many countries have British english standards. Oh, except for Japan. And China. And Korea. And the Phillipines. And much of South America. Which all largely use US standards. Oh, wait, that's a rather big chunk of the population, isn't it? By "anywhere else", you mean Africa, India, the Middle East, and parts of Europe. How delightfully eurocentric of you!:-)
British spelling exists in countries worldwide largely because of the influence of remnants of the British empire. A hundred years ago that used to be an all-dominant force. But it's waning now. For better or for worse, US English has been *the* driving force in English for at least fifty years now, particularly after the onset of US dominance in media. Movies and TV and Rap have an amazingly powerful effect on how people speak a language. Practically all changes in English worldwide have been from US vocabulary -- when was the last time you heard of a new British term rising to common use? This may or may not be a *good* thing, but British English has been definitely in retreat over the course of the last century.
Even if your computations come up suggesting that your wall outlet is a cheaper energy source than gas (and I very strongly doubt this), you didn't include the weight of the batteries.
For the same amount of power, batteries are EXTREMELY heavy compared to gas. Particularly given that, as you're hoping for 3-5 years out of deep cycle packs, you'll be needing rather more than your stated 40 mile capacity in batteries so that you can still hit those necessary 40 miles as the 3-5 year range nears an end.
Electric cars are great for the environment. But I am not convinced they have ever been more cost-efficient than gas cars, unless we get a breakthrough in solar cell technology. There's a reason Detroit crushed all those EV-1s.
If it's not automated, it doesn't make a lick of difference if a few dozen or a few hundred people get nailed....THAT is why there will never be a catastrophic Mac virus or worm: there is no way for it to spread en masse, which has been an absolute hallmark of the heavily publicized windows worms.
You mean like ILOVEYOU? Oh, wait, that was entirely human-driven, sorry, it disproved your theory. My bad.:-)
Well, I do have a PhD in computer science, in addition to being a fairly accomplished code hacker and a former professional typesetter. And I'm here to say that TeX's font handling is a disaster that even PhDs in CS -- like myself -- can't figure out. PSNFSS (LaTeX's font system) is a grotesque mess, from its ridiculous 8-character encoding name requirements to its myriad of arcane tools and scripts to install what, on my Mac, requires a single drag-and-drop of a font into a folder. And that's the improvement over the old LaTeX 2.09 days! Unicode? Never heard of it. Formal ligature and alternative glyph handling, what's that? Ugh. Hell, LaTeX even has trouble extending font color declarations and underlining beyond a linebreak without hacking code.
Recognizing that TeX's font handling is in the dark ages, variations on LaTeX have popped up lately, like XeTeX. Easy to use? No. Easier to use than LaTeX? Yes! Standard? Hardly. I applaud Will for getting out there on the bleeding edge with these tools -- but Will, your defense of the LaTeX arcane reminds me of hacker-apologists defending poor Windows design compared to the Mac's drag-and-drop elegance. People that, on another day, you'd gladly (and rightly) be the first to smack down.
That being said, the FreeBSD part doesn't do a whole hell of a lot. Apple has mostly replaced the traditional Unix bits with NextStep Frameworks.... these frameworks are written in ObjectiveC, which means fun times for driver writers.
I'm pretty sure that's incorrect. NeXT, er, Apple has largely relegated Obj-C to the AppKit and FoundationKit, which are in the upper eschelons of the system, approximately in the equivalent position as X and the widget sets in Linux. Indeed, under the FoundationKit, stuff is mostly in C and C++. As to drivers, maybe things have changed a lot, but I thought that Apple had gone the same way that NeXT had before: its DriverKit had an Obj-C front-end but was really mostly written in C++ (as were the drivers).
3 cylinders aren't a novel idea. They're just 120 degrees apart on the crankshaft, no problem. A rotary has no cylinders of equivalent of this and I seriously doubt they'll risk the novelty value of their RX-8 with that kind of engine.
You may be right, they'd want to protect the RX brand: but Mazda had positioned the Renesys engine for, ultimately, a significant line of cars. The standard Renesys engine is a dual 3-chamber, but it seems to me that a single 3-chamber rotary would be straightforward.
Slashdot Mirror
- NTP owns six patents that RIM is violating. These patents were submitted at the dawn of PDAs -- before the Newton, in fact -- and proposed the general notion of a wireless handheld which receives email, including protocols, long before this was an obvious notion.
- The original patent submitter actually built devices based on these patents and hawked them at trade shows.
- NTP's lawsuit includes the original inventor as one of its litigants. He's directly suing RIM.
- RIM completely ignored NTP's requests for a year.
- NTP wasn't formed to go after patents in general: it was largely formed to give the original patent submitters enough power to go after RIM for flaunting them -- and believe me, RIM was flaunting.
- RIM behaved monstrously at court. They tried to starve NTP to death by dragging out everything, repeatedly lied to the judge (to the point that he issued a condemnation of them), and even appealed to Congress to throw out the case by fiat because they'd given Congressmen Blackberries and so if RIM lost the case it'd create a problem with "national defense".
- RIM has been doing whatever they can to suggest that NTP is a patent whore.
I hate patent whores. They are evil. But NTP is not one of themI. They invented the concepts, produced products based on them, and were screwed by RIM. RIM deserves to fry.- Single Inheritance
- Interfaces (a direct copy from Obj-C's Prototypes)
- Wrapper classes for basic data objects (another direct copy)
- All virtual methods
- Late binding
- Late method calls which throw an exception on call-time if the object cannot respond to it.
