Interesting Snippets from 2012-10-08

• In Technology Wars, Using the Patent as a Sword - NYTimes.com

  Patents are vitally important to protecting intellectual property. Plenty of creativity occurs within the technology industry, and without patents, executives say they could never justify spending fortunes on new products. And academics say that some aspects of the patent system, like protections for pharmaceuticals, often function smoothly.

  However, many people argue that the nation’s patent rules, intended for a mechanical world, are inadequate in today’s digital marketplace. Unlike patents for new drug formulas, patents on software often effectively grant ownership of concepts, rather than tangible creations. Today, the patent office routinely approves patents that describe vague algorithms or business methods, like a software system for calculating online prices, without patent examiners demanding specifics about how those calculations occur or how the software operates.

• An Interview with Brian Kernighan on C and The C Programming Language | InformIT

  C's influence on other languages is clearly visible in syntactic echoes like braces for grouping and operators like += for incrementing. C++ was specifically designed as "a better C", with notational conveniences and data abstraction for hiding implementation details, while retaining C's efficiency. Semantically, C++ adds facilities to deal with very large programs, for which C is not likely the best choice. Java is in some ways a reaction to the perceived complexity of C++, and of course C# is partly a marketing response to Java. C still sets the standard for efficiency, and is the best way to get close to the hardware while maintaining a reasonable degree of machine independence, so it's likely to remain a significant language in its own right.

  One could argue that Unix's influence on operating systems is easier to assess: aside from Windows in its many variants, most operating systems today are Unix systems. If one counts cellphones, there may well be more *nix systems running than anything else.

• The State Of The Internet [SLIDE DECK] - Business Insider

  A major media company was kind enough to ask me to speak to their senior executives at an off-site last week.

  The topic was an overview of the digital industry.

  Analyst Alex Cocotas from our BI Intelligence team helped me put together an excellent deck, using slides from the BI Intelligence archive.

  We've posted the deck here. We hope you enjoy it.

• Welcome to TypeScript

  TypeScript offers classes, modules, and interfaces to help you build robust components.

  These features are available at development time for high-confidence application development, but are compiled into simple JavaScript.

  TypeScript types let you define interfaces between software components and to gain insight into the behavior of existing JavaScript libraries.

• Half of the Facts You Know Are Probably Wrong - Reason.com

  So is there anything we can do to keep up to date with changing facts (other than constantly reading Reason)? Arbesman suggests that simply knowing that our factual knowledge bases have a half-life should keep us humble and always seeking new information. Well, hope springs eternal. More daringly, Arbesman suggests, “Stop memorizing things and just give up. Our individual memories can be outsourced to the cloud.” Through the Internet, we can “search for any fact we need any time.” Really? The Web is great for finding a list of the ten biggest cities in the United States, but if the scientific literature is merely littered with wrong facts, then cyberspace is an enticing quagmire of falsehoods, propaganda, and just plain bunkum. There simply is no substitute for skepticism.

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