Given the commercial exploitability, R&D costs, and relative ease of copying once the R&D heavy lifting has been done, chemical compounds are exactly the sort of thing that patents should protect.
I'm going to come right out and say that it is not true in the general case that it is easy to copy a chemical. My father works in a pharmaceutical research lab/pilot plant. That research building and the associated pilot plant are major assets the company that recently bought his wanted. Almost all the work done there is not in discovering new chemicals, but in researching how to synthesize those chemicals in a full production plant setting. This process can take years, just like researching the chemical in the first place. Just because you have the chemical formula for a substance doesn't give you the ability to make cheap knock-offs. This isn't Star Trek, and we don't have replicators.
That said, I'm not strictly against pharmaceutical patents. The pharmaceuticals are blatantly lying about why the cost of drugs are so high, but it is still true that R&D costs are substantial and a patent is appropriate to help them recoup those costs. I am strictly against patenting naturally occuring substances (e.g.: my god-damned genes).
Oh yeah:
Why would companies sink millions into R&D for potentially useful compounds (say, enzymes to metabolize oil spills, or self-repairing fabrics) if anyone could exploit that R&D latterly?
For the same reason the makers of Tylenol didn't stop making Tylenol once Kroger Brand Acetominephine came on the market: they still make uber-tons (like a ton, only uber) of money off of it. Do you think the makers of Rogaine wouldn't have wanted to tap the incredibly lucrative hair restoration market if they weren't assured of being the only players? Would the makers of Viagra been unsatisfied being merely very profitable instead of insanely so?
Also remember that even in a patentless world in which you are also required to publish chemical formulas there is still the built-in monopoly time while your competitors bring up their own production processes.
No matter that what I think is true or not. I think it because of what I have learned about Moslems over the years, from TV, newspaper, classic literature, etc. has made me think the guys over in the Middle-East and Eastern Africa are barbarians that are not willing to stop being a bunch of jerks.
If they want me to think the West should change it's behavior, they need to explain point by point why they have a problem, *AND* their complaints must be valid and rational. Until then, they get no sympathy from me.
So they get no sympathy because they haven't yet overcome your brainwashing by propaganda and ignorant stereotypes in American television. You know you've been brainwashed by horseshit, but maintain that it is on them to fix your ignorance and prejudice.
You, sir, are an example to us all. I salute you, in the time-honored one-finger method.
I'm not so sure it isn't obvious; I think most video stores would avoid the plan due to the lack of late fee income even if they thought of it. I'd be willing to bet that there was a small video store somewhere that had a similar method.
I think I deserve to be compensated for any improvements that I have made to the original code and I reserve the right to keep those improvements private.
I think that too. The GPL doesn't prevent you from doing either. Which is why I don't consider that to be the crux of the issue.
In my opinion, BSD vs GPL is about whether it is better to maximize the freedom of the individual, or to maximize the freedoms which are guaranteed for the individual. The latter means preventing individuals from doing things which reduce the freedoms of others, and therefore a reduced level of attainable freedom for the individual with the benefit of hopefully maximal freedom for the group.
As a taxpayer I should not be required to fund works that I will not be able to use (copy, modify, etc.) because of licensing restrictions.
But if the code is released under GPL, I can't use it the way I want to.
Since what you want is to package the code I paid for and sell it back to me with a restrictive license that denies me many of the benefits of any improvements you might have made, I can't say I care much.
But don't get me wrong; I have no problem with the BSD license being used. I simply think that the GPL is also suitable, and in some ways preferrable. Any Free Software license would be fine with me, though.
The GPL says is that if I make a copy of the park at my own expense I have to let everyone use it.
No it does not. You aren't required to let anyone use your park at all. You can put a 10 metre electric fence around it and charge $10,000,000 for entry if you like. However, since your park is a modified version of the original park, if you do let someone use your park, you have to allow them to make their own park based on yours. In which case your park is still there for you to use however you want. Why is this so difficult to understand?
I don't think it is always inappropriate to use the GPL in government funded work, but I don't think that the BSD license is something to be avoided.
I agree. BSD licenses are fine with me; they are Free Software licenses. However I also think that some things would be better off under the GPL. Anything designed to work with an open file format, for example. Here proprietary offshoots could be damaging, if the one who made it proprietary has the deep pockets to get their product into widespread use over the still-Free version.
