the hot new programming language

On 6 Jul 2015 06:44:59 GMT, Jasen Betts <jasen@xnet.co.nz> wrote:

On 2015-07-05, krw <krw@nowhere.com> wrote:
On 5 Jul 2015 08:51:20 GMT, Jasen Betts <jasen@xnet.co.nz> wrote:

On 2015-07-05, krw <krw@nowhere.com> wrote:
On 4 Jul 2015 21:47:03 GMT, Jasen Betts <jasen@xnet.co.nz> wrote:

The tax could be inverse on holding time, tapering to zero after, say,
5 years. That would change a lot.

such complexity is unneeded, inflation already does that, and faster.

Inflation does the opposite.

No. It does the opposite 0f the opposite, it devalues cash. In effect
increasing the cash value of inverstments.

But it does nothing to dampen the trading feedback loop. It doesn't
matter what the frequency is, the tax is the same.

it reduces the gain, once the gain is below 1.0 short term trading is
pointless.

No, it doesn't reduce the gain at all, at least any differential
between insta-tradez/speculation and long-term investments.

It's a tax that is proportional to the holding time.

only if you're holding cash.

No, investments are the same.

bank deposits count as "cash". invest in someting better performing.

Irrelevant.
 
On 07/07/15 11:53, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 7/6/2015 12:00 PM, Clifford Heath wrote:
On 07/07/15 09:07, Phil Hobbs wrote:
This was a philosophical commonplace up until our culture lost its mind,
sometime around 1955.
NB this has nothing to do with any particular religion--Plato and
Aristotle knew all about it.

Plato is identified (probably wrongly) as the source of this bizarre
material/spiritual dualism which extends all the way to more modern
Cartesian thinking. It's purest mysticism, and doesn't answer the main
question that it purports to: how can our lives have significance if we
are machines with no "truly" free will. It does not - and cannot -
answer this question because it just relegate "significance" to another
realm - which has the same problems. If that realm has no rules, it's
chaos, and if it does, how is it not a machine? It's turtles all the way
down, folk.

The populist rubbish in which Larkin suggests the two realms are joined
by quantum uncertainties (without breaking the idea of the physical
world as mechanistic) has never been demonstrated to be plausible, and
represents just another attempt to clutch at straws in the search for a
meaning beyond our individual finite lives. Why should the "spiritual"
realm be any more capable of carrying meaning than the one world we
*can* observe? Turtles again, folk.

You reckon it was around 1955 that people started to call bullshit on
this nonsense? Do you associate any particular event or person with that
event?

Brain structure and operation is quite unlike any existing logic
machine, but it's still a logic machine. The recent adoption by the IBM
Cortical Learning Center of Jeff Hawkins' (of Numenta) approach called
Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) will show that our brains are not
magical. The resources that IBM are bringing to bear on realising the
incredible recent achievements of small-scale HTM - like, they're now
starting to build wafer-scale devices consisting of eventually up to
half a dozen stacked full wafers - will tell the truth, and this
mystical nonsense will finally be seen for what it it - a failed attempt
to dream that humans have some significance beyond just the arrangement
of molecules that make us.

One life, then it ends. Make a difference while you can, don't spend it
preparing for a future life where eternity requires that no difference
can ever be made.

Clifford Heath.

So where's your actual argument?

No argument is actually needed until you present evidence of the
existence of this meta-magical woo. I'm not the one claiming it exists,
you are, and I'm just pointing out the psychological motivations for
such delusions. Prove it. Or are you limited to merely your "faith the
evidence of things unseen"?

Meantime, you completely missed the 'turtles' argument. It's blatant
illogic to think that a lack of significance in this world can be
remedied by saying that it all makes sense in the next. It's
intellectual crime of the first order to push the one thing that people
most want to a place that's eternally and by definition just beyond the
reach of observation.

You also missed that I pointed you to success in mimicing the actual
neurological structure, operation and behaviour of the brain, as it is
understood through the last decades of MRI work. This is not the failed
"neural net" technology which cannot learn complex material before the
heat death of the universe; it learns rapidly and it scales. Perhaps try
reading about the work I referred to before you discount what I said?

Clifford Heath.
 
On 4 Jul 2015 21:47:03 GMT, Jasen Betts <jasen@xnet.co.nz> wrote:

On 2015-07-04, John Larkin <jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:
On Fri, 03 Jul 2015 20:00:08 -0400, krw <krw@nowhere.com> wrote:

On Fri, 03 Jul 2015 09:04:03 -0700, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

On Fri, 3 Jul 2015 07:29:00 -0700 (PDT), Lasse Langwadt Christensen
langwadt@fonz.dk> wrote:

Den fredag den 3. juli 2015 kl. 12.52.52 UTC+2 skrev Martin Brown:
If you want to sell your soul for maximum financial gain then
destabilising the global stock trading systems with sophisticated high
frequency trading algorithms is definitely the way to go.

