Brighton36 is Factom's favorite troll. Searching brighton36 and Factom will yield more information about our project than nearly any other you might use.
This idea of selling "checksums" is his current favorite smear, but it is of course obvious nonsense.
Ah brings back the days! Once upon a time I did most of my programming in a Forth like language we called "Fifth".
Eclipse today is almost bringing Java development to the point that it is sort of as productive as the Environment we built for Forth that ran on 20 Mhz PCs with 16 Megs of memory.
Almost.
What did we have?
Lazy compilation (functions compiled as needed rather than making us wait for a full compile) which doesn't exist today for Java, unless you count JIT (which honestly is a different concept).
Hot code replacement (that worked every time rather than the "sometimes works" with Eclipse).
Immediate functions for implementing all sorts of functionality algorithmically at compile time instead of writing code generators and initialization functions.
Instant initialization (a side effect of Immediate functions). Our Postscript Interpreter booted in milliseconds on a 16 Mhz 68000 as compared to the 1 or 2 minutes for the Apple Lazerwriter.
Hot key navigation -- Eclipse is about on par.
Online help -- Eclipse has a bit nicer interface, but ours was pretty near "Wiki Easy" to develop and extend and available on a key stroke.
Graphical interfaces and windows, Syntax completion, Syntax highlighting... All ideas that came later. All we had was character graphics, but we did great stuff with that.
Anyway, Thanks for the trip down memory lane. I miss programming right against the metal, but I also don't miss it too!
"... (iPhone, iPad) which was totally new under the sun."
No, the iPhone and iPad and all of Apple's products have been built upon ideas and inventions created by others outside of Apple. If I was made of time and money, I'd wander through the patents held by Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Intellectual Ventures, Nortel (Apple only recently got rights to their patents), HP, HTC, Samsung, Nokia, and the hundreds of other companies (trolls and product companies alike) and document the thousands upon thousands of patents that cover aspects of the Phone and IP
Then I would go through all the public records and and to the best of my ability guess how many of these patents were actually licensed by Apple prior to selling the IPhone and IPad.
My guess? (It is nothing but a guess, but still) I'd expect Apple incorporates 100,000's of thousands of patented features. And I would be shocked if they licensed anything over 50 percent of these patents.
Why do I think their license rate would be that high? I would guess they have a cross license agreement with IBM, TI, and Microsoft, which might cover nearly that many of the infringing patents.
Anyway, I had to respond when someone claims these products were "totally new under the sun".
This idea of selling "checksums" is his current favorite smear, but it is of course obvious nonsense.