Therefore, I believe it only fair that everyone has the opportunity to benefit from software developed with government dollars.
Absolutely! Now, why exactly isn't the GPL a good choice for ensuring that everyone has the opporutinity to benefit? Anyone can use the software, and distribute it to anyone else who wants to use it. This includes corporations! They can benefit from using the software, or modify it so that it benefits them more. Businesses already derive a great deal of benefit from using GPL software, so why would government-paid GPL software not be of benefit to them?
Oh, right... Because the GPL doesn't allow proprietary derivatives, making it difficult for a company to sell me shrink-wrapped EULA-encumbered versions of the software my tax dollars already paid for.
So what you're really saying is not that companies can't benefit from GPL software, but can't profit. Easily. From traditional software sales models. And I say "So what?" Why do companies have to be able to benefit more than everyone else before you'll approve?
It's a sad day when when it is considered unfair for a corporation to be merely equal to a normal citizen instead of preferred.
I too have been explicitly told not to do patent searches when I come up with an idea, for exactly that reason.
I was also told explicitly that, partially because of the above, violating someone else's patents is essentially unavoidable. Therefore the purpose of patenting things is to have a bigger stick when you sit down to discuss any patent dispute.
So you have tons of engineers inventing things and deliberately remaining ignorant of whether anyone else has invented it, then trying to patent it for the sole purpose of ensuring that if it turns out to already be invented, that inventor will be violating some other patent that did get through.
With no suspense I might add. Nobody watched that scene on top of the semi and thought "how will he get out of this?"
Yeah. When I heard that Matrix was going to be a trilogy, my first thought was "How the hell are they going to write their way around Keanu gaining godlike powers at the end of the first movie? He's fucking Superman now!"
Turns out their method was to make the mere mortals (trinity & morpheus) stupidly separate from Superman so that they could get in trouble, and then have Superman fly in to save them just in the nick of time. And they just had to make that stupid operator act surprised every god damn time. "Whoa, something is flying toward Morpheus at super speeds! Oh, it's Neo! Hooray!"
I had far fewer complaints about the plot than I did with their inability to create any tension in the combat scenes.
I have a theory. First, assume that the "battery" thing isn't true and the "humans as processing power" thing is. Or at least assume that -part- of the processing for the matrix is done in the human mind.
So you have the original matrix, in which the human mind is both prisoner and prison, creating the very rules which fool it into thinking it is free. That fails, and the Architect is forced to introduce choice. Perhaps the anomaly is that he could not remove choice at the lowest levels while retaining it at the higher. Perhaps it is possible for the human brain to produce the -wrong- answer by choice. This could be the deeper implication of Morpheus' "free your mind" speech in the first movie, and the spoon bending -- by choosing to alter the output of the fundamental functions of the matrix, you can modify reality.
My original theory of how the powers exhibited by the freed came about was based more on chaos theory. Presumeably the computers only have a finite calculation of fundamental values such as Pi or Plank's Constant, and it was the error in these values that allowed "suprenatural" feats, but the human brain, being part of the real world, "knows" Pi infinitely and thus doesn't try to exploit the openings created by the error. Knowing it is a simulation allows one to exploit the errors.
Adding the new theory to this makes more sense. Perhaps it is possible for a human to "choose" to use the wrong value for Pi, etc. The human mind can't do this very easily (we have certain facts of physics ingrained in our minds from birth, and others are simply parts of our biology), which is why it takes training and is why some humans are better than others.
Well, notwithstanding the differences between Red Hat and their licenses versus Microsoft and their licenses, there is a point hidden in that comment.
Frankly I think the concept of "whatever concessions they think the market will bear" is one that ultimately damages consumers and capitalism. Within that concept is the implication that the concessions are a -burden- that the consumer must carry if they want to use the product. "What the market will bear" implies finding that point at which the burden is just shy of actually driving your customers away. In other words, "they are entitled to abuse the customer as much as they want until the customer can't take anymore". While they are entitled to do that, it doesn't sound like a healthy philosophy to me. For one thing, by believing that companies are entitled to abuse them, consumers naturally expand the amount of abuse they are willing to take.
Take Microsoft for instance. They kept taking more and more concessions until the point where they were basically saying you are now only renting your software and it could be disabled at any time and in order to have the privilege of renting software you have to let them examine and change the contents of your own computer at will. Only then did large amounts of people start to say "hey, I was okay with how much you screwed us before, but now this is too much!"
