I agree that you can't really own an idea. But our problem is this: A song is essentially and idea, a business is essentially the execution of a collection of ideas, a story is an idea, a government is the execution of a group of ideas, a program is a collection of ideas, a product is the fruit of a group of ideas and methods derived from ideas.
Ideas are the Genesis of all the elements of our human made society. How do you allow people to get paid for creating an idea? If I generate millions of wonderful ideas and never get credit, what incentive is there for me to continue doing so.
All our IP laws are about trying to find a way to give a person credit for an idea. You can own an idea in the sense that you birthed it. Once the idea is in another person's mind, do they own it as much as you did? They can be said to own the idea but they did not birth it. They "stood on your shoulders" to get the idea.
Do you deserve credit? yes. Can you get compensation for it? maybe. Is it fair that the person who "birthed" VisiCalc doesn't get any royalties for "Excel" even though the Genesis for the idea of an Electronic Spreadsheet was birthed in his mind? No.
So life's not fair and ideas do get "stolen" but that's the nature of an idea.
I'm merely standing on the shoulders of a bunch of other midgets. We can see nearly as high as those who stand on the shoulders of giants... it just takes more of us and a little bit more walking.
I plan on retiring by becoming a school teacher sometime between the ages of 45 and 55. I'd look for being a High School level Math teacher or an instructor at a local community college. If I had plenty of money and time, I'd go back to college and study biochem, nano-tech, materials science, or whatever else interested me... writing software to solve those problems that I took an intrest in. If you want me to write a solution to a problem that doesn't intrest me... well... then... you'd better pay me.
So booting might at worst take 30 seconds extra due to sleep commands. My solution would be to replace _all_ sleep() shell scripting commands with usleep() and put 2 or 3 zeros behind the number of seconds .
Actually you're pointing at a fundamental flaw. The majority of these extraneous "sleep" calls are there to wait for some timing issue. What you really want and need instead of a sleep call is an "event listener" which will tell you when the USB device is registered and assigned and then emulating a SCSI device or whatever it does. I personally feel Linux needs an event bus of some kind to drive hardware level events up to user space.
Don't just study computers, get a minor in CS and a major in something else... anything else... Computers and Business, Computers and Physics, Computers and Biology, Computers and Art, Computers and Theater... Computers and English.
Really. You need to diversify your investments, skill and monitary investments both. Diversification is the key. Find a niche market you can fill and fill it well. Computers and Video production... things like that. What are your other intrests? How do computers fail to help people in these areas? How can you improve the use of computers in these other fields? Do you know anyone who is in a special industry? Have you volunteered to do anything in the community? How can computers help them?
Due to the costs of living, American programmers can never compete on costs. The only options left are 1) to convince the buyers (i.e. hiring companies) that the quality of your work is higher, or 2) offer some different kind of labor in a different sector.
Well, you can say that your quality is comperable and that you're one-stop-shopping convenient. That's why people shop at super-stores in theory they get one-stop-shopping. So if a programmer in the US can provide "Value Added Retail" services like a VAR does perhaps he can get employment on that.
The Americans of the future will write articles about the American economy and sell books about the evils of Outsourcing. Americans of the future will be writers, artists, architects, and thespians. They will be free from having to produce anything, having to create wealth, or having to work. It will be a jobless utopia.
...a utopia for anyone with more than 2.2 million dollars in the bank right now. Everyone else will be shipped to Elbonia. Then, the US will institute a national lottery to execute via painless injection a certain percentage of the population each year. This will force the population to implode at a rate that will keep the shrinkage of the nation's wealth and the shrinkage of the population in step. Eventually there will only be five American families left and they will take turns running the government...
When I shop for a doctor I always look for the cheapest one.
How many people would go to a cut rate doctor? A cut rate lawyer? A cut rate home builder? A cut rate mechanic?
There's a floor to market pricing. If you charge too little for your market area... why are you? Is there something wrong with your service?
Now consider a house for $100k in rural Texas versus a house for $100k in the thick of San Jose. One is reasonably priced and one is a shack without any windows. The difference is their markets. An India based programmer for $11k per year versus a US based programmer for $11k per year... what's wrong with this picture?