- No stack allocation
- No pass-by-reference
In what way does this remotely resemble C++'s object model? Java is very very far away from how C++ does things internally. Don't get wrapped up with the intentionally similar syntax.Not to nitpick, but you painstakingly misspelled "Philips" six times.
Languages come and go. Lisp was before its time, and now that hardware has caught up, Lisp is already in the "going" stage. That's the only reason why Lisp "continues to flounder".
Wake me up when Haskell has an actual optimizing compiler.
The guy proposed an illegal solution to the problem. I don't care how illegal it is (if such a thing can be measured). What matters is that his moral system led him to propose an illegal solution instead of a legal one. It tells me a lot about the kind of person he is. And you are, AC.
It's nice to see that your moral system permits you to commit a crime as long as it "leaves no trail". Remind me to not cross your path at dark.
The point: your answer to not having to pay you felt was too-high a price was to break the law and risk your own personal karma. Well, duh. That's a solution to a great many problems. It doesn't make it a good one.
Not really, any more than any dynamic language is "Lisp-like". AppleScript is a direct descendant of one of the most verbose languages every created: HyperTalk. HyperTalk is *far* from a Lisp-like language.
It's worthwhile being more clear there: Python does *not* have native, fast list operations. It has native, occasionally fast but more often than not unnecessarily O(n) *array* operations. Lisp's "lists" are singly linked lists. IMHO, Python is far from elegant. Its OO subsystem is a mess, combining the lack of dynamism and simplicity inherent in class-based OO with the slowness of proto-style OO. It's amazing, Python managed to combine the worst features of both approaches to OO. And functions as first-class objects counts for very little indeed if you don't have a clean, consistent, complete approach to closures. Only recently Python got (with an add-on) a complete closure mechanism. Consistent and clean, no. Metaprogramming also doesn't count for much if you don't have macros. I myself think "strongly influenced by Lisp" is too strong. Instead, I'd describe Python as "dumbed-down Lisp". No macros, poor closures, no efficient mechanism for compilation, no continuations, no real numerical tower, no general functions, and a poorly-thought-out (IMHO) OO subsystem. But hey, look, no parentheses! For a language closer to Lisp's beauty (though only a bit thus), see Ruby.
NTP isn't holding a "very vague patent" either. They're holding a half-dozen patents which RIM has violated. Last but not least, RIM's actions in court have been, not to put too fine a point on it, mendacious. The citations they've received from the judge are nothing short of astonishing. At one point they appealed to Congress to throw the case out of court because Congressmen make heavy use of the Blackberries RIM gave them, and thus fining RIM would somehow create -- get ready -- a dent in national security.
ICFP: I See a First Post!
And the original MessagePad came with 640K of RAM, only part of which was flash. No Newton ever shipped with more than 4MB flash even in later years.
The first Newton MessagePad was $800.
Also, the first Palm device, the Pilot, was shipped by a company called Palm Computing, Inc., whose CEO was Jeff Hawkins. The company started in 1992 developing software for the GRiDPad, then later for the Newton and also for the Zoomer. Only rather later did they decide to go it on their own, after Apple kept going for more advanced machines rather than smaller, simpler, cheaper ones. At that point they got a $44 million stock infusion from US Robotics to put out the Pilot.
The Pilot cost $300.
All better now?
It's true that many countries have British english standards. Oh, except for Japan. And China. And Korea. And the Phillipines. And much of South America. Which all largely use US standards. Oh, wait, that's a rather big chunk of the population, isn't it? By "anywhere else", you mean Africa, India, the Middle East, and parts of Europe. How delightfully eurocentric of you! :-)
British spelling exists in countries worldwide largely because of the influence of remnants of the British empire. A hundred years ago that used to be an all-dominant force. But it's waning now. For better or for worse, US English has been *the* driving force in English for at least fifty years now, particularly after the onset of US dominance in media. Movies and TV and Rap have an amazingly powerful effect on how people speak a language. Practically all changes in English worldwide have been from US vocabulary -- when was the last time you heard of a new British term rising to common use? This may or may not be a *good* thing, but British English has been definitely in retreat over the course of the last century.
Even if your computations come up suggesting that your wall outlet is a cheaper energy source than gas (and I very strongly doubt this), you didn't include the weight of the batteries.
For the same amount of power, batteries are EXTREMELY heavy compared to gas. Particularly given that, as you're hoping for 3-5 years out of deep cycle packs, you'll be needing rather more than your stated 40 mile capacity in batteries so that you can still hit those necessary 40 miles as the 3-5 year range nears an end.
Electric cars are great for the environment. But I am not convinced they have ever been more cost-efficient than gas cars, unless we get a breakthrough in solar cell technology. There's a reason Detroit crushed all those EV-1s.
Would that this hadn't already happened. Yahoo! Stores was rewritten from highly-sophisticated Lisp to C++. And it shows...
Recognizing that TeX's font handling is in the dark ages, variations on LaTeX have popped up lately, like XeTeX. Easy to use? No. Easier to use than LaTeX? Yes! Standard? Hardly. I applaud Will for getting out there on the bleeding edge with these tools -- but Will, your defense of the LaTeX arcane reminds me of hacker-apologists defending poor Windows design compared to the Mac's drag-and-drop elegance. People that, on another day, you'd gladly (and rightly) be the first to smack down.
The proper form is of course: (if (nondeterministically-chosen) (do) nil) ;; TRY removed from options