The upside is that in a healthier market with more competition and choices, companies are unable to demand quite so much. The downside is that since everyone expects to have to bear as much as they can bear, all the companies in the market still end up putting some kind of burden on the customers.
Perhaps I'm just keying off the word "entitled", which sounds too much like something owed them instead of something that is merely legal to do. Maybe if the next phrase was "and the market is entitled to tell them to fuck off".:)
That's no troll you got there, my friend. That's called a principle.
To PingXao: Secret warrantless spying is bad. It doesn't matter if they are investigating a suspected terrorist cell, a suspected pot smoker, a suspected communist, or a suspected annoying spammer.
You can't allow the secret spying because who they're spying on is "bad". Remember the whole reason you don't want them spying on you is that even if you "have nothing to hide" right now, that can change as what is "bad" changes. What good does it do if they can just label you a spammer and spy on you? Today it's the other guy they don't like; tommorrow it could be you.
Open up your mind a bit and recognize that maybe if you didn't have BASIC available to you, you wouldn't have been programming, you wouldn't be who you are today, and you wouldn't be wasting your time on slashdot. Wait a minute...
I'm sorry, but I don't think you understood my point at all.
I wasn't saying that BASIC was worse than no programming language, I was saying it isn't a very good language and a better one would be... better. It's not BASIC vs nothing, it's BASIC vs anything else.
Honestly, if I said the current U.S. public school system was inadequate, would you think I was arguing that there should be no school system?
If you're worried about them becoming too dependent on the "build and fix" software development model, then I think you've forgotten the original excitement you felt when you started hacking on a computer.
What do you mean? Build and fix is the method I still use today when learning something new. Now it's just OpenGL or SDL or Perl instead of BASIC.
When I lose the excitement that comes from hacking on computers, I'll stop doing it.:)
You learn that computers are machines that you can tell what to do and they will do it. You learn that computers follow your instructions precisely even if your instructions don't make any sense. You learn that computers can do math and manipulate text.
I learned that in the half hour it took my mother to type a BASIC program in from the book and run it so a little caterpiller walked across the screen. Now I need to learn -how- to control what the computer does and ensure that my instructions -do- make sense.
Almost no 9-year old is going to have the patience to write a program that goes beyond BASIC's capabilities.
Maybe, but when I was 10 I had already grown irritated with how limited the language was. I was in a vaccuum -- I knew no other programmers, I knew of no other languages. I only knew BASIC existed because it was the title of a manual that came with the computer. But I did see some commercial software titles. From that, I deduced that other languages must exist, and that BASIC must be the crappiest.:)
Trying to get a kid to learn first about concrete and rebar is a sure way to kill his interest.
Sure, but that's why I said C probably wasn't the best choice. I never learned Pascal, but that seems like a good middle ground. A scripting language that doesn't require you to know about pointers or worry too much about typing is probably good too.
It's constantly trying to trick me into using its proprietary format!
Proprietary doesn't mean "isn't readable by other programs", it means "cannot be read by other programs because the format is a secret".
OOo may not be portable (because other programs haven't implemented filters to read it, for various reasons not the least of which being OOo's market share), but it is not proprietary.
P.S. I hate how it does that too. If I wanted to save in OpenOffice format, I'd say so!
There's no such thing as a stupid question, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots.
OpenOffice has basically no visibility. If you don't read one of a few technical websites, where the hell are you going to hear about it? Educated people don't necessarily read NewsForge, and they aren't going to see advertising for OpenOffice in Time or whatever they are reading. Word of mouth works, but it is slow to start.
When OpenOffice comes preloaded on the PC Aunt Bettie and Uncle Lou buys from Dell (educated people buy from Dell, you know), or it gets advertising during Friends, then people will hear of it.
As to why people who have heard it aren't using it... Well, sorry, but it does -not- read all MS Office docs correctly. I blame OOo for that no more than I blame Mozilla for not supporting ActiveX, but it's still true. As long as people are still sending MSOffice files around and expecting you to be able to read them and/or modify them, then Open Office is going to have a big hurdle to overcome.
Sounds like a cool book. Wish I had that. All I had was the manual that came with the computer. It was pure shit.:)
Anyway, while it isn't -impossible- to become a good programmer after BASIC, I do agree with Dijkstra to an extent. I did spend about half of my time during my teens un-learning all the bad programming practices I'd adopted while using BASIC. Maybe if I'd had a better book, or, I don't know, known a single other programmer in the world that I could talk to it wouldn't have been so bad.