One guy in the UK in his parents bedroom can allegedly do this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-32415664

People seem to get upset if you are too good at it!


yeh, you have to be a member of "the money sucking parasite club" to
manipulate prices and steal money like that


-Lasse

A small tax on transactions, like 0.1%, would have a remarkable
damping effect. Maybe we can get that soon, after the next monster
worldwide crash.

Nah. They'll just bail out the culprets. As usual.

The problem with a small tax is that it won't stay small. How about a
1sec delay in reporting sale prices? Perhaps even dithering the
delay.

The tax could be inverse on holding time, tapering to zero after, say,
5 years. That would change a lot.

such complexity is unneeded, inflation already does that, and faster.

The point would be to heavily tax assets owned for a short time, like,
say, 300 milliseconds.

A fixed transaction tax has much the same effect.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing laser drivers and controllers

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com
 
On Sun, 05 Jul 2015 11:48:48 -0400, krw <krw@nowhere.com> wrote:

On 5 Jul 2015 08:51:20 GMT, Jasen Betts <jasen@xnet.co.nz> wrote:

On 2015-07-05, krw <krw@nowhere.com> wrote:
On 4 Jul 2015 21:47:03 GMT, Jasen Betts <jasen@xnet.co.nz> wrote:

The tax could be inverse on holding time, tapering to zero after, say,
5 years. That would change a lot.

such complexity is unneeded, inflation already does that, and faster.

Inflation does the opposite.

No. It does the opposite 0f the opposite, it devalues cash. In effect
increasing the cash value of inverstments.

But it does nothing to dampen the trading feedback loop. It doesn't
matter what the frequency is, the tax is the same.

It's a tax that is proportional to the holding time.

only if you're holding cash.

No, investments are the same. John's proposal was to dampen
oscillations caused by automated trading programs.

And the frenzy for quarterly returns, and IPOs.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing laser drivers and controllers

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com
 
On Sat, 04 Jul 2015 12:17:19 -0400, Phil Hobbs
<hobbs@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 7/4/2015 12:10 PM, rickman wrote:
On 7/4/2015 11:42 AM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 7/4/2015 9:32 AM, Tom Del Rosso wrote:
Martin Brown wrote:

Moore's law never made any claims about speed. It was specifically
about the number density of transistors on a given area of silicon.

I roll my eyes when I hear "Moore's law" and the "computing power of a
chip"
in the same sentence. He stated his law when a chip had 4 transistors.
Since you can't make a computer with 4, it makes no sense to speak of
the
computing power of a chip.

What we need is a breakthrough in 3D structures. In 2D we're limited
to a
few connections per transistor, and a few per gate. It's
connections-per-element that will make HAL possible.


There are all kinds of 3D structures. The problem is cooling them. For
instance, say you're stacking a processor and several planes of memory.
The processor generates a lot of heat, so it has to go next to the
heat sink, i.e. at the top of the stack. but then all its I/O has to go
through the memory chips, so you lose all your area to through-silicon
vias (TSVs). Same problem as very tall buildings.

Aren't the human brain and body 3-D structures? I wonder how they can
do what they do?

You should have studied biology. ;)



If you put it the other way up, you have to throttle back the CPU to the
point that you don't gain anything. Computer speed has been a tradeoff
between clock rate and cooling since the 1980s. I remember going to a
talk by a system architect in about 1988, where he put up a plot of
delay vs. power consumption per gate. It dropped steeply at first, of
course but then gradually rose again at high powers, because the chips
had to be spaced out in order to cool them, which added time-of-flight
delay.

That assumes a constant in process technology which we all know advances
steadily at least if not at the same exponential rates it has been
achieving.

No, it doesn't. There are fundamental physical limits involved, like
the size of atoms and the conductivity of pure copper. Just the random
variations in the local density of dopant atoms causes huge
threshold-voltage shifts. Process improvements can help lots of things,
but you can't make smaller atoms.

And the brain hardly has the same speed-of-light limits as fast silicon.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

A human, with a wet-chemistry brain, using millisecond logic gates,
can whup a teraflop-CPU robot at tennis.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing laser drivers and controllers

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com
 
On Sat, 04 Jul 2015 11:31:54 -0400, Phil Hobbs
<pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 7/4/2015 11:05 AM, John Larkin wrote:
On 4 Jul 2015 09:58:10 GMT, Jasen Betts <jasen@xnet.co.nz> wrote:

On 2015-07-03, Phil Hobbs <pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

I agree, but that's a separate issue. Outlawing C strings, for
instance, outlaws good code as well as bad. Those of us who know that,
for instance, strncpy() doesn't append a null if it runs out of space,
know enough to unconditionally put the null in there. (Yes, it's a
stupid design, but alternatives are available. The auto industry's
standards are actually pretty useful.)

it's using the wrong function strncopy is for writting to null padded
records, where maximal strings are unterminated.

if you want a length limit and a nul at the end use sprintf

sprintf(dest,"%.*s",len-1,src);

Powerbasic:

A$ = B$ + C$

is safe, or, if you need it,

A$ = LEFT$(B$, 16)

works too. And there are tons of other crashproof string functions.