So what will the market expect? What will the market bear? How can you compete? The only viable option is to sell something else since selling for less looks bad.
Hey Fred, I just had open-heart surgery at the resturant around the corner! It cost me only $300 bucks and I got free garlic bread! Wow, who needs HMO's?
Sometimes I get the feeling that to these economists going from being a skilled worker to a Deliverator is acceptable as long as I'm employed.
Yes, it is. These economists don't care a whit about your particular situation. You have to deal with your situation because no one else will. It's not the Economist's job to figure out how to bring back the dot-com bubble.
Tighten your belt and get a second skill set. Network with the people you take classes with... that you work with... ect. You may be in the position to start moving toward a chem degree and may have more connections than you realize. Monster isn't getting you a job in this economy and neither is having one skill set.
When I taught undergrads I would tell them that if they could they should double up their degrees. Get Computer Science and something... anything else. Too bad I didn't take my own advice! Go get your chem degree if you can, go back with no major and just take course work toward it... go part time... but do it if you can.
I wish to become your padawan learner... teach me the way oh great Jedi Master! The advice is good but hard to act upon when one is broke and a family needs feeding. Maybe the risks are too great for the average family man. Crazy risks, crazy like a fox risks. Maybe risks that are too great not to take.
I cannot comment on the rest of this snippit as I am not lazy, and I abhor the lazy. In fact, most decent open source coders (myself included) aren't lazy. We, well, they write good tools for no compensation.
You've obviously never heard of Larry Wall, otherwise you would understand how important it is to be lazy. If a developer isn't practicing laziness then they're just being stupid. Ofcourse I'm speaking of a special kind of lazy... Larry Wall brand lazy.
So I guess I should have been using dot-Net this whole time instead of learning Linux. If I could have started with dot-Net ten years ago I would have and I might even have wondered why I should learn anything else. So, why did I switch to Linux again?
Right. Timing. See, all the wonderful special things that made you switch to Microsoft today they weren't doing ten years ago. And furthermore, Linux was.
Linux has made Microsoft better.
Yes. I've been using Perl and Linux much longer than you have, so I'd better!
I think you are lying... how could you miss the Larry Wall reference if you have been programming in PERL for more than ten years? You just said you've been programming Perl for over ten years... have you ever written an XSub?
Microsoft has a "CPAN", it's called MSDN, and it's full of code snippets and examples and miscellaneous cruft. Objects and C/C++ code included.
That's fantastic. Where was this in 1996? I had a subscription to MSDN at one of my jobs it wasn't nearly as helpful as CPAN.
MFC isn't a repository, MFC is a base library for high-level C++ code development, which is significantly different than CPAN, which is a repository.
That's fantastic. And totally beside the point.
You're right, though. You couldn't modify DirectX and submit the changes to Microsoft. I find this argument silly and stupid, in most cases.
Really? I doubt you've had Microsoft's service packs add memory leaks to your program, take them away, add them back, and then take them away again. You wouldn't have recurring and re-introduced bugs if you used Linux. Microsoft did this with XP and OpenGL several times. On Linux we would have rolled our own patches to cover the problem that we needed covered. I find arguments to the contrary naive and short sighted. I also think insulting the parent poster is trollish.
can't learn from Microsoft without spending money. Brains I got... money I don't.
Again, MSDN... TechNet... MS newsgroups, community websites. Most MS programmers would take these sources of learning over anything that might cost money. This argument is pure tripe. You just might have brains, use them before making crack statements like this.
Hey there, mister insulty pants, I think someone needs to eat their bran flakes! Go find me some of that free stuf circa 1996 and I'll change my tune, okay? See... there's this little thing called continuity and I think you're missing it.
Microsoft is just stealing the "free stuff" idea because it's successful... and they're dumb for not catching on when it mattered... say back in 1996? Still, it's not too late. If Microsoft catches the next batch of high-school students and holds on tight they'll be fine.
I agree, and this is good for both Microsoft and the open source world. Competition is great.
So before you snap off another half-baked come-back I would like to ask you to think. Why did I say that I switched to Linux? Why would I personally stay with Linux? The "I" refering to "me" the person writing the post.