I was 9 when I started programming, and it was in BASIC on a TI-99, which I'm not certain but I think it was called CRAP-BASIC. Moving to a PC with GW-BASIC was a big upgrade.:)
Anyway, I do not think that BASIC is a good learning language. BASIC encourages bad programming practices. Not C either, simply because it's got too many loaded guns you have to ensure aren't pointed at your foot. Something like Java, or Python, or whatever where you can learn programming concepts without having to also learn hardware concepts. Though eventually those should be learned as well, but not necessarily at age 9.:)
But yes, having GW-BASIC or whatever available is the only reason I learned to program. And to people suggesting Linux -- that works great for your or my children, but what about the children of parents like mine, who aren't programmers themselves and aren't going to be putting Linux on their computers any time soon?
Of course, we all must throw our common sense out of the window
Rumsfield: Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons on his own people in the 80s! He must be stopped! People: What? You said that was just crop dusting! And where the hell did he get those weapons from? You sold him chemical weapons and covered for him when he used them on civilians! Rumsfield: [softly] This isn't going well... Good thing we put all those subliminal messages in Froot Loops commercials. Rumsfield: [loudly] Initiate Patriotic Doublethink! People: Grrrrrrrrnnn... Oh my God! Saddam gassed his own people! He must be stopped!
a psychopath dictator who kills for export
Yeah, he is crazy, what with the international killing market doing so poorly right now. With so many countries running a surplus of killing, they have no need to import any. Though if you happen to be out at the moment, remember it's a buyers' market!
Slashdot Mirror
Given the commercial exploitability, R&D costs, and relative ease of copying once the R&D heavy lifting has been done, chemical compounds are exactly the sort of thing that patents should protect.
I'm going to come right out and say that it is not true in the general case that it is easy to copy a chemical. My father works in a pharmaceutical research lab/pilot plant. That research building and the associated pilot plant are major assets the company that recently bought his wanted. Almost all the work done there is not in discovering new chemicals, but in researching how to synthesize those chemicals in a full production plant setting. This process can take years, just like researching the chemical in the first place. Just because you have the chemical formula for a substance doesn't give you the ability to make cheap knock-offs. This isn't Star Trek, and we don't have replicators.
That said, I'm not strictly against pharmaceutical patents. The pharmaceuticals are blatantly lying about why the cost of drugs are so high, but it is still true that R&D costs are substantial and a patent is appropriate to help them recoup those costs. I am strictly against patenting naturally occuring substances (e.g.: my god-damned genes).
Oh yeah:
Why would companies sink millions into R&D for potentially useful compounds (say, enzymes to metabolize oil spills, or self-repairing fabrics) if anyone could exploit that R&D latterly?
For the same reason the makers of Tylenol didn't stop making Tylenol once Kroger Brand Acetominephine came on the market: they still make uber-tons (like a ton, only uber) of money off of it. Do you think the makers of Rogaine wouldn't have wanted to tap the incredibly lucrative hair restoration market if they weren't assured of being the only players? Would the makers of Viagra been unsatisfied being merely very profitable instead of insanely so?
Also remember that even in a patentless world in which you are also required to publish chemical formulas there is still the built-in monopoly time while your competitors bring up their own production processes.
No matter that what I think is true or not. I think it because of what I have learned about Moslems over the years, from TV, newspaper, classic literature, etc. has made me think the guys over in the Middle-East and Eastern Africa are barbarians that are not willing to stop being a bunch of jerks.
If they want me to think the West should change it's behavior, they need to explain point by point why they have a problem, *AND* their complaints must be valid and rational. Until then, they get no sympathy from me.
So they get no sympathy because they haven't yet overcome your brainwashing by propaganda and ignorant stereotypes in American television. You know you've been brainwashed by horseshit, but maintain that it is on them to fix your ignorance and prejudice.
You, sir, are an example to us all. I salute you, in the time-honored one-finger method.
I'm not so sure it isn't obvious; I think most video stores would avoid the plan due to the lack of late fee income even if they thought of it. I'd be willing to bet that there was a small video store somewhere that had a similar method.
I think I deserve to be compensated for any improvements that I have made to the original code and I reserve the right to keep those improvements private.
