Your point is plain to see, and it is correct in principle, but there are plenty of bindings for Lisps too. As far as I understand, making CL talk to Oracle is a battery included in the commercial implementations, or available through CLSQL (and therefore through higher-level libraries built on top of it such as Elephant). Sure, CL may not have all of the latest and greatest, but plenty of languages don't either. While I cannot pretend to approach any sort of "hacker-level" competence in Lisp (I'm not even a programmer really), I have yet to find a relatively trivial task (where my definition of trivial is "included in Python's standard library or a very widely used / de facto standard module", since I'm coming from Python) for which there isn't a usable (and often excellent) Lisp tool. YMMV, of course.
Have you looked at "The Joy of Clojure"? I thought the authors did a very good job of showing why exactly they're so excited to be working with the language.
In any case, this is very much a question of discourse. For historical reasons Lisp (at least Common Lisp) seems to have this reputation of being associated with deadly serious people, or alternatively smug lisp weenies, while Ruby people talk about how happy it makes them feel all the time, even though there are plenty of people who clearly have fun with Lisp (even "crufty" "old" CL), and I'm sure many people would regard working with Ruby a chore. I mean, to each his own, I honestly can't imagine there's an objective scale on which CL (much less exciting new languages like Clojure) is "less fun" than Ruby. Things like homoiconicity, on the other, are objective criteria for comparing languages. There are plenty of reasons to like (say) Python better than (say) CL, but to say that homoiconicity or restarts or MOP are no big deal because if you try hard enough you can replicate 95% of that functionality in (say) Perl is a different question entirely.
That was pretty much my point. That maybe the solution to the mystery of the "profound enlightenment experience" around Lisp is that it makes some very happy, but not me.
Have you looked at "The Joy of Clojure"?
I haven't, I'll look into it, thanks. I haven't given up on solving that mystery yet.
I think that Zach Beane is doing a stupendous job with quicklisp. Of course it's nowhere near CPAN at this stage, but it's a tremendous step forward compared to, say, plain asdf-install.
Re your case in point 1, it is precisely this thinking that they want to exploit. "They wouldn't be suing us if they didn't have a case, so let's just settle". Except that if it actually comes to court, chances are it'll be thrown out within a minute.
Um, no. He pointed out that as the smartphone market grows (at the expense of feature phones, probably), HTC and Samsung are riding that wave much better. It's not horribly surprising, since Apple's product is not likely to be immediately affordable to many of those switching from feature phones, but as the smartphone (and eventually tablet) market becomes commoditized it is not a given that Apple will be able to successfully uphold their profit margin by charging relatively high premiums for their value proposition. Of course they might do just that, but that is not something we can take for granted.
From the article, HTC's market share growth in the given interval was 4%, compared to Apple's 3%. Considering they achieved that growth on significantly lower margins than Apple (and consequently much less revenue growth), I don't think it's reasonable to claim HTC are riding the smartphone market growth much better than Apple.
Samsungs 10% growth is more impressive, but again was achieved with much lower margins. Apple could afford to cut their margin significantly if competitive pressure forces their hand, and unlike RIM they have a product which is high demand.
Percent is not the same as percentage points, you know. Growing from 6% to 10% is actually a growth of 66% percent, which sounds much more impressive. Fair point about the margins, but the fact is that Apple's entire business model is built on ensuring their margin stays high by charging large premiums for products that are clearly better than the competition. This is not guaranteed to last forever. The other companies on the other hand are used to living in commoditized markets with razor thin margins. I'm not saying Apple are doomed, but they clearly cannot just write the whole competition off, and they obviously aren't.
Sure, but by a similar logic going from 0.1 to 0.2% represents 100% growth.
But yes, I agree that Apple are very aware of the competition and the pitfalls of potentially losing marketshare. It would be silly for them to be otherwise. I just don't thing they're running scared yet in the way the original article infers they are.
It really does depend on your standard of comparison. Cosmology? Yeah, I guess you're right. Philosophy (or for that matter any humanities department)? Guess who gets more "serves them right" jeers if a a university decides to close down the department
One problem is that peer review is essentially free for the journals, and people have to take time for it out of the other things they have to do (like teaching, or scrambling to get Yet Another Publication before the tenure review comes up, or doing the reporting to 550 external agencies). People are expected to uphold the highest standard of rigour essentially in their free time. In that sense, the current peer review leads to waste, by decreasing the efficiency of the investments originally made into other things.
I agree. I've had two articles reviewed by now (not in a science field, but still), and only one reviewer was relatively unhelpful (they thought the paper was too dense and insufficiently well presented to do a detailed review); all the others, even whey they could not recommend acceptance, went out of their way to suggest various ways of making the paper(s) better.
People are in general much more likely to bother giving negative feedback than to give positive feedback, much less defend other people's efforts. I'm afraid such a system would be no different: would a ton of "likes" offset the negativity of a couple of arseholes wreaking havoc in the comments to make it worth it?
What do you think is the population density of Sweden, Norway, or Finland? There is still very decent broadband to be had up here at 70 degrees northern latitude.
Europe is going to a model where the infrastructure is owned by some arm of the government (quangos like Railtrack in the UK or national rail administrations), because the initial outlay on infrastructure is too big to make private investment or even private-public partnerships profitable for the private actors everywhere except the most densely populated areas. It seems to me that the scheme is somewhat similar here? I don't know whether it would work in the US though.