I said that Microsoft could have crushed the Open Source movement before it got started. It didn't. I happen to be one of the people that would have been easily swayed toward staying Microsoft if the Microsoft of 1996 (the year I deleted my windows partition) had been more supportive.
I personally will avoid switching (to windows) since sw
I was very excited to read this. I remember learning programming and wanting to download a C/C++ compiler and I couldn't find a free one for Windows that was free and well documented. This was back in 1996 and I was a poor college student.
I would have had to pay $139 for Visual C++ if I wanted to do windows development. Even that was too much. I could barely afford a computer! The reason I learned GNU and OSS software was because I was poor. I stuck with it because I'm a cheapskate.
So now I hear that MS gives away this stuff! That's great! Where do I download my copy of Visual C++ for free? Where do I download my free windows SDK so I can write windows software?
I went to that website you put in the link and I couldn't find the free Visual C++ what gives?
Now if Microsoft had been giving away this stuff from the beginning (like I said) then they would have prevented droves of lazy programmers from getting lazy and learning Linux and then being lazy and staying with Linux. Today, for many Linux programmers, the path of Laziness is to "just stay with Linux" or unix or whatever.
Do you know what CPAN is? A microsoft CPAN would have tons of objects and C/C++ code that you could download for free. These objects would do things like SMTP, LDAP, PostScript, or TK for you. Microsoft has the MFC but last I checked I couldn't submit anything to the MFC. I couldn't modify my own version of DirectX and submit it to Microsoft for approval.
I can't learn from Microsoft without spending money. Brains I got... money I don't.
And, for the record, I don't think Microsoft is evil. I just think that they practice unfair monopolistic tactics against competitors. I'd do the same thing.
I do think Microsoft completely missed a boat that they should have seen coming. I don't think it's too late for Microsoft to put a stop to Open Source Software's drain on their marketshare. I do think that the OSS model will/has force(d) Microsoft to change it's tactics.
I do remember when IBM was evil and Mac would save us. I do remember when Microsoft was the bastion of shareware and GWBasic. I do remember when Mac screwed us and Microsoft was the good guy.
And, I do remember when you couldn't write software for Windows without buying hundreds of dollars in materials.
Microsoft could have crushed the Open Source movement if it had given away one of it's development platforms for free. If they had fostered a Java-esque or CPAN-esque software repository... if they had given free SDK's for windows out... if they supported or encouraged the development of free servers, browsers, desktop systems, and support utilities... THEN Microsoft could have crushed the Open Source movement when it was just beginning.
But, then... it wouldn't be "Microsoft" would it? If Microsoft does these things... will Microsoft keep "Microsoft-like" control over the software market?
People are lazy. If you could do everything you do now on Linux without having to learn Linux... would you? Many people say yes, many people say no. Are enough people that are lazy enough to "just stay with Microsoft" developers? Are they a large enough group that they'd cripple the OSS movement?
I doubt it. But, I think that it's still early enough for Microsoft to do a complete 180 and hold it's market share virtually indefinately. Try this on for size: GNUM, GNUM is Not Unix by Microsoft. I'm sure they'll call it something different.
Personally, I prefer to keep track of the value of a dollar in a more tangible every day way. The dollar is currently worth 462.131 sheets of Toilet Paper. We've lost 4 sheets to the wind since Monday. Toilet paper is not significantly weakening against the dollar. I hope for a stronger dollar that can perhaps give two-ply a run for it's money.
I heard about this first on Science Friday on the December 12th show. When I heard them mention the bacteria making electricity I though of the "Proto-Culture" from Robotech. When I was a kid I used to think it was an electricity producing life-form that they found on the SDF-1... of course my memories are mostly of Robotech season three... "Genesis Climber Mospeada"
It would be hilarious if science fact would follow this particular fiction and lead to... <Announcer Voice>
"the awesome power of RoboTech!" </Announcer Voice>
All though balled, I am using an SGI 3-Button mouse right now. I have stock-piled these jems against the inevitable coming darkness of three-button-mouse-less chaos that is sure to consume the rest of the twenty-first century. You should have prepared for these new dark ages my friend. I and my comrades in arms have. We are ready. And, nobody gets to use our three-button-mouse stock pile... not without getting through our perimeter defenses and down in to our bunkers they don't!