I think that too. The GPL doesn't prevent you from doing either. Which is why I don't consider that to be the crux of the issue.
In my opinion, BSD vs GPL is about whether it is better to maximize the freedom of the individual, or to maximize the freedoms which are guaranteed for the individual. The latter means preventing individuals from doing things which reduce the freedoms of others, and therefore a reduced level of attainable freedom for the individual with the benefit of hopefully maximal freedom for the group.
As a taxpayer I should not be required to fund works that I will not be able to use (copy, modify, etc.) because of licensing restrictions.
I thought you said you understood?
But if the code is released under GPL, I can't use it the way I want to.
Since what you want is to package the code I paid for and sell it back to me with a restrictive license that denies me many of the benefits of any improvements you might have made, I can't say I care much.
But don't get me wrong; I have no problem with the BSD license being used. I simply think that the GPL is also suitable, and in some ways preferrable. Any Free Software license would be fine with me, though.
The GPL says is that if I make a copy of the park at my own expense I have to let everyone use it.
No it does not. You aren't required to let anyone use your park at all. You can put a 10 metre electric fence around it and charge $10,000,000 for entry if you like. However, since your park is a modified version of the original park, if you do let someone use your park, you have to allow them to make their own park based on yours. In which case your park is still there for you to use however you want. Why is this so difficult to understand?
I don't think it is always inappropriate to use the GPL in government funded work, but I don't think that the BSD license is something to be avoided.
I agree. BSD licenses are fine with me; they are Free Software licenses. However I also think that some things would be better off under the GPL. Anything designed to work with an open file format, for example. Here proprietary offshoots could be damaging, if the one who made it proprietary has the deep pockets to get their product into widespread use over the still-Free version.
I paid taxes to develop the original code, I should be allowed to do whatever the hell I want with it.
You can do whatever the hell you want with it, except prevent others from doing the same.
I guess it also really irks you that you can't set up a toll booth at the entrance to a public park, eh?
Therefore, I believe it only fair that everyone has the opportunity to benefit from software developed with government dollars.
Absolutely! Now, why exactly isn't the GPL a good choice for ensuring that everyone has the opporutinity to benefit? Anyone can use the software, and distribute it to anyone else who wants to use it. This includes corporations! They can benefit from using the software, or modify it so that it benefits them more. Businesses already derive a great deal of benefit from using GPL software, so why would government-paid GPL software not be of benefit to them?
Oh, right... Because the GPL doesn't allow proprietary derivatives, making it difficult for a company to sell me shrink-wrapped EULA-encumbered versions of the software my tax dollars already paid for.
So what you're really saying is not that companies can't benefit from GPL software, but can't profit. Easily. From traditional software sales models. And I say "So what?" Why do companies have to be able to benefit more than everyone else before you'll approve?
It's a sad day when when it is considered unfair for a corporation to be merely equal to a normal citizen instead of preferred.
I too have been explicitly told not to do patent searches when I come up with an idea, for exactly that reason.
I was also told explicitly that, partially because of the above, violating someone else's patents is essentially unavoidable. Therefore the purpose of patenting things is to have a bigger stick when you sit down to discuss any patent dispute.
So you have tons of engineers inventing things and deliberately remaining ignorant of whether anyone else has invented it, then trying to patent it for the sole purpose of ensuring that if it turns out to already be invented, that inventor will be violating some other patent that did get through.
Does that not sound completely fscked to anyone?
Not exactly the first lawyer I'd bring to the White House to try and get some help.
I'd say that depends on the conditions you bring him in under.
With no suspense I might add. Nobody watched that scene on top of the semi and thought "how will he get out of this?"
Yeah. When I heard that Matrix was going to be a trilogy, my first thought was "How the hell are they going to write their way around Keanu gaining godlike powers at the end of the first movie? He's fucking Superman now!"
Turns out their method was to make the mere mortals (trinity & morpheus) stupidly separate from Superman so that they could get in trouble, and then have Superman fly in to save them just in the nick of time. And they just had to make that stupid operator act surprised every god damn time. "Whoa, something is flying toward Morpheus at super speeds! Oh, it's Neo! Hooray!"
I had far fewer complaints about the plot than I did with their inability to create any tension in the combat scenes.
I have a theory. First, assume that the "battery" thing isn't true and the "humans as processing power" thing is. Or at least assume that -part- of the processing for the matrix is done in the human mind.
