5 ms·
> The number of actually novel, non-obvious inventions in the software industry that maybe, in some universe, deserve a government-granted monopoly is, perhaps,
by maqr 13y ago
> The number of actually novel, non-obvious inventions in the software industry that maybe, in some universe, deserve a government-granted monopoly is, perhaps, two.
Any idea to which two he might be referring?
- recursive 13y agoMy guesses are garbage collection and Carmack's fast inverse square root.
- spolsky 13y agoI sort of like http://www.google.com/patents/US4464650 http://www.google.com/patents/US4464650 (Ziv/Lempel compression), which doesn't seem obvious to me
- Tyr42 13y agoCan't patent algorithms though, so, can't be that.
- msg 13y agoRSA? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_(algorithm)#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_(algorithm)#History
- cruise02 13y agoHe mentioned on a podcast that Amazon's 1-click is one of them. http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2013/02/podcast-43-false-facts-blood-feuds/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2013/02/podcast-43-false-facts...