I'm not sure I follow, but the answer I think is there was a stop symbol in the input (the user hitting ctrl-c to halt the machine).
The user observes the computer and interacts with it based with what they observed the computer doing. This is not captured in a Turing machine model. It is more than non-determinism or input sequence... an outside action is modifying the running of the machine based on what it sees the machine doing. I think that is significantly different from a fixed input set while it is possible to imagine a tape that recorded all user interactions into the future... such a model fails to demonstrate the user is actively carrying out their own "computations" based on what it observes the machine doing. That interaction can be spontaneous and non-sensical.
I'm muddling through This Paper trying to digest exactly what it was driving at. I'm not advocating anything silly...that the Turing machine is somehow invalid... just that the model is incomplete (the classic model at least I guess). I believe the term "Oracle Turing Machine" sums up my point.
BTW: most of the architectures I've worked on do a "memory mapping" to devices. That means the CPU only writes to memory that is normally viewed as a one-dimensional array. I think there is one architecture that actually views memory in sort-of two dimensions by the virtue of extending it's origonal instruction set from 8 bits to 32 bits and reading either a 32bit word or an 8bit word depending on the specific instruction... but I think that was mainly an academic exercise.
Sorry if I lead you down too many rabbit trails but I'm just goofing off here on Slashdot and don't usually strive to put too much work into my posts. Thanks for the exercise!
The oft-used standard undecidable problem is the halting problem
Somehow humans can avoid this problem. If there was a human who decided something for a computer that was undecidable then how is that representable in a Turing machine?
The problem with user interaction is that a user can interrupt or alter the flow of the program... how is that represented in a Turing machine? Do we just decide that there are hypothetical tapes that contain the future decisions of the user? The tapes would have to contain representations that meant "user decides if program is running too long" or "user interrupts" ?
Okay, that's pretty sick. I don't think that research was meant to be applied directly to human behavior like that. Then again there are some pretty sick people in the world.
Now I'm looking to build myself a professional grade editing suite using only open source tools so that I can dump as much money as possible into the hardware.
Me too... except I don't have any money. At all. I've been browsing through: http://www.linuxartist.org/ and trying different things in their Video - Animation section.
Clearly the need to be able to alter control flow is necessary for Turing completeness.
Yeah, so I was making a very nit-picky point. It's a small point... but an important one. So I agree HTML or any ML can't be called a programming language but because they can't express any algorithms at all let alone being Turing Complete.
Totally OT, I notice that our user #s are only 114 apart. That means you must have beaten me here by a couple of days:-)
Ironically this isn't my first account, it's just the one I remember the password for!:-O
Although I know about BF and Whitespace, I was thinking along the lines of something I'd heard arguing against the Turing model of computation. It was brought up in this discussion that Turing himself felt the model was incomplete. The example given... showing that Turing derived models of computation are incomplete... was of user decision input to a program where the result of computation depended on the user's decision. The presenter argued that no facility was present in a Turing Machine to represent a User interaction or user decision.
So my thinking was: If there is a set called Turing Computable... there is also a set that is Turing non-Computable. If user interaction is not in the set of things in the Turing Computable set AND modern computer programming languages can cope with some of this set... A language which expresses those Turing Non-Computable problems yet doesn't express the whole set of Turing Computable problems must exist.
Therefore, it is possible to have a programming that isn't Turing Complete... yet is a programming language.
It's an extrodinary claim I suppose. But this is just slashdot and I'm just goofing off. I was just allowing for the possibility someone might implement a language that could express some algorithms but not all algorithms in a given set.
So if our hypothetical Markup "programmers" can add 2 and 2 but can't compute a division or Taylor expansion series then you get to bestow the title "programmer" on them anyhow. However, they can't represent 2 and 2 and no markup language makes provision for variables, computations, or calculations of any kind. If one did it wouldn't be markup anymore... it would be PostScript... it would be a rendering language.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that you can't really own an idea. But our problem is this: A song is essentially and idea, a business is essentially the execution of a collection of ideas, a story is an idea, a government is the execution of a group of ideas, a program is a collection of ideas, a product is the fruit of a group of ideas and methods derived from ideas.
