A prof i had in grad school (from Oxford, of course) claimed that the Cambridge students had a parlor/drinking game during Turing's time which consisted of... having a male and female in a separate room, and passing notes into the room with questions designed to determine which of the two was the male and which the female.
It's interesting to examine the lives of the 3 pioneers of theorical computing: Kurt Godel, Emil Post and Alan Turing.
Turing developed a model for computers (the Turing machine). He developed the proof of the Halting problem. That is, given a program and a input to that program, you cannot generally determine if the program will terminate execution.
As you're probably already aware, Turing was arrested and imprisoned for homosexuality. After he was released, he undertook a multi-month project to extract cyanide from the pits of apples. After he had sufficient quantities, he drank it and died (aged early 40s).
Kurt Godel was responsible for developing the mathematical proof of undecidability. Given a system with the capabilities of "simple" arithmetic, he showed that there are propositions (i.e. statements) you can make within the system which can be neither proven nor disproven. This is equivalent to Turing's "halting problem".
Godel was paranoid, and believed that people were trying to poison him. He only ate what his wife cooked. When she died, he stopped eating and starved himself to death.
Emil Post was an American mathematician (Columbia Ph.D., i think) who developed a proof of undecidability many years before Godel. In addition, he developed a model for computation which is similar to Turing's machine (it uses a pre-loaded queue to both hold the input string, and to hold the results of intermediate computations). He developed a proof of undeciability based upon his machine model (the "Post Correspondence Problem").
Post was a manic-depressive for most of his life. He lost an arm in an accident as a child. He had a hard time holding jobs after receiving his Ph.D. due to his depression. In the 50's he was treated for depression using Electro-Shock therapy (for interested readers... for a real shock go look up the 1948 or 1949 Nobel prize for Medicine:-). After one of his "treatments", he suffered a heart attack and died.
So, in conclusion, it's rather interesting to reflect upon the fact that the foundations of computer science comes from three individuals who suffered clear psychological problems. (And they wonder why nerds work in the dark:-)
I have maintained for years that Gates will be villified in the future for having stifled computing with his tactics. He's rich, but only because, in large part, he was in the right place at the right time. Don't get me wrong, he worked hard create his empire. However, he's a robber baron, not a technologist. If any of 6+ things hadn't happened, he'd only be another multi-millionaire (IBM didn't negotiate its license agreement to be exclusive, Jobs didn't allow others to build the Apple platform, etc.)
Your point about offshoring is interesting and probably very important. Because Gates has control of the US and its desktops, the fastest way to break his control is to move development out of this country. There is certainly movement to break the monoculture here (witness behavior in our own government), but the fastest way to do it is to operate outside of the control of our laws and his marketing spin.
Slashdot Mirror
A prof i had in grad school (from Oxford, of course) claimed that the Cambridge students had a parlor/drinking game during Turing's time which consisted of ... having a male and female in a separate room, and passing notes into the room with questions designed to determine which of the two was the male and which the female.
Turing developed a model for computers (the Turing machine). He developed the proof of the Halting problem. That is, given a program and a input to that program, you cannot generally determine if the program will terminate execution.
As you're probably already aware, Turing was arrested and imprisoned for homosexuality. After he was released, he undertook a multi-month project to extract cyanide from the pits of apples. After he had sufficient quantities, he drank it and died (aged early 40s).
Kurt Godel was responsible for developing the mathematical proof of undecidability. Given a system with the capabilities of "simple" arithmetic, he showed that there are propositions (i.e. statements) you can make within the system which can be neither proven nor disproven. This is equivalent to Turing's "halting problem".
Godel was paranoid, and believed that people were trying to poison him. He only ate what his wife cooked. When she died, he stopped eating and starved himself to death.
Emil Post was an American mathematician (Columbia Ph.D., i think) who developed a proof of undecidability many years before Godel. In addition, he developed a model for computation which is similar to Turing's machine (it uses a pre-loaded queue to both hold the input string, and to hold the results of intermediate computations). He developed a proof of undeciability based upon his machine model (the "Post Correspondence Problem").
Post was a manic-depressive for most of his life. He lost an arm in an accident as a child. He had a hard time holding jobs after receiving his Ph.D. due to his depression. In the 50's he was treated for depression using Electro-Shock therapy (for interested readers... for a real shock go look up the 1948 or 1949 Nobel prize for Medicine :-). After one of his "treatments", he suffered a heart attack and died.
So, in conclusion, it's rather interesting to reflect upon the fact that the foundations of computer science comes from three individuals who suffered clear psychological problems. (And they wonder why nerds work in the dark :-)
Your point about offshoring is interesting and probably very important. Because Gates has control of the US and its desktops, the fastest way to break his control is to move development out of this country. There is certainly movement to break the monoculture here (witness behavior in our own government), but the fastest way to do it is to operate outside of the control of our laws and his marketing spin.
Now i'm certain he'll be villified.