:)
So you have the original matrix, in which the human mind is both prisoner and prison, creating the very rules which fool it into thinking it is free. That fails, and the Architect is forced to introduce choice. Perhaps the anomaly is that he could not remove choice at the lowest levels while retaining it at the higher. Perhaps it is possible for the human brain to produce the -wrong- answer by choice. This could be the deeper implication of Morpheus' "free your mind" speech in the first movie, and the spoon bending -- by choosing to alter the output of the fundamental functions of the matrix, you can modify reality.
My original theory of how the powers exhibited by the freed came about was based more on chaos theory. Presumeably the computers only have a finite calculation of fundamental values such as Pi or Plank's Constant, and it was the error in these values that allowed "suprenatural" feats, but the human brain, being part of the real world, "knows" Pi infinitely and thus doesn't try to exploit the openings created by the error. Knowing it is a simulation allows one to exploit the errors.
Adding the new theory to this makes more sense. Perhaps it is possible for a human to "choose" to use the wrong value for Pi, etc. The human mind can't do this very easily (we have certain facts of physics ingrained in our minds from birth, and others are simply parts of our biology), which is why it takes training and is why some humans are better than others.
Or at least, that's what I think at the moment.
Well, notwithstanding the differences between Red Hat and their licenses versus Microsoft and their licenses, there is a point hidden in that comment.
:)
Frankly I think the concept of "whatever concessions they think the market will bear" is one that ultimately damages consumers and capitalism. Within that concept is the implication that the concessions are a -burden- that the consumer must carry if they want to use the product. "What the market will bear" implies finding that point at which the burden is just shy of actually driving your customers away. In other words, "they are entitled to abuse the customer as much as they want until the customer can't take anymore". While they are entitled to do that, it doesn't sound like a healthy philosophy to me. For one thing, by believing that companies are entitled to abuse them, consumers naturally expand the amount of abuse they are willing to take.
Take Microsoft for instance. They kept taking more and more concessions until the point where they were basically saying you are now only renting your software and it could be disabled at any time and in order to have the privilege of renting software you have to let them examine and change the contents of your own computer at will. Only then did large amounts of people start to say "hey, I was okay with how much you screwed us before, but now this is too much!"
The upside is that in a healthier market with more competition and choices, companies are unable to demand quite so much. The downside is that since everyone expects to have to bear as much as they can bear, all the companies in the market still end up putting some kind of burden on the customers.
Perhaps I'm just keying off the word "entitled", which sounds too much like something owed them instead of something that is merely legal to do. Maybe if the next phrase was "and the market is entitled to tell them to fuck off".
That's no troll you got there, my friend. That's called a principle.
To PingXao: Secret warrantless spying is bad. It doesn't matter if they are investigating a suspected terrorist cell, a suspected pot smoker, a suspected communist, or a suspected annoying spammer.
You can't allow the secret spying because who they're spying on is "bad". Remember the whole reason you don't want them spying on you is that even if you "have nothing to hide" right now, that can change as what is "bad" changes. What good does it do if they can just label you a spammer and spy on you? Today it's the other guy they don't like; tommorrow it could be you.
Open up your mind a bit and recognize that maybe if you didn't have BASIC available to you, you wouldn't have been programming, you wouldn't be who you are today, and you wouldn't be wasting your time on slashdot. Wait a minute...
I'm sorry, but I don't think you understood my point at all.
I wasn't saying that BASIC was worse than no programming language, I was saying it isn't a very good language and a better one would be... better. It's not BASIC vs nothing, it's BASIC vs anything else.
Honestly, if I said the current U.S. public school system was inadequate, would you think I was arguing that there should be no school system?
I stand corrected.
:)
Though notably OOo still isn't proprietary. And worrying about getting locked into OO format is just a waste of good worrying.
It's not the "Add random letters for no reason" rule. It the "I want to sound like I know latin" rule.
:)
Which the AC who posted above demonstrated.
If you're worried about them becoming too dependent on the "build and fix" software development model, then I think you've forgotten the original excitement you felt when you started hacking on a computer.
:)
What do you mean? Build and fix is the method I still use today when learning something new. Now it's just OpenGL or SDL or Perl instead of BASIC.
When I lose the excitement that comes from hacking on computers, I'll stop doing it.
You learn that computers are machines that you can tell what to do and they will do it. You learn that computers follow your instructions precisely even if your instructions don't make any sense. You learn that computers can do math and manipulate text.