Ideas are the Genesis of all the elements of our human made society. How do you allow people to get paid for creating an idea? If I generate millions of wonderful ideas and never get credit, what incentive is there for me to continue doing so.
All our IP laws are about trying to find a way to give a person credit for an idea. You can own an idea in the sense that you birthed it. Once the idea is in another person's mind, do they own it as much as you did? They can be said to own the idea but they did not birth it. They "stood on your shoulders" to get the idea.
Do you deserve credit? yes. Can you get compensation for it? maybe. Is it fair that the person who "birthed" VisiCalc doesn't get any royalties for "Excel" even though the Genesis for the idea of an Electronic Spreadsheet was birthed in his mind? No.
So life's not fair and ideas do get "stolen" but that's the nature of an idea.
I'm merely standing on the shoulders of a bunch of other midgets. We can see nearly as high as those who stand on the shoulders of giants... it just takes more of us and a little bit more walking.
Yet another example of how the Awesome Power of Robotechnology is transforming our lives!
I plan on retiring by becoming a school teacher sometime between the ages of 45 and 55. I'd look for being a High School level Math teacher or an instructor at a local community college. If I had plenty of money and time, I'd go back to college and study biochem, nano-tech, materials science, or whatever else interested me... writing software to solve those problems that I took an intrest in. If you want me to write a solution to a problem that doesn't intrest me... well... then... you'd better pay me.
So booting might at worst take 30 seconds extra due to sleep commands. My solution would be to replace _all_ sleep() shell scripting commands with usleep() and put 2 or 3 zeros behind the number of seconds .
Actually you're pointing at a fundamental flaw. The majority of these extraneous "sleep" calls are there to wait for some timing issue. What you really want and need instead of a sleep call is an "event listener" which will tell you when the USB device is registered and assigned and then emulating a SCSI device or whatever it does. I personally feel Linux needs an event bus of some kind to drive hardware level events up to user space.
Don't just study computers, get a minor in CS and a major in something else... anything else... Computers and Business, Computers and Physics, Computers and Biology, Computers and Art, Computers and Theater... Computers and English.
Really. You need to diversify your investments, skill and monitary investments both. Diversification is the key. Find a niche market you can fill and fill it well. Computers and Video production... things like that. What are your other intrests? How do computers fail to help people in these areas? How can you improve the use of computers in these other fields? Do you know anyone who is in a special industry? Have you volunteered to do anything in the community? How can computers help them?
Due to the costs of living, American programmers can never compete on costs. The only options left are 1) to convince the buyers (i.e. hiring companies) that the quality of your work is higher, or 2) offer some different kind of labor in a different sector.
Well, you can say that your quality is comperable and that you're one-stop-shopping convenient. That's why people shop at super-stores in theory they get one-stop-shopping. So if a programmer in the US can provide "Value Added Retail" services like a VAR does perhaps he can get employment on that.
The Americans of the future will write articles about the American economy and sell books about the evils of Outsourcing. Americans of the future will be writers, artists, architects, and thespians. They will be free from having to produce anything, having to create wealth, or having to work. It will be a jobless utopia.
...a utopia for anyone with more than 2.2 million dollars in the bank right now. Everyone else will be shipped to Elbonia. Then, the US will institute a national lottery to execute via painless injection a certain percentage of the population each year. This will force the population to implode at a rate that will keep the shrinkage of the nation's wealth and the shrinkage of the population in step. Eventually there will only be five American families left and they will take turns running the government...
And now, cue Rod Sterling!
The following statement is sarcasm:
When I shop for a doctor I always look for the cheapest one.
How many people would go to a cut rate doctor? A cut rate lawyer? A cut rate home builder? A cut rate mechanic?
There's a floor to market pricing. If you charge too little for your market area... why are you? Is there something wrong with your service?
Now consider a house for $100k in rural Texas versus a house for $100k in the thick of San Jose. One is reasonably priced and one is a shack without any windows. The difference is their markets. An India based programmer for $11k per year versus a US based programmer for $11k per year... what's wrong with this picture?
So what will the market expect? What will the market bear? How can you compete? The only viable option is to sell something else since selling for less looks bad.