C++ has crashproof strings too: std::string, and they have semantics
like that too. They just aren't stdio. The null-termination thing is
a minor wart. There are a few things like that strncpy() fail and the
fact that you have to remember to free() things created with strdup(),
but the output functions of stdio are easy to use.

The parsing functions, especially the scanf() family, are a mess, but as
I say I have my own stdio-compatible parsing library that doesn't share
the same problems.

I just use the PARSE$ function.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing laser drivers and controllers

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com
 
On 7/6/2015 6:52 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 04 Jul 2015 12:17:19 -0400, Phil Hobbs
hobbs@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 7/4/2015 12:10 PM, rickman wrote:
On 7/4/2015 11:42 AM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 7/4/2015 9:32 AM, Tom Del Rosso wrote:
Martin Brown wrote:

Moore's law never made any claims about speed. It was specifically
about the number density of transistors on a given area of silicon.

I roll my eyes when I hear "Moore's law" and the "computing power of a
chip"
in the same sentence. He stated his law when a chip had 4 transistors.
Since you can't make a computer with 4, it makes no sense to speak of
the
computing power of a chip.

What we need is a breakthrough in 3D structures. In 2D we're limited
to a
few connections per transistor, and a few per gate. It's
connections-per-element that will make HAL possible.


There are all kinds of 3D structures. The problem is cooling them. For
instance, say you're stacking a processor and several planes of memory.
The processor generates a lot of heat, so it has to go next to the
heat sink, i.e. at the top of the stack. but then all its I/O has to go
through the memory chips, so you lose all your area to through-silicon
vias (TSVs). Same problem as very tall buildings.

Aren't the human brain and body 3-D structures? I wonder how they can
do what they do?

You should have studied biology. ;)



If you put it the other way up, you have to throttle back the CPU to the
point that you don't gain anything. Computer speed has been a tradeoff
between clock rate and cooling since the 1980s. I remember going to a
talk by a system architect in about 1988, where he put up a plot of
delay vs. power consumption per gate. It dropped steeply at first, of
course but then gradually rose again at high powers, because the chips
had to be spaced out in order to cool them, which added time-of-flight
delay.

That assumes a constant in process technology which we all know advances
steadily at least if not at the same exponential rates it has been
achieving.

No, it doesn't. There are fundamental physical limits involved, like
the size of atoms and the conductivity of pure copper. Just the random
variations in the local density of dopant atoms causes huge
threshold-voltage shifts. Process improvements can help lots of things,
but you can't make smaller atoms.

And the brain hardly has the same speed-of-light limits as fast silicon.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

A human, with a wet-chemistry brain, using millisecond logic gates,
can whup a teraflop-CPU robot at tennis.

The whole singularity thing is a red herring. It's a symptom of the
decline of thinking in our age that most folks assume without proof that
'modern science' has proven that the human mind is just the pure
physical operation of the human brain under physical causation and
nothing else.

That argument isn't modern at all, and in fact was debunked quite
conclusively about 400 BC. We can't think without our brains, but we
don't altogether think *with* them. If pure physical causation (what
Aristotle called 'efficient causation') is all that's going on when our
brains change from one state to the next, there's no room for *logical*
causation at all. A madman's brain is just as good as Einstein's, on
that view, and if (per impossibile) the state of a brain happened to
correspond to one step of a logical argument, there would be no way to
even notice that the next step went wrong, let alone correct it.

This was a philosophical commonplace up until our culture lost its mind,
sometime around 1955.

NB this has nothing to do with any particular religion--Plato and
Aristotle knew all about it.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs


--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
 
On 7/6/2015 6:54 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 04 Jul 2015 11:31:54 -0400, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 7/4/2015 11:05 AM, John Larkin wrote:
On 4 Jul 2015 09:58:10 GMT, Jasen Betts <jasen@xnet.co.nz> wrote:

On 2015-07-03, Phil Hobbs <pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

I agree, but that's a separate issue. Outlawing C strings, for
instance, outlaws good code as well as bad. Those of us who know that,
for instance, strncpy() doesn't append a null if it runs out of space,
know enough to unconditionally put the null in there. (Yes, it's a
stupid design, but alternatives are available. The auto industry's
standards are actually pretty useful.)

it's using the wrong function strncopy is for writting to null padded
records, where maximal strings are unterminated.

if you want a length limit and a nul at the end use sprintf

sprintf(dest,"%.*s",len-1,src);

Powerbasic:

A$ = B$ + C$

is safe, or, if you need it,

A$ = LEFT$(B$, 16)

works too. And there are tons of other crashproof string functions.




C++ has crashproof strings too: std::string, and they have semantics
like that too. They just aren't stdio. The null-termination thing is
a minor wart. There are a few things like that strncpy() fail and the
fact that you have to remember to free() things created with strdup(),
but the output functions of stdio are easy to use.

