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2011
428

He Who Controls the Bootloader

The day before I submitted this column, news hit the net that the other shoe had finally dropped. After months of waiting and wondering what was to become of Be, we learned that Palm, Inc. will be purchasing Be's technology, intellectual property, and assets. While we don't yet know exactly what Palm plans to do with…

430

Why Lisp Will Never Win (2003)

For 2003 OSCON I proposed to give nine five-minute talks in a 45-minute slot. To avoid confusing this with the real lightning talks sessions, Nat decided to call my talk ``Nine Views of Mark Jason Dominus''. At first I didn't like that title, which sounded too much like self-promotion. But I warmed up to it after a…

442

In the Shadow of John McCarthy

John McCarthy was a genius of the highest order. Much is known about his contribution to Lisp as its inventor, but he was also the mind behind much of early AI research, the progenitor of much of computer chess, and the initiator of time-sharing. As a Lisp advocate I have many thanks due to John McCarthy and it…

445

Apple and the Kindle

The Amazon Kindle is full of all sorts of amazing, delightful touches — the sort of thing you’d expect from an Apple product. For example, when you first take your Kindle out of its (gorgeous!) box, it boots right up knowing your name and logged into your account. This is actually out-Apple-ing Apple: it’s possible…

450

My offer to Google Reader

Like many others, I was curious when Google announced that it would be revamping the Google Reader UI and refactor its social components into Google Plus. To that end, I wrote a brief blog post about what I felt would be a better alternative to stripping out Google Reader's social functionality .