Hey Fred, I just had open-heart surgery at the resturant around the corner! It cost me only $300 bucks and I got free garlic bread! Wow, who needs HMO's?
Sometimes I get the feeling that to these economists going from being a skilled worker to a Deliverator is acceptable as long as I'm employed.
Yes, it is. These economists don't care a whit about your particular situation. You have to deal with your situation because no one else will. It's not the Economist's job to figure out how to bring back the dot-com bubble.
Tighten your belt and get a second skill set. Network with the people you take classes with... that you work with... ect. You may be in the position to start moving toward a chem degree and may have more connections than you realize. Monster isn't getting you a job in this economy and neither is having one skill set.
When I taught undergrads I would tell them that if they could they should double up their degrees. Get Computer Science and something... anything else. Too bad I didn't take my own advice! Go get your chem degree if you can, go back with no major and just take course work toward it... go part time... but do it if you can.
I would like to come work in India. How do I get a work visa and an IT job? How do I calculate my salary requirements for living in India?
I for one welcome our transgenic zebra fish sperm producing overlords.
I'm so sorry I couldn't help myself. Please mod me down... I must be punished.
I wish to become your padawan learner... teach me the way oh great Jedi Master!
The advice is good but hard to act upon when one is broke and a family needs feeding. Maybe the risks are too great for the average family man. Crazy risks, crazy like a fox risks. Maybe risks that are too great not to take.
I cannot comment on the rest of this snippit as I am not lazy, and I abhor the lazy. In fact, most decent open source coders (myself included) aren't lazy. We, well, they write good tools for no compensation.
... how could you miss the Larry Wall reference if you have been programming in PERL for more than ten years? You just said you've been programming Perl for over ten years... have you ever written an XSub?
You've obviously never heard of Larry Wall, otherwise you would understand how important it is to be lazy. If a developer isn't practicing laziness then they're just being stupid. Ofcourse I'm speaking of a special kind of lazy... Larry Wall brand lazy.
So I guess I should have been using dot-Net this whole time instead of learning Linux. If I could have started with dot-Net ten years ago I would have and I might even have wondered why I should learn anything else. So, why did I switch to Linux again?
Right. Timing. See, all the wonderful special things that made you switch to Microsoft today they weren't doing ten years ago. And furthermore, Linux was.
Linux has made Microsoft better.
Yes. I've been using Perl and Linux much longer than you have, so I'd better!
I think you are lying
Microsoft has a "CPAN", it's called MSDN, and it's full of code snippets and examples and miscellaneous cruft. Objects and C/C++ code included.
That's fantastic. Where was this in 1996? I had a subscription to MSDN at one of my jobs it wasn't nearly as helpful as CPAN.
MFC isn't a repository, MFC is a base library for high-level C++ code development, which is significantly different than CPAN, which is a repository.
That's fantastic. And totally beside the point.
You're right, though. You couldn't modify DirectX and submit the changes to Microsoft. I find this argument silly and stupid, in most cases.
Really? I doubt you've had Microsoft's service packs add memory leaks to your program, take them away, add them back, and then take them away again. You wouldn't have recurring and re-introduced bugs if you used Linux. Microsoft did this with XP and OpenGL several times. On Linux we would have rolled our own patches to cover the problem that we needed covered. I find arguments to the contrary naive and short sighted. I also think insulting the parent poster is trollish.
can't learn from Microsoft without spending money. Brains I got... money I don't. Again, MSDN... TechNet... MS newsgroups, community websites. Most MS programmers would take these sources of learning over anything that might cost money. This argument is pure tripe. You just might have brains, use them before making crack statements like this.
Hey there, mister insulty pants, I think someone needs to eat their bran flakes! Go find me some of that free stuf circa 1996 and I'll change my tune, okay? See... there's this little thing called continuity and I think you're missing it.
Microsoft is just stealing the "free stuff" idea because it's successful... and they're dumb for not catching on when it mattered... say back in 1996? Still, it's not too late. If Microsoft catches the next batch of high-school students and holds on tight they'll be fine.
I agree, and this is good for both Microsoft and the open source world. Competition is great.