The parsing functions, especially the scanf() family, are a mess, but as
I say I have my own stdio-compatible parsing library that doesn't share
the same problems.

I just use the PARSE$ function.


How does it work?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
 
On Mon, 06 Jul 2015 19:07:12 -0400, Phil Hobbs
<pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 7/6/2015 6:52 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 04 Jul 2015 12:17:19 -0400, Phil Hobbs
hobbs@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 7/4/2015 12:10 PM, rickman wrote:
On 7/4/2015 11:42 AM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 7/4/2015 9:32 AM, Tom Del Rosso wrote:
Martin Brown wrote:

Moore's law never made any claims about speed. It was specifically
about the number density of transistors on a given area of silicon.

I roll my eyes when I hear "Moore's law" and the "computing power of a
chip"
in the same sentence. He stated his law when a chip had 4 transistors.
Since you can't make a computer with 4, it makes no sense to speak of
the
computing power of a chip.

What we need is a breakthrough in 3D structures. In 2D we're limited
to a
few connections per transistor, and a few per gate. It's
connections-per-element that will make HAL possible.


There are all kinds of 3D structures. The problem is cooling them. For
instance, say you're stacking a processor and several planes of memory.
The processor generates a lot of heat, so it has to go next to the
heat sink, i.e. at the top of the stack. but then all its I/O has to go
through the memory chips, so you lose all your area to through-silicon
vias (TSVs). Same problem as very tall buildings.

Aren't the human brain and body 3-D structures? I wonder how they can
do what they do?

You should have studied biology. ;)



If you put it the other way up, you have to throttle back the CPU to the
point that you don't gain anything. Computer speed has been a tradeoff
between clock rate and cooling since the 1980s. I remember going to a
talk by a system architect in about 1988, where he put up a plot of
delay vs. power consumption per gate. It dropped steeply at first, of
course but then gradually rose again at high powers, because the chips
had to be spaced out in order to cool them, which added time-of-flight
delay.

That assumes a constant in process technology which we all know advances
steadily at least if not at the same exponential rates it has been
achieving.

No, it doesn't. There are fundamental physical limits involved, like
the size of atoms and the conductivity of pure copper. Just the random
variations in the local density of dopant atoms causes huge
threshold-voltage shifts. Process improvements can help lots of things,
but you can't make smaller atoms.

And the brain hardly has the same speed-of-light limits as fast silicon.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

A human, with a wet-chemistry brain, using millisecond logic gates,
can whup a teraflop-CPU robot at tennis.

The whole singularity thing is a red herring. It's a symptom of the
decline of thinking in our age that most folks assume without proof that
'modern science' has proven that the human mind is just the pure
physical operation of the human brain under physical causation and
nothing else.

That argument isn't modern at all, and in fact was debunked quite
conclusively about 400 BC. We can't think without our brains, but we
don't altogether think *with* them. If pure physical causation (what
Aristotle called 'efficient causation') is all that's going on when our
brains change from one state to the next, there's no room for *logical*
causation at all. A madman's brain is just as good as Einstein's, on
that view, and if (per impossibile) the state of a brain happened to
correspond to one step of a logical argument, there would be no way to
even notice that the next step went wrong, let alone correct it.

This was a philosophical commonplace up until our culture lost its mind,
sometime around 1955.

NB this has nothing to do with any particular religion--Plato and
Aristotle knew all about it.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

The model of a brain as a bunch of threshold logic gates (the Neural
Network approach) is silly. Prop delay alone makes the idea absurd.
Single-celled critters can do pretty cool adaptive stuff.

The brain must be quantum mechanical at the cellular level, with all
the mysticism and noncausal behavior of quantum mechanics.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing laser drivers and controllers

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com
 
On Mon, 06 Jul 2015 19:07:57 -0400, Phil Hobbs
<pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 7/6/2015 6:54 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 04 Jul 2015 11:31:54 -0400, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 7/4/2015 11:05 AM, John Larkin wrote:
On 4 Jul 2015 09:58:10 GMT, Jasen Betts <jasen@xnet.co.nz> wrote:

On 2015-07-03, Phil Hobbs <pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

I agree, but that's a separate issue. Outlawing C strings, for
instance, outlaws good code as well as bad. Those of us who know that,
for instance, strncpy() doesn't append a null if it runs out of space,
know enough to unconditionally put the null in there. (Yes, it's a
stupid design, but alternatives are available. The auto industry's
standards are actually pretty useful.)

it's using the wrong function strncopy is for writting to null padded
records, where maximal strings are unterminated.

if you want a length limit and a nul at the end use sprintf

sprintf(dest,"%.*s",len-1,src);

Powerbasic:

A$ = B$ + C$

is safe, or, if you need it,

A$ = LEFT$(B$, 16)

works too. And there are tons of other crashproof string functions.




C++ has crashproof strings too: std::string, and they have semantics
like that too. They just aren't stdio. The null-termination thing is
a minor wart. There are a few things like that strncpy() fail and the
fact that you have to remember to free() things created with strdup(),
but the output functions of stdio are easy to use.

