http://www.amazon.com/47452-equivalent-Energy-Smart-Spiral/dp/B000S5OK12/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1325377514&sr=8-1

Competitor: Wow! Call the lawyers! Open the champagne! We're set for life!

At the same time, at every major lawfirm: Quick, call Competitor and ask them if they would like our services for 5% of the award!

At the same time, at Apple and consumer rights societies: Quick, issue a press release!

AmigaDOS was the shell / file system component of the whole AmigaOS, not the core of the OS. Not sure what fraction I'd call that (maybe 10%?). And yes, that part was based on TRIPOS. The core was Exec (message passing, threading, scheduling, memory allocation, etc), which is the bit written by Carl Sassenrath.

David Gay, who spent a lot of time programming his Amiga 1000/2500...

Universities and academics who value their reputation for open, unbiased research do not accept grants that allow the funder to control publication of the results.

Indeed! The result is you won't evolve, as a result of spending the next 30 years in a dark room!

The real question nobody has addressed here: if C had gone for length+characters for its string, would it have succeeded?

David Gay, scarred by Pascal "strings"
PS: I've often wondered the same about that other decried C feature, the preprocessor.

Somebody needs to look up the Apple II / Visicalc / MS-DOS timeline before they confuse more young readers...

David Gay

Actually this just shows you don't understand programming. The inherent nature of a chair is not a tree. The inherent nature of a program/programming language IS its semantics, which is defined mathematically if you have any desire to be rigorous (and aren't patents supposed to be precise?). The only rigorous definition of a program is a mathematical equation.

David Gay
PS: Lookup axiomatic, denotational or operational semantics for details.

You only see the differences with California or Ohio because you don't have an external reference point to see the similarities (similarly, most English people don't see the similarities with the US as well as, e.g., French people who know both the US and England).

David Gay

You may have long argued that, but if you actually looked at its history (how the architecture was defined, etc), you would actually understand that Itanium(ic) is a not-very-successful(*) joint HP-Intel project.

David Gay
*: For ambitious definitions of success.

Spoken like somebody who has never paid any attention to the difficulty of transliterating (not translating) Cyrillic.

As an example, from wikipedia (and note that the first letter of Tchaikovsky is the same as the first letter of Chernobyl...):

I'm sorry, but no. Vaccination is not effective if it's not sufficiently widely used. So arguing for arbitrary opt-out is arguing to be allowed to let other people die. You may think that that makes you a worthy person, but the rest of us will disrespectfully disagree.

David Gay

Why didn't SI fix our idiotic time system?

They tried (*). It didn't stick. You're welcome to try again, though (but less blood, please).

David Gay
*: not SI, the people who gave you the meter and the kilogram well before SI came along.

Good times. In those days, there was a rule: never meet anyone from the internet IRL. That used to be condsidered a good way to end up in a bodybag.

One of the sillier comments I've seen on slashdot... (weird yes, but bodybags is ridiculous)

David Gay, who did use the internet in 1993, and met people IRL in 1994...

Carpaccio

Steak Tartare

Time for another overrated comment.

David Gay