So before you snap off another half-baked come-back I would like to ask you to think. Why did I say that I switched to Linux? Why would I personally stay with Linux? The "I" refering to "me" the person writing the post.
I said that Microsoft could have crushed the Open Source movement before it got started. It didn't. I happen to be one of the people that would have been easily swayed toward staying Microsoft if the Microsoft of 1996 (the year I deleted my windows partition) had been more supportive.
I personally will avoid switching (to windows) since sw
Sigh. They do. http://msdn.microsoft.com
I was very excited to read this. I remember learning programming and wanting to download a C/C++ compiler and I couldn't find a free one for Windows that was free and well documented. This was back in 1996 and I was a poor college student.
I would have had to pay $139 for Visual C++ if I wanted to do windows development. Even that was too much. I could barely afford a computer! The reason I learned GNU and OSS software was because I was poor. I stuck with it because I'm a cheapskate.
So now I hear that MS gives away this stuff! That's great! Where do I download my copy of Visual C++ for free? Where do I download my free windows SDK so I can write windows software?
I went to that website you put in the link and I couldn't find the free Visual C++ what gives?
Now if Microsoft had been giving away this stuff from the beginning (like I said) then they would have prevented droves of lazy programmers from getting lazy and learning Linux and then being lazy and staying with Linux. Today, for many Linux programmers, the path of Laziness is to "just stay with Linux" or unix or whatever.
Do you know what CPAN is? A microsoft CPAN would have tons of objects and C/C++ code that you could download for free. These objects would do things like SMTP, LDAP, PostScript, or TK for you. Microsoft has the MFC but last I checked I couldn't submit anything to the MFC. I couldn't modify my own version of DirectX and submit it to Microsoft for approval.
I can't learn from Microsoft without spending money. Brains I got... money I don't.
And, for the record, I don't think Microsoft is evil. I just think that they practice unfair monopolistic tactics against competitors. I'd do the same thing.
I do think Microsoft completely missed a boat that they should have seen coming. I don't think it's too late for Microsoft to put a stop to Open Source Software's drain on their marketshare. I do think that the OSS model will/has force(d) Microsoft to change it's tactics.
I do remember when IBM was evil and Mac would save us. I do remember when Microsoft was the bastion of shareware and GWBasic. I do remember when Mac screwed us and Microsoft was the good guy.
And, I do remember when you couldn't write software for Windows without buying hundreds of dollars in materials.
Microsoft could have crushed the Open Source movement if it had given away one of it's development platforms for free. If they had fostered a Java-esque or CPAN-esque software repository... if they had given free SDK's for windows out... if they supported or encouraged the development of free servers, browsers, desktop systems, and support utilities... THEN Microsoft could have crushed the Open Source movement when it was just beginning.
... would you? Many people say yes, many people say no. Are enough people that are lazy enough to "just stay with Microsoft" developers? Are they a large enough group that they'd cripple the OSS movement?
But, then... it wouldn't be "Microsoft" would it? If Microsoft does these things... will Microsoft keep "Microsoft-like" control over the software market?
People are lazy. If you could do everything you do now on Linux without having to learn Linux
I doubt it. But, I think that it's still early enough for Microsoft to do a complete 180 and hold it's market share virtually indefinately. Try this on for size: GNUM, GNUM is Not Unix by Microsoft. I'm sure they'll call it something different.
Personally, I prefer to keep track of the value of a dollar in a more tangible every day way. The dollar is currently worth 462.131 sheets of Toilet Paper. We've lost 4 sheets to the wind since Monday. Toilet paper is not significantly weakening against the dollar. I hope for a stronger dollar that can perhaps give two-ply a run for it's money.
I heard about this first on Science Friday on the December 12th show. When I heard them mention the bacteria making electricity I though of the "Proto-Culture" from Robotech. When I was a kid I used to think it was an electricity producing life-form that they found on the SDF-1 ... of course my memories are mostly of Robotech season three... "Genesis Climber Mospeada"
It would be hilarious if science fact would follow this particular fiction and lead to...
<Announcer Voice>
"the awesome power of RoboTech!"