The parsing functions, especially the scanf() family, are a mess, but as
I say I have my own stdio-compatible parsing library that doesn't share
the same problems.

I just use the PARSE$ function.


How does it work?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

PowerBasic actually has two:

The PARSE statement uses user-defined delimiters and an input string
and extracts the delimited substings into a string array. The
PARSECOUNT function predicts how many will be found.

Example

a$ = "Trevor, Bob, Bruce, Dan, Simon, Jenny"
DIM b$(1 TO PARSECOUNT(a$))
PARSE a$, b$()
ARRAY SORT b$()

Result
b$(1) = "Bob"
b$(2) = "Bruce"
b$(3) = "Dan"
b$(4) = "Jenny"
b$(5) = "Simon"
b$(6) = "Trevor"


The PARSE$ function is similar but, given the delimiters and N, it
plucks out the Nth delimited string from the input string.

Example
a$ = PARSE$("one,two,three", 2) ' returns "two"
a$ = PARSE$("one;two,three", 2) ' returns "three"
a$ = PARSE$("one",2) ' returns ""

Comma is the default delimiter, but you can name other, multiple
delimiters.



And if you can't remember the gory details, just type PARSE and hit F1
for help.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing laser drivers and controllers

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com
 
On 7/6/2015 7:33 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 06 Jul 2015 19:07:57 -0400, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 7/6/2015 6:54 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 04 Jul 2015 11:31:54 -0400, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 7/4/2015 11:05 AM, John Larkin wrote:
On 4 Jul 2015 09:58:10 GMT, Jasen Betts <jasen@xnet.co.nz> wrote:

On 2015-07-03, Phil Hobbs <pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

I agree, but that's a separate issue. Outlawing C strings, for
instance, outlaws good code as well as bad. Those of us who know that,
for instance, strncpy() doesn't append a null if it runs out of space,
know enough to unconditionally put the null in there. (Yes, it's a
stupid design, but alternatives are available. The auto industry's
standards are actually pretty useful.)

it's using the wrong function strncopy is for writting to null padded
records, where maximal strings are unterminated.

if you want a length limit and a nul at the end use sprintf

sprintf(dest,"%.*s",len-1,src);

Powerbasic:

A$ = B$ + C$

is safe, or, if you need it,

A$ = LEFT$(B$, 16)

works too. And there are tons of other crashproof string functions.




C++ has crashproof strings too: std::string, and they have semantics
like that too. They just aren't stdio. The null-termination thing is
a minor wart. There are a few things like that strncpy() fail and the
fact that you have to remember to free() things created with strdup(),
but the output functions of stdio are easy to use.

The parsing functions, especially the scanf() family, are a mess, but as
I say I have my own stdio-compatible parsing library that doesn't share
the same problems.

I just use the PARSE$ function.


How does it work?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

PowerBasic actually has two:

The PARSE statement uses user-defined delimiters and an input string
and extracts the delimited substings into a string array. The
PARSECOUNT function predicts how many will be found.

Example

a$ = "Trevor, Bob, Bruce, Dan, Simon, Jenny"
DIM b$(1 TO PARSECOUNT(a$))
PARSE a$, b$()
ARRAY SORT b$()

Result
b$(1) = "Bob"
b$(2) = "Bruce"
b$(3) = "Dan"
b$(4) = "Jenny"
b$(5) = "Simon"
b$(6) = "Trevor"


The PARSE$ function is similar but, given the delimiters and N, it
plucks out the Nth delimited string from the input string.

Example
a$ = PARSE$("one,two,three", 2) ' returns "two"
a$ = PARSE$("one;two,three", 2) ' returns "three"
a$ = PARSE$("one",2) ' returns ""

Comma is the default delimiter, but you can name other, multiple
delimiters.



And if you can't remember the gory details, just type PARSE and hit F1
for help.

That's sort of like Rexx, except with the usual BASIC dollars-sign
ugliness that the punters know and love. ;)

My parsing library has things like

unsigned ParseNDoublesOnOneLine( char **pc, double *af, unsigned int N);

which does what it sounds like, and

SkipCommentLines(char ** pc);

for comfort features. I've used it for reading parameters files for a
decade or more. Works great.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
 
On 7/6/2015 12:00 PM, Clifford Heath wrote:
On 07/07/15 09:07, Phil Hobbs wrote:
This was a philosophical commonplace up until our culture lost its mind,
sometime around 1955.
NB this has nothing to do with any particular religion--Plato and
Aristotle knew all about it.

Plato is identified (probably wrongly) as the source of this bizarre
material/spiritual dualism which extends all the way to more modern
Cartesian thinking. It's purest mysticism, and doesn't answer the main
question that it purports to: how can our lives have significance if we
are machines with no "truly" free will. It does not - and cannot -
answer this question because it just relegate "significance" to another
realm - which has the same problems. If that realm has no rules, it's
chaos, and if it does, how is it not a machine? It's turtles all the way
down, folk.

