If I had a black box wherein you fed in paper tape encoding data on one end and different paper tape with the data compressed came out the other end (thus taking less tape), that would be a data compression machine. Certainly, if the black box had no software at all but was instead a bunch of gears and such, i.e., totally mechanical, you'd have to agree that the machine would be patentable.
But it's still the type of machine that's being patented (a data compression machine). The preferred embodiment as described in the patent is just one way to do it. Now if instead of gears you had a computer running software, well that doesn't change the functioning of the machine -- the tape output is the same for a given input. Therefore, the fact that a particular embodiment just might happen to use a computer and software rather than gears is irrelevant.
... Bill Gates' home from the 1990s
... so how'd Apple get that patent, anyway?
Patents last for 20 years. Hence, something patented by Microsoft in 1990 would have expired in 2010.
I worked with a guy who understood pointers. He was a brilliant guy. He was also a terrible programmer.
Being able to understand pointers is orthogonal to being someone who write intelligible code.
I've hired guys to do C, Java, perl, and ruby among others
...
And, for the non-C hires, you probably hired the ones who just so happened to have the right aptitude anyway, i.e., they could do pointers if they did C. The "true" programmers will always filter through to those hiring. His point is that Java schools make the hiring problem harder by not filtering out those without the right aptitude. Hence your examples do nothing to invalidate his point.
I can install a GPS transmitter inside one of my computers or my guitar. As a ham radio operator, I can use APRS which is trackable almost anywhere.
And they've already got it.
Beware anyone quoting from joelonsoftware --- that clown is such a douchey!
Instead of an ad hominem remark, how about refuting his points with an actual argument?
So he starts off with stuff about how he's feeling old and the surest sign of it is bitching about "kids these days".
You need to have read more of Joel's writing. That's just his irreverent style.
Got to that point and decided that it's an obviously unsupportable premise. Read a little bit more, and my takeaway is that Joel doesn't know how to spot a good programmer unless they're working in C.
His premise is that, in order to be a good programmer, you need the right kind of metal aptitude which is a you-either-have-it-or-you-don't thing and not a skill that can be learned. While there may be other ways to test for that aptitude, his claim is that one sure-fire way to test for it is the ability to understand pointers. (He makes that point even more explicit here.) And, among today's languages that are in use, the only one that really requires you to understand pointers is C. (Many years ago, it might have been Pascal, but Pascal is pretty much a dead language.)
And [C] absolutely does not require me to understand how the processor works.
Well then you're not writing that has to run fast. Consider this talk. Yes, it's on C++, but the point is that, at least for code that's used a lot (like the page-display code at Facebook), shaving 1% off the running time saves the company an "engineer's salary for 10 years."
In order to achieve that level of performance, you really do need to understand what's going on at the CPU level.
Apparently people have trouble going from Java to C...
You're not the first to notice this.
Tied plans are hiding the true costs of the smartphones Americans...
If carriers sold phones at their true cost -- and therefore very few people bought them -- perhaps it would force the smartphone manufacturers to lower their costs.
[M]any dealers charge $200 dollars to transfer your ownership....
What? But the dealer has no legal role in car ownership after the car is initially purchased. What happens if the new (or old) owner doesn't pay? (I've sold two previous cars and never paid the dealership anything.)
Real Users know your home telephone number.