</Announcer Voice>
All though balled, I am using an SGI 3-Button mouse right now. I have stock-piled these jems against the inevitable coming darkness of three-button-mouse-less chaos that is sure to consume the rest of the twenty-first century. You should have prepared for these new dark ages my friend. I and my comrades in arms have. We are ready. And, nobody gets to use our three-button-mouse stock pile... not without getting through our perimeter defenses and down in to our bunkers they don't!
I'm not sure I follow, but the answer I think is there was a stop symbol in the input (the user hitting ctrl-c to halt the machine).
...that the Turing machine is somehow invalid... just that the model is incomplete (the classic model at least I guess). I believe the term "Oracle Turing Machine" sums up my point.
The user observes the computer and interacts with it based with what they observed the computer doing. This is not captured in a Turing machine model. It is more than non-determinism or input sequence... an outside action is modifying the running of the machine based on what it sees the machine doing. I think that is significantly different from a fixed input set while it is possible to imagine a tape that recorded all user interactions into the future... such a model fails to demonstrate the user is actively carrying out their own "computations" based on what it observes the machine doing. That interaction can be spontaneous and non-sensical.
I'm muddling through This Paper trying to digest exactly what it was driving at. I'm not advocating anything silly
BTW: most of the architectures I've worked on do a "memory mapping" to devices. That means the CPU only writes to memory that is normally viewed as a one-dimensional array. I think there is one architecture that actually views memory in sort-of two dimensions by the virtue of extending it's origonal instruction set from 8 bits to 32 bits and reading either a 32bit word or an 8bit word depending on the specific instruction... but I think that was mainly an academic exercise.
Sorry if I lead you down too many rabbit trails but I'm just goofing off here on Slashdot and don't usually strive to put too much work into my posts. Thanks for the exercise!
The oft-used standard undecidable problem is the halting problem
Somehow humans can avoid this problem. If there was a human who decided something for a computer that was undecidable then how is that representable in a Turing machine?
The problem with user interaction is that a user can interrupt or alter the flow of the program... how is that represented in a Turing machine? Do we just decide that there are hypothetical tapes that contain the future decisions of the user? The tapes would have to contain representations that meant "user decides if program is running too long" or "user interrupts" ?
It's called Sperm Competition
Okay, that's pretty sick. I don't think that research was meant to be applied directly to human behavior like that. Then again there are some pretty sick people in the world.
Now I'm looking to build myself a professional grade editing suite using only open source tools so that I can dump as much money as possible into the hardware.
Me too... except I don't have any money. At all. I've been browsing through: http://www.linuxartist.org/ and trying different things in their Video - Animation section.
Clearly the need to be able to alter control flow is necessary for Turing completeness.
:-)
:-O
Yeah, so I was making a very nit-picky point. It's a small point... but an important one. So I agree HTML or any ML can't be called a programming language but because they can't express any algorithms at all let alone being Turing Complete.
Totally OT, I notice that our user #s are only 114 apart. That means you must have beaten me here by a couple of days
Ironically this isn't my first account, it's just the one I remember the password for!
Although I know about BF and Whitespace, I was thinking along the lines of something I'd heard arguing against the Turing model of computation. It was brought up in this discussion that Turing himself felt the model was incomplete. The example given... showing that Turing derived models of computation are incomplete... was of user decision input to a program where the result of computation depended on the user's decision. The presenter argued that no facility was present in a Turing Machine to represent a User interaction or user decision.
So my thinking was: If there is a set called Turing Computable... there is also a set that is Turing non-Computable. If user interaction is not in the set of things in the Turing Computable set AND modern computer programming languages can cope with some of this set... A language which expresses those Turing Non-Computable problems yet doesn't express the whole set of Turing Computable problems must exist.
Therefore, it is possible to have a programming that isn't Turing Complete... yet is a programming language.
It's an extrodinary claim I suppose. But this is just slashdot and I'm just goofing off. I was just allowing for the possibility someone might implement a language that could express some algorithms but not all algorithms in a given set.
So if our hypothetical Markup "programmers" can add 2 and 2 but can't compute a division or Taylor expansion series then you get to bestow the title "programmer" on them anyhow. However, they can't represent 2 and 2 and no markup language makes provision for variables, computations, or calculations of any kind. If one did it wouldn't be markup anymore... it would be PostScript... it would be a rendering language.