Ever notice how that happens, these rash of things? I think it's a result of two things. One is that ideas have a birthpoint, where the technology becomes simple enough to do something like this. Another is that someone hears about the idea, and writes their own. It's not necessarily a re-invention, so much as a parallel invention.
There are a number of examples of this through out history. Edison won the lightbulb patent (I think it was this one), because he filed his patent *1* hour earlier than the other guy. Anyone remember his name? Probably not (well, tilly probably does, but then he knows all that triva...).
So, no, we don't need the 'Reinvented Wheel' section of the monastery. We need the 'Parallel Evolution Showcase' section.
--Chris
e-mail jcwren | [reply] |
I did take a peek at that Image->Table converter posted by bastard, and it is remarkably similar to my own. 'course using GD instead of parsing it yourself is the easy way out. ;-)
The thing that I find most comical is that I actually developed my HTML-izer for the very same reason that bastard did: to get around the restriction on posting images for low ranking monks. I decided that the files were prohibitively too large to actually do it, mind you.
So I definitely think that "parallel evolution" is the appropriate name for it.
Oh, and I'm pretty sure you're actually referring to Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone. There was another phone inventor whose name escapes me at the moment (the letter "Z" keeps occurring to me, though), who was just beaten to the patent office by Graham. Graham had, in fact, paid off the patent clerk to make sure that his phone was the won patented, and the rest is history.
| [reply] |