The populist rubbish in which Larkin suggests the two realms are joined
by quantum uncertainties (without breaking the idea of the physical
world as mechanistic) has never been demonstrated to be plausible, and
represents just another attempt to clutch at straws in the search for a
meaning beyond our individual finite lives. Why should the "spiritual"
realm be any more capable of carrying meaning than the one world we
*can* observe? Turtles again, folk.

You reckon it was around 1955 that people started to call bullshit on
this nonsense? Do you associate any particular event or person with that
event?

Brain structure and operation is quite unlike any existing logic
machine, but it's still a logic machine. The recent adoption by the IBM
Cortical Learning Center of Jeff Hawkins' (of Numenta) approach called
Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) will show that our brains are not
magical. The resources that IBM are bringing to bear on realising the
incredible recent achievements of small-scale HTM - like, they're now
starting to build wafer-scale devices consisting of eventually up to
half a dozen stacked full wafers - will tell the truth, and this
mystical nonsense will finally be seen for what it it - a failed attempt
to dream that humans have some significance beyond just the arrangement
of molecules that make us.

One life, then it ends. Make a difference while you can, don't spend it
preparing for a future life where eternity requires that no difference
can ever be made.

Clifford Heath.

So where's your actual argument?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
 
On 08/07/15 00:21, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 07/06/2015 02:35 PM, Clifford Heath wrote:
No argument is actually needed until you present evidence of the
existence of this meta-magical woo.

What magic? I'm merely pointing out (along with the whole Western
philosophical tradition) that simple mechanistic materialism is
self-contradictory, because it logically entails the consequence that
logical thought cannot exist.

You define logical thought as requiring logical causation, in other
words, as "why" the thought occurred, the reason (logic) behind the thought.

Has it ever occurred to you that thought might be *reasonable* in and of
itself without needing such an a-priori assumption that it originates
elsewhere, somewhere other than "in the machine"?

You define a kind of thought that cannot exist in a machine (because it
originates outside a machine) and then you "prove" that such thought
cannot exist in the machine. It's begging the question.

The madman's brain has the same random noise in it as Einstein's does,
but only Einstein has the appropriately trained resonant filters to
choose noise that fits training that others recognise as "reasonable".

> No one has ever refuted that AFAICT.

It's not possible to refute a tautological argument, and that's what
this is.

I'm not the one claiming it exists,
you are, and I'm just pointing out the psychological motivations for
such delusions. Prove it. Or are you limited to merely your "faith the
evidence of things unseen"?

I'd say that ignoring a straightforward logical antinomy in your
position in order to support your prior commitment to a strictly
mechanical universe is the faith position, not mine. I think that
there's only one kind of truth.

No. You're claiming that for thought to be "logical", it has to
originate outside the brain - you presume that such an "outside" exists.
That's the "magic" I was referring to. It's the same error that has
existed since Plato tried to divide form and substance.

Clifford Heath.
 
On 06/07/2015 23:42, John Larkin wrote:
On 4 Jul 2015 21:47:03 GMT, Jasen Betts <jasen@xnet.co.nz> wrote:

On 2015-07-04, John Larkin <jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:
On Fri, 03 Jul 2015 20:00:08 -0400, krw <krw@nowhere.com> wrote:

On Fri, 03 Jul 2015 09:04:03 -0700, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

On Fri, 3 Jul 2015 07:29:00 -0700 (PDT), Lasse Langwadt Christensen
langwadt@fonz.dk> wrote:

Den fredag den 3. juli 2015 kl. 12.52.52 UTC+2 skrev Martin Brown:
If you want to sell your soul for maximum financial gain then
destabilising the global stock trading systems with sophisticated high
frequency trading algorithms is definitely the way to go.

One guy in the UK in his parents bedroom can allegedly do this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-32415664

People seem to get upset if you are too good at it!


yeh, you have to be a member of "the money sucking parasite club" to
manipulate prices and steal money like that


-Lasse

A small tax on transactions, like 0.1%, would have a remarkable
damping effect. Maybe we can get that soon, after the next monster
worldwide crash.

Nah. They'll just bail out the culprets. As usual.

The problem with a small tax is that it won't stay small. How about a
1sec delay in reporting sale prices? Perhaps even dithering the
delay.

They will just rig the market like they did for Forex and Libor.

Think about it! The informed inner circle could then make bets on the
market already knowing what is really about to happen - pretty much like
the most astonishingly successful hedge fund managers do!
The tax could be inverse on holding time, tapering to zero after, say,
5 years. That would change a lot.

such complexity is unneeded, inflation already does that, and faster.

The point would be to heavily tax assets owned for a short time, like,
say, 300 milliseconds.

That is an aeon in the present era of high frequency trading. They are
trading at rates up to MHz. It is funny when the algorithms cock up eg.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19214294

The practitioners claim it increases liquidity but in practice they all
quit the market if their parasitism cannot yield an instant profit.
A fixed transaction tax has much the same effect.

