If that wrapper actually supports all the features evenly, and doesn't favor a particular implementation. Is that possible outside a design by committee?

Nothing forces you to read the posts you don't like.

> Well, I'll chirp on the opposite side of discusion. The syntax is completely <->:%^&#$^ $% %^&*% up. Unreadable. Yes, it maybe somewhat pleasant to write code in such syntax, but readability sucks.

Readability is mostly a matter of experience.

> Which means that there are uncountably many ways to screw up the design

And many ways to make it fit a given problem. It's again a matter of experience.

> And each OCaml primadonna developer thinks that his way is the right way. And the rest can't read his code. Fuck that.

Glad you give your opinion. Apparently you have an axe to grind against the OCaml community though. You could probably replace OCaml with any language with a lot of expressiveness, and still be correct - assuming there are "primadonna"s in the OCaml community and that "any other". Or do you mean that this happen only with OCaml?

If a company is producing new ideas, and stock pile them in the form of patents, are they playing the game correctly?

Is it (just) an issue in the case of sotware patent?

That said, I still think that a positive approach (positive criticism) cannot be worse than plain critics.

> "You come in here and think that you know our applications, but you don't know the history and the specific compromises we decided to make, etc, etc."

That's exactly the sort of answers that team should prep for: it is obvious to me that whatever compromise I made for my software stack, if there's a security issue, I will have to reconsider them. The whole point is to not rub it up my face for me to accept the issue more easily (not everyone is an adept of egoless programming). I was also saying that with the perspective of the Sony situation: in Japan, losing face is an extremely serious matter. I don't know how this situation was handled by this guy though: perhaps he did all he could to manage their feelings. It's clear to me though that doing it the IBM black team way did is a recipe for failure.

Actually you raise a good point. ARM has been always doing that though, they built their own cpus when they started, iirc. That would have large consequences on their current business model, it's true.

> And if not, what would prevent NPEs from licensing to one small company and then suing everyone else?

It's already happening. When one of those company win a lawsuit, it is usually followed by them selling a license to whomever they sued...

Which is the lesser evil? Forcing patent holders into producing practical implementation of their patents, or allowing NPEs to exist?

I guess my idea doesn't really hold waters. Most probably smarter people already have thought about that possibility and saw the issues you hinted at. Oh well.

Oh, and what should be done in the case of patent transfers? Should the new holder be subjected to that countdown as well? What if the products tied to a patent is eol'ed? Should the countdown be restarted? I do think so. It's all about the practical side of things.

Why? Where's the benefit for the economy? If somehow the patent trolls reinject the benefits they make (ie what they obtain from the law suit minus the lawyers/legal fees) in the economy, perhaps we could say it's maybe a positive outcome, but there are no garantee that the infringing company would not have done so. So where is the benefit for the economy?

Note that this is even truer when criticism comes from an outsider, and Google's team will be doing exactly that. If they also deal with companies whose culture is very much reputation based (like in Asia), they'll have to be even more cautious.

Define basic teaching.

> a high percentage of french teenagers cant even write french at the end of highschool,

Reference?

I don't know if Russia has the industry to mass produce it, but surely it has the skilled people to design it, and it may probably use foreign fabs for the remaining steps if necessary.

As for the software, with an established ISA, they may quickly leverage exising open source solutions. Of course, Windows and OSX support will be a problem (given that they are the major desktop players).

Politic or not, they know it's doable.

There's clearly a different notion of deterministic there! If your program using ref counting gets a different input, the same object might be released at a different time as well, or am I misunderstanding?

> "OCaml's automatic memory management guarantees that a value will eventually be freed when it's no longer in use, either via the GC sweeping it or the program terminating"

> So, it can guarantee your object will be freed... but only when the program terminates? That's not a very strong promise.

”A or B imply C” is not the same as ”B implies C”. There's a logic mistake there.

How is reference counting safer?