emfle

Advertisement is not a very effective form of marcomm because people tune it out, and if they don't, they don't believe what the ads say anyway.

PR is much more effective. Part of the reason is that if you can make your piece look like a regular article, that in itself makes it more believable. But the other part is that sometimes PR pieces are genuinely useful for the recipient.

If I were in the market for a new x, I think I'd want to read the reviews of xs, even if some of them are paid for by manufacturers of xs.

Fake Steve often makes fun of the Apple "flaks" and the "hacks" that print the "flaks"s output, but I think many people in the market for Apple products actually like reading the gushing stories about Apple.

If PR is the new advertising, then an obvious way to fix the newspapers is to make the relationship with PR companies explicit and charge for it. It's not deceptive if the readers want it and you don't try to hide what you are doing. Charging to make product reviews is one possibility. Offering to write stories about any topic for payment is another, which would make you a direct competitor to PR companies.

There is a balance between making high-quality, independent content and making for-pay content that must be carefully managed, but this is not really all that different from today's print media that range from all-ads newspapers with minimal and very crappy journalistic content, to media with high quality journalistic content and almost no ads.

A company doing this should probably never offer a positive review for cash, and never offer a positive spin on a topic. Only ever offer a review or a story, with payment due regardless of whether the customer likes it or not. In the end, this would be in the interest of the customers anyway, even though they might not believe that at first.

Not me personally, though.

But the lisp style leverages the linguistic propensity to give words special significance. We're also very good at learning languages and parsing sentences in context, so the lisp linguistic style leverages similar natural cognitive abilities.

Linguistic processing does require more cognitive effort, especially when it involves something like a macro that can change the context in which it is invoked. For exactly the same reason, most people are more productive with a graphical user interface than with a command-line one. This is directly related to the fact that abstract linguistic processing is more difficult than manipulation of the tangible, physical objects you find in a GUI.

No, I don't mean unfamiliar. Things like parentheses and prefix notation are unfamiliar to many people, but once learned, they don't require much more cognitive processing than other notation. There are several things in Java that are similarly weird until you learn them.

Tog never says that as far as I can tell.

- Mr. President! The Russians have landed on the moon, and they are busy painting it red!

- No problem. When they are done, we will just write "Drink Coca-Cola" in big white letters.

Fortunately, that particular brand of nerd can safely be ignored. They are a tiny, tiny minority who make a lot of noise on websites such as this.

Why not, if the language makes it simple? I am not claiming that Lisp does not have more powerful abstractions than C, just that they are not usually essential to any given feature in the application.

If Lisp is actually part of the user interface, then clearly there is no way to avoid having a Lisp interpreter. This is begging the question though.

That's just an elaborate way of saying that you can write an interpreter (of size c) for one language in another.

Nevertheless, I have a hard time believing that viaweb could not be written in C short of writing a Lisp interpreter. For that to be true, the runtime compilation of s-expressions would have to be essential to the application; there would have to be no other way to write it.

The obvious algorithm is to sort all the words in order of increasing frequency, then print the 100 first. This algorithm is O(n log n) because of the sorting. It generates the list in order of frequency.

There is an O(n) algorithm that first picks some random item as pivot, then does a partioning like QuickSort where items with higher frequency than the pivot are moved to the front of the array and those with lower frequency to the back.

If the first partition has more than a 100 items, then the algorithm only has to recurse into that part. If it has fewer (k), then it prints everything in the first partition, and recurses into the second to generate the 100 - k best items.

This is expected O(n) and will not generate the list in order of frequency.

In garbage collected languages leaks can be very hard to track down. And they do happen from time to time.

It's getting harder and harder to tell them apart and this means a typical PC more and more looks like two general purpose computers that are talking to each other over the PCI bus. Which is kinda dumb.

Wouldn't that mean you should throw the move that beats the move that would have beaten the opponents previous move?

It's difficult to predict the exact form it will take.

Neither company can afford the risk of getting an injunction granted on their products, and both companies know this.

It also explains why software written in Java sucks so much compared to software written in Lisp or C. Any idiot can get a Java program "working", but an idiot writing C code will never get anything more than "Segmentation Fault".