I am inclined to agree that anyone holding shares in a company for less
than a day should incur punitive transaction taxes.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown
 
On 2015-07-06, krw <krw@nowhere.com> wrote:
On 6 Jul 2015 06:44:59 GMT, Jasen Betts <jasen@xnet.co.nz> wrote:

On 2015-07-05, krw <krw@nowhere.com> wrote:
On 5 Jul 2015 08:51:20 GMT, Jasen Betts <jasen@xnet.co.nz> wrote:

On 2015-07-05, krw <krw@nowhere.com> wrote:
On 4 Jul 2015 21:47:03 GMT, Jasen Betts <jasen@xnet.co.nz> wrote:

The tax could be inverse on holding time, tapering to zero after, say,
5 years. That would change a lot.

such complexity is unneeded, inflation already does that, and faster.

Inflation does the opposite.

No. It does the opposite 0f the opposite, it devalues cash. In effect
increasing the cash value of inverstments.

But it does nothing to dampen the trading feedback loop. It doesn't
matter what the frequency is, the tax is the same.

it reduces the gain, once the gain is below 1.0 short term trading is
pointless.

No, it doesn't reduce the gain at all, at least any differential
between insta-tradez/speculation and long-term investments.

It's a tax that is proportional to the holding time.

only if you're holding cash.

No, investments are the same.

bank deposits count as "cash". invest in someting better performing.

Irrelevant.

I can make neither head nor tail of your claims, they appeart to be
based on tautologies, and thus I choose to leave this matter unresoved.

--
umop apisdn
 
On Mon, 06 Jul 2015 10:46:47 -0400 JW <none@dev.null> wrote in Message id:
<j55lpa9rotieoqvaumft2s4v95nmv5talk@4ax.com>:

On Sat, 4 Jul 2015 13:16:53 -0400 M Philbrook <jamie_ka1lpa@charter.net
wrote in Message id:
MPG.3001df0e874eff80989c63@news.eternal-september.org>:

In article <usqfpa517onoc09j0ff9jimdq6s7t3cviu@4ax.com>,
jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com says...

On Sat, 04 Jul 2015 06:33:25 -0400, DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno
DLU1@DecadentLinuxUser.org> wrote:

On Sat, 04 Jul 2015 09:19:35 +0100, Martin Brown
|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> Gave us:

The singularity is coming - beware. We are already letting computers
design new bigger chips that no individual human can fully comprehend.


Slow light technology will usher in a simple 4 bit optical computer
that puts them all to shame.

The 4004 was slow enough!

I got some!

One day I may need to melt them down for the gold :)

Jamie

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-INTEL-C4004-White-Golden-Plate-Extremly-Rare-Ceramic-Processor-Cpu-Good-/231608504079?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item35ecf14f0f

Unbelievable!

Crap. I meant to post this link.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-C4004-CPU-Ceramic-Gold-Zebra-Grey-Traces-Worlds-First-Microprocessor-1975-/121675383209?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item1c546b01a9

Sold for $1,533.87.
 
On Mon, 06 Jul 2015 15:42:45 -0700, the renowned John Larkin
<jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

The point would be to heavily tax assets owned for a short time, like,
say, 300 milliseconds.

A fixed transaction tax has much the same effect.

Hong Kong has a 'stamp duty' on share transactions- a fairly small 10
basis point (0.1%) transaction tax, and it does discourage HFT. Here
is the argument for scrapping it:

http://www.scmp.com/business/banking-finance/article/1333961/hong-kong-should-scrap-its-stamp-duty-share-trading


--sp


--
Best regards,
Spehro Pefhany
Amazon link for AoE 3rd Edition: http://tinyurl.com/ntrpwu8
Microchip link for 2015 Masters in Phoenix: http://tinyurl.com/l7g2k48
 
On Tue, 07 Jul 2015 08:06:13 -0400, Spehro Pefhany
<speffSNIP@interlogDOTyou.knowwhat> wrote:

On Mon, 06 Jul 2015 15:42:45 -0700, the renowned John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:


The point would be to heavily tax assets owned for a short time, like,
say, 300 milliseconds.

A fixed transaction tax has much the same effect.

Hong Kong has a 'stamp duty' on share transactions- a fairly small 10
basis point (0.1%) transaction tax, and it does discourage HFT. Here
is the argument for scrapping it:

http://www.scmp.com/business/banking-finance/article/1333961/hong-kong-should-scrap-its-stamp-duty-share-trading


--sp

It's incredible that a market velocity of 44% per month is considered
low.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing laser drivers and controllers

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com
 
On 07/06/2015 02:35 PM, Clifford Heath wrote:
On 07/07/15 11:53, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 7/6/2015 12:00 PM, Clifford Heath wrote:
On 07/07/15 09:07, Phil Hobbs wrote:
This was a philosophical commonplace up until our culture lost its
mind,
sometime around 1955.
NB this has nothing to do with any particular religion--Plato and
Aristotle knew all about it.

