scottdw2

13 ms·

61.
by scottdw2 15y ago
A patent is not an inalienable right. Definetly not in the libriterian sense. 1. A patent is, fundamentally anti-libriterian. It's an example of the government interfering with private action, buy granting exclusive rights solely to a singl
62.
by scottdw2 15y ago
Patents aren't actually property, so I don't think the 5th ammendment applies. Invalidating a patent doesn't deprive the holder of anything. It just stops the law from injoining others from engaging in protected activities.
63.
by scottdw2 15y ago
GC is inevitable, but so is no GC. In the 80s people wanted to write software on platforms where GC was not practical. Having a GC when you have 640 K of ram is silly. So people used languages that didn't have GC. But then the platforms gre
64.
by scottdw2 15y ago
Yes, but they usually use some form of monad to hold either an exception or a value. The implementation of >>= (haskell calls it bind, buts it's useful to think of it like an overloaded ";" that takes a continuation as a parameter )
65.
by scottdw2 15y ago
I don't think it's gutsy. 1. They are a patent troll. 2. They have no brand to tarnish. 3. Even if they did have a brand to tarnish (oh, your THOSE patent trolls, no thanks I'll sell to someone else), their assests can easily be transferred
66.
by scottdw2 15y ago
Checkout Microsoft's last quarterly report: http://apps.shareholder.com/sec/viewerContent.aspx?companyid... The "Microsoft Business Division" (which includes Office) had 5.266 Billion in Revenue, out of 16.428 Billion in total revenue. Th
67.
by scottdw2 15y ago
I disagree, completely. 1) The iPad is not a no-brainer. Far from it. Apple is a public company, with billions of dollars of revenue and many short-term focused investors it needs to satisfy. The same pressures of "profit maximizing resourc
68.
by scottdw2 15y ago
I'll concede the IPhone bit. But the iPad is disruptive. You don't have to dominate a market to be disrupted. You only need to be upset by a "not as good, but more convenient" low margin alternative. That is the iPad.
69.
by scottdw2 15y ago
The IPhone disrupts the IPod and the IPad disrupts the Mac business. The IPad is not just an "improved product". It's disruptive.
70.
by scottdw2 15y ago
The best thing to do would be for them to disrupt themselves. Apple does that. Historically Microsoft has shied away from "canabalizing its existing businesses". Netdocs is a famous example. It's much better to own the disruptions rather th
71.
by scottdw2 15y ago
According to Clayton Christensen's model of disruptive innovation, once disruptors push all incumbents out of a low margin market segment, the prices in the lower market segment plummet, and margins drop toward zero. The only way for the di
72.
by scottdw2 15y ago
The answer is simple: "Disruption". Smartphones are disruptive to the PC industry. In fact they are a canonical example of disruptive innovation. A phone is nowhere near as good as a PC, but it's cheaper and more convenient. It fits in your
73.
by scottdw2 15y ago
The primary purpose of hacker news is to aggregate content from other places on the web.... I find someone searching through C2 and posting links to interesting articles to HN a useful for service. Othwerwise HN has no purpose.
74.
by scottdw2 15y ago
Interesting article! I have one nit-pick: Multiple dispatch doesn't, in and of its self, imply something isn't object oriented. You can certainly argue that multiple dispatch, as it exists in CLOS is not object oriented, but it is possible
75.
by scottdw2 15y ago
WTF? I just got 2 down votes for this? It was a serious question. I want to know, did they take a negative measurement too, and if they didn't, how does this prove relativity?
76.
by scottdw2 15y ago
Did the experiment use a control? That is, did they put other gyros in places where space time should not have been twisted and observe no deviation? If not, how do they know that the deviation was in fact caused by twisting space time?
77.
by scottdw2 15y ago
I think is may not be testing the right things. For example, what if the test was in Visual Basic, and instead of asking questions about non virtual destructors in virtual classes, it was asking questions about uses of various database Apis
78.
by scottdw2 15y ago
Actually... he misses a big use case (stolen from haskell)... Using extension methods (which accept null receivers) and "as" you can get pretty readable straight line code... something like: name = (obj as Customer).LiftName() ?? "Guy
79.
by scottdw2 15y ago
There is a bit of a logical fallacy here. He says "the data is not extremely accurate", "metadata indicates apple intended to store locations of access points", "therefore the phone is not traking your location". That's simply false. It is
80.
by scottdw2 16y ago
While this is a nice improvement, it still needs work. The biggest problem is that: 1. Not all warnings have a -W command line option. 2. Sometimes a single -W option will control more than warning message. Contrast this with pretty much ev
81.
by scottdw2 16y ago
Which means its fast because of the way it binds symbols, not because of the way it parses infix expressions. One thing to consider is that such a design hurts the usability of the language. It's a lot easier to not have to worry about forw
82.
by scottdw2 16y ago
I don't actually know if Delphi is fast or not, I'll take your word on it. However, I'd be skeptical that the parser is one of the main reasons for its fast compile times. In my experience, parsing is really a tiny amount of compilation tim
83.
by scottdw2 16y ago
Actually, it doesn't have to be. There are 3 forms of the interrupt instruction. 2 1 byte versions for specifying either int 3 or int 4, and a 2 byte version that can specify any interrupt number. It's possible to use either the one byte or
84.
by scottdw2 16y ago
If they have the ability to precompiled JS code, they would, of course, precompile the benchmark. Why would you run a benchmark in "slow" mode if you had a fast mode available? There's nothing wrong with precompiling the benchmark. I'm not
85.
by scottdw2 16y ago
Yes. I'm not comming up with an excuse. Other java script engines, like the one in web kit, minimize the amount of analysis they do of java script source, in order to avoid extra overhead. Something like an optimizing compilation pass is ge
86.
by scottdw2 16y ago
That's a pretty big conclusion to jump to (they are cheating the test) based on a small amount of evidence. If they were "precompiling" the java script for the test, and had functionality to "preconpile" java script code in the cache, would
87.
by scottdw2 16y ago
I didn't like the essay much. The comparison with medeival medicine is a little shallow. One big problem he misses, is that unlike medeival medicine, computer science theory is well developed. CS has a solid theoretical foundation. The schi
88.
by scottdw2 16y ago
2 things: 1) Eliminate the word career from your vocabulary. It's something invented by beaurocrats as a rationalization for being timid. 2) Ask your self "can I identify with this product?" Or, more importantly, are you OK with other peopl
89.
by scottdw2 16y ago
You bring up some interesting points. One question worth pondering, though, is "what does it mean for a tool to be powerful"? Since you brought up VIM let's take text editors as an example. VIM is indeed a powerful editor. It gives you a lo
90.
by scottdw2 16y ago
The article is somewhat flawed. It starts with the notion that placing too much weight on "important people" is bad, because those people may not be that important afterall, if you take a broad view. That seems reasonable. The flaw however,

More ›