wbillingsley

11 ms·

61.
by wbillingsley 7y ago
Neither was user generated content (that's what the original web was) or social networking (irc, email, bulletin boards, etc). Making it useful and usable beyond an academic and techie niche was new.
62.
by wbillingsley 7y ago
The complaints I see about Scala mostly seem to centre on whether other people are adopting Scala. "Google's backing Kotlin", "Rust and Go have more trajectory", "FP programmers in Scala write too complicated
63.
by wbillingsley 7y ago
> and a clean room reimplementation lets you do that legally You're begging the question. This Supreme Court fight is over whether a clean room reimplementation lets them do that legally.
64.
by wbillingsley 7y ago
But is that enough? Let's use a deliberately extreme example to test its limits: Skyrim mods. Does the presence of third party Skyrim mods mean that everything they refer to is an API and therefore non-copyright? The game geometry, map
65.
by wbillingsley 7y ago
> An API doesn't implement anything, it describes a function. Unfortunately, that is also a definition for the whole of programming: describing functions. In Java, the method signature gives only a very incomplete definition, but th
66.
by wbillingsley 7y ago
No, that's not a reasonable interpretation of his comment. Other OO VMs (e.g. dot NET) exist and do not have the Java API. Google's argument is that the API is required to maintain compatibility with Java programs, not bytecode-
67.
by wbillingsley 7y ago
The EU has similar cases occur. For example between Lego and Best-Lock over what features of lego are copyrightable versus which are functional (and their competitors' minifigures are also designed to "interoperate" with lego
68.
by wbillingsley 7y ago
Get in quick, there's only 49 days left of BER months this year!
69.
by wbillingsley 7y ago
Frankly, I don't see a problem with this if it is done consciously rather than automatically. * Usually, I'm interested in currency not recency. If, say, a technical article was written in 2015, I don't exactly care that it w
70.
by wbillingsley 7y ago
Have you tried talking to universities or university video providers (e.g. Echo360)? A lot of universities are part of networks (e.g., the one I teach at, UNE in Australia, is part of the Regional Universities Network.) So they seem to fit
71.
by wbillingsley 7y ago
One of my favourite books, by some of my favourite authors.
72.
by wbillingsley 7y ago
No, but there is some motivation built into the title. HCD grew out of the fact that too many products were being designed by teams that seemed to give little thought to finding out about the people who would have to use them. (It's &q
73.
by wbillingsley 7y ago
I came across this one the other day, which looks like it does this plus producing the binary package for you: https://jitpack.io/ (No, I'm not related to that company in any way. I just saw it yesterday and thought it
74.
by wbillingsley 7y ago
I completely agree with this. Sometimes you have to look closer than people often do to spot self-citation.
75.
by wbillingsley 7y ago
As an indication that this is a hard problem to solve, remember that these papers have usually gone through peer review anonymised. They cite "Smith & Jones 1982", but it might not be obvious from the writing that they are eit
76.
by wbillingsley 8y ago
"Additionally an impetus product for the misconduct treatise hard-working" ...
77.
by wbillingsley 8y ago
Apparently Disney's names for the dwarfs, other than Sneezy, are copyright. So pantomimes regularly turn up with a slightly different array of dwarfs. (And different songs, of course)
78.
by wbillingsley 8y ago
Then again, thinking about the kids' tv shows that only really existed to sell the toys (eg, Transformers) it's not that surprising.
79.
by wbillingsley 8y ago
Now hang on, that can't be right - I didn't once get a Google overlay asking if I've ever bought a gift card for myself instead of someone else (seriously Google, has your data analysis not yet shown you I'M NEVER ANSWER
80.
by wbillingsley 8y ago
More often, you do have a use case, you just don't quite know what it is yet.
81.
by wbillingsley 8y ago
This is one of the things I rather like about Scala. It still leaves suitable room for the programmer to decide "that doesn't count", and defer deciding what does / does not count until after they have their application
82.
by wbillingsley 8y ago
That's not an exclusively cross-cultural issue. The tension between duty and emotion is fairly common in western literature. For example, the entire premise of Lady Windermere's Fan (an Oscar Wilde play) is Lady Windermere interpr
83.
by wbillingsley 8y ago
Hmm, looks like that's changed. Back in 2012, they were reported as "profitable nearly the entire way" in their history. https://gigaom.com/2012/07/09/github-finally-raises-funding-... and more
84.
by wbillingsley 8y ago
This is a furphy. GitHub is already monetized -- it is highly profitable, selling fee-paying plans to corporations. MS's major customer is corporations. Of course they're not going to do a SourceForge because this is a traditional
85.
by wbillingsley 8y ago
I'm not convinced they are -- the models are entirely different. Google receives the vast bulk of its revenue from advertising based on mining what they know about you. Microsoft receives the vast bulk of its funding from companies usi
86.
by wbillingsley 8y ago
Play for Scala
87.
by wbillingsley 8y ago
In any system where you select multiple candidates (including approval voting) you'll get horse-trading between parties before the election. Basically, the minor parties say "if you adopt this policy, we'll direct our prefere
88.
by wbillingsley 8y ago
The thing I most hated about RSS readers was they treated it like email (or even old-style newsgroups), assuming you cared how many articles you hadn't read. Nope, most of it's news (whether tech or some other kind), and the soc
89.
by wbillingsley 8y ago
I disagree The major sounds similar in intent to the Data Science major we introduced into our Bachelor of Computer Science at UNE (in Australia) last year. These days there is something of a branch in computing routes -- to express it in a
90.
by wbillingsley 9y ago
In some fields, such as HCI (and research through design) I think there could be value in moving to a system where instead you version papers and also publish the criticisms that led to its refinement. If you've explored a problem, des

More ›