Plato is identified (probably wrongly) as the source of this bizarre
material/spiritual dualism which extends all the way to more modern
Cartesian thinking. It's purest mysticism, and doesn't answer the main
question that it purports to: how can our lives have significance if we
are machines with no "truly" free will. It does not - and cannot -
answer this question because it just relegate "significance" to another
realm - which has the same problems. If that realm has no rules, it's
chaos, and if it does, how is it not a machine? It's turtles all the way
down, folk.

The populist rubbish in which Larkin suggests the two realms are joined
by quantum uncertainties (without breaking the idea of the physical
world as mechanistic) has never been demonstrated to be plausible, and
represents just another attempt to clutch at straws in the search for a
meaning beyond our individual finite lives. Why should the "spiritual"
realm be any more capable of carrying meaning than the one world we
*can* observe? Turtles again, folk.

You reckon it was around 1955 that people started to call bullshit on
this nonsense? Do you associate any particular event or person with that
event?

Brain structure and operation is quite unlike any existing logic
machine, but it's still a logic machine. The recent adoption by the IBM
Cortical Learning Center of Jeff Hawkins' (of Numenta) approach called
Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) will show that our brains are not
magical. The resources that IBM are bringing to bear on realising the
incredible recent achievements of small-scale HTM - like, they're now
starting to build wafer-scale devices consisting of eventually up to
half a dozen stacked full wafers - will tell the truth, and this
mystical nonsense will finally be seen for what it it - a failed attempt
to dream that humans have some significance beyond just the arrangement
of molecules that make us.

One life, then it ends. Make a difference while you can, don't spend it
preparing for a future life where eternity requires that no difference
can ever be made.

Clifford Heath.

So where's your actual argument?

No argument is actually needed until you present evidence of the
existence of this meta-magical woo.

What magic? I'm merely pointing out (along with the whole Western
philosophical tradition) that simple mechanistic materialism is
self-contradictory, because it logically entails the consequence that
logical thought cannot exist.

No one has ever refuted that AFAICT.

If you thought I was defending some specific model of how the mind
coexists with the brain, you're mistaken. There is clearly a deep
connection between the two, but it equally clearly isn't that the mind
is a program running on the brain's hardware.

I'm not the one claiming it exists,
you are, and I'm just pointing out the psychological motivations for
such delusions. Prove it. Or are you limited to merely your "faith the
evidence of things unseen"?

I'd say that ignoring a straightforward logical antinomy in your
position in order to support your prior commitment to a strictly
mechanical universe is the faith position, not mine. I think that
there's only one kind of truth.

Cheers

Phil "former mechanist" Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
 
Den tirsdag den 7. juli 2015 kl. 13.34.06 UTC+2 skrev Martin Brown:
On 06/07/2015 23:42, John Larkin wrote:
On 4 Jul 2015 21:47:03 GMT, Jasen Betts <jasen@xnet.co.nz> wrote:

On 2015-07-04, John Larkin <jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:
On Fri, 03 Jul 2015 20:00:08 -0400, krw <krw@nowhere.com> wrote:

On Fri, 03 Jul 2015 09:04:03 -0700, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

On Fri, 3 Jul 2015 07:29:00 -0700 (PDT), Lasse Langwadt Christensen
langwadt@fonz.dk> wrote:

Den fredag den 3. juli 2015 kl. 12.52.52 UTC+2 skrev Martin Brown:
If you want to sell your soul for maximum financial gain then
destabilising the global stock trading systems with sophisticated high
frequency trading algorithms is definitely the way to go.

One guy in the UK in his parents bedroom can allegedly do this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-32415664

People seem to get upset if you are too good at it!


yeh, you have to be a member of "the money sucking parasite club" to
manipulate prices and steal money like that


-Lasse

A small tax on transactions, like 0.1%, would have a remarkable
damping effect. Maybe we can get that soon, after the next monster
worldwide crash.

Nah. They'll just bail out the culprets. As usual.

The problem with a small tax is that it won't stay small. How about a
1sec delay in reporting sale prices? Perhaps even dithering the
delay.

They will just rig the market like they did for Forex and Libor.

Think about it! The informed inner circle could then make bets on the
market already knowing what is really about to happen - pretty much like
the most astonishingly successful hedge fund managers do!

The tax could be inverse on holding time, tapering to zero after, say,
5 years. That would change a lot.

such complexity is unneeded, inflation already does that, and faster.

The point would be to heavily tax assets owned for a short time, like,
say, 300 milliseconds.

That is an aeon in the present era of high frequency trading. They are
trading at rates up to MHz. It is funny when the algorithms cock up eg.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19214294

The practitioners claim it increases liquidity but in practice they all
quit the market if their parasitism cannot yield an instant profit.

A fixed transaction tax has much the same effect.

I am inclined to agree that anyone holding shares in a company for less
than a day should incur punitive transaction taxes.

I saw Toyota has just come up with a new class of shares aimed at financing longer term development programs, you can't sell them only swap to common shares for a short period each year, and for the first 5 years the dividend will increase for each year held

-Lasse
 

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