:)
I learned that in the half hour it took my mother to type a BASIC program in from the book and run it so a little caterpiller walked across the screen. Now I need to learn -how- to control what the computer does and ensure that my instructions -do- make sense.
Almost no 9-year old is going to have the patience to write a program that goes beyond BASIC's capabilities.
Maybe, but when I was 10 I had already grown irritated with how limited the language was. I was in a vaccuum -- I knew no other programmers, I knew of no other languages. I only knew BASIC existed because it was the title of a manual that came with the computer. But I did see some commercial software titles. From that, I deduced that other languages must exist, and that BASIC must be the crappiest.
Trying to get a kid to learn first about concrete and rebar is a sure way to kill his interest.
Sure, but that's why I said C probably wasn't the best choice. I never learned Pascal, but that seems like a good middle ground. A scripting language that doesn't require you to know about pointers or worry too much about typing is probably good too.
While OpenOffice may lack commercial visibility, StarOffice is on Fry's and CompUSA's retail shelves all over America.
There are many things on the shelves of Fry's that you've never heard of. Being one box on a shelf of hundreds of titles isn't visibility.
But at least it is available, and that's a good thing.
It's constantly trying to trick me into using its proprietary format!
Proprietary doesn't mean "isn't readable by other programs", it means "cannot be read by other programs because the format is a secret".
OOo may not be portable (because other programs haven't implemented filters to read it, for various reasons not the least of which being OOo's market share), but it is not proprietary.
P.S. I hate how it does that too. If I wanted to save in OpenOffice format, I'd say so!
There's no such thing as a stupid question, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots.
OpenOffice has basically no visibility. If you don't read one of a few technical websites, where the hell are you going to hear about it? Educated people don't necessarily read NewsForge, and they aren't going to see advertising for OpenOffice in Time or whatever they are reading. Word of mouth works, but it is slow to start.
When OpenOffice comes preloaded on the PC Aunt Bettie and Uncle Lou buys from Dell (educated people buy from Dell, you know), or it gets advertising during Friends, then people will hear of it.
As to why people who have heard it aren't using it... Well, sorry, but it does -not- read all MS Office docs correctly. I blame OOo for that no more than I blame Mozilla for not supporting ActiveX, but it's still true. As long as people are still sending MSOffice files around and expecting you to be able to read them and/or modify them, then Open Office is going to have a big hurdle to overcome.
Sounds like a cool book. Wish I had that. All I had was the manual that came with the computer. It was pure shit. :)
Anyway, while it isn't -impossible- to become a good programmer after BASIC, I do agree with Dijkstra to an extent. I did spend about half of my time during my teens un-learning all the bad programming practices I'd adopted while using BASIC. Maybe if I'd had a better book, or, I don't know, known a single other programmer in the world that I could talk to it wouldn't have been so bad.
I was 9 when I started programming, and it was in BASIC on a TI-99, which I'm not certain but I think it was called CRAP-BASIC. Moving to a PC with GW-BASIC was a big upgrade. :)
:)
Anyway, I do not think that BASIC is a good learning language. BASIC encourages bad programming practices. Not C either, simply because it's got too many loaded guns you have to ensure aren't pointed at your foot. Something like Java, or Python, or whatever where you can learn programming concepts without having to also learn hardware concepts. Though eventually those should be learned as well, but not necessarily at age 9.
But yes, having GW-BASIC or whatever available is the only reason I learned to program. And to people suggesting Linux -- that works great for your or my children, but what about the children of parents like mine, who aren't programmers themselves and aren't going to be putting Linux on their computers any time soon?
Of course, we all must throw our common sense out of the window
Rumsfield: Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons on his own people in the 80s! He must be stopped!
People: What? You said that was just crop dusting! And where the hell did he get those weapons from? You sold him chemical weapons and covered for him when he used them on civilians!
Rumsfield: [softly] This isn't going well... Good thing we put all those subliminal messages in Froot Loops commercials.
Rumsfield: [loudly] Initiate Patriotic Doublethink!
People: Grrrrrrrrnnn... Oh my God! Saddam gassed his own people! He must be stopped!
a psychopath dictator who kills for export
Yeah, he is crazy, what with the international killing market doing so poorly right now. With so many countries running a surplus of killing, they have no need to import any. Though if you happen to be out at the moment, remember it's a buyers' market!