Not just revenue, but 'products'. Maker, to me, means someone who makes projects, not necessarily things for other people to consume.

In this case, I probably choose a bad name for the report. What name would better describe the community of people who are creating tools/products and also trying to make a living from it? I call those people makers as well, but I agree that this could be misleading.

I'd say maybe indie developers.

'Maker', to me, means the culture that started with O'Reilly's Make magazine, Maker Faires, and the subsequent culture that grew around it, which concentrated mainly on making physical things, rather than software.

I'll update the landing page to clarify who the target audience of this survey is. Thank you for your help.

Probably I'm in a bubble where "maker" has a slightly different meaning :/

And what about those who are making tutorials, graphics and digital art, or music? Now I'm starting to worry that there is another name for this group of people as well :D

I'd say all the terms are wrong: you've covered maker, hacker also has nothing to do with this, as well as indie, which means being alternative, outside the mainstream. I believe you're looking for "Independent Developer"

I changed the title of my post to try to make it a bit more clear who the target audience is.

I agree that the real meaning of the word "hacker" has almost nothing to do with independent software or digital product development, but my experience is that many people started to use it to identify those who are using their knowledge to "hack" together digital stuff. Not to mention hackathons where everyone is a "hacker".

Probably there should be more series like Mr. Robot so people would get a better picture of what real hackers are doing :D

The variety of memory used for computers is amazing, and I find it a lot more interesting than the history of the CPU. CPU architecture is very diverse, but physically tends to be just different configurations of a few physical elements - relay, valve or transistor.

Memory had cathode ray tubes, mercury delay lines, dekatron and selectron tubes, core store, core rope, magnetic drums, tapes and discs, magnetostrictive delay lines, magneto-optical discs, and probably many more I don't know about, not counting the write-once formats like punched card and tape.

Random anecdote: a teacher implied at one point some project used a satellite link as RAM because they had no other choice, I don't know more but it's curious nonetheless.

One of my favorite backwaters of technology is the work they did in the 50's and 60's with "cryotrons", which were essentially like superconducting transistors that switched by one superconductor temporarily destroying another's superconductivity. They apparently even made a working memory module out of them and provided it to the NSA before the transistor came along and changed everything.

It can run on steam if you like; it just needs one rotating shaft as input power. I did have the first version hooked up to a model steam engine, shown at the end of the video here: http://www.srimech.com/turing-machine-and-maker-faire.html

The infinite tape requirement is a bit difficult to fulfill, but that's true of the silicon implementations as well.

I wouldn't call that a mistake on your part; it's over-use of capitalization in the headline.

The problem is that it's still normal:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_case#Headings_and_public...

>As regards publication titles it is, however, a common typographic practice among both British and U.S. publishers to capitalise significant words (and in the United States, this is often applied to headings, too). This family of typographic conventions is usually called title case. For example, R. M. Ritter's Oxford Manual of Style (2002) suggests capitalising "the first word and all nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs, but generally not articles, conjunctions and short prepositions"

It is normal in the US. In the UK title case has been obsolete for decades. Apparently USA Today and Washington Post already switched[1]. It makes US newspapers look very old fashioned to me, well along with the rest of their retro styling.

[1] http://gawker.com/reader-poll-big-letters-in-headlines-or-li...

I used to work in a company which had "a culture that enforces a library-like environment on an open floor plan" as indicated (it wasn't a written rule, just the way the culture worked). I found it extremely stressful and depressing, so wasn't working well, and ended up quitting as soon as I could.

I'm now in an open-floor office in which people talk a lot and interrupt me when it's necessary, and I'm a lot happier and more productive.

"Now maybe you're different than me" is probably the most important phrase in there.

I quit the co-working place I was working out of and went to work in the public library instead. It was free and their wifi was more reliable.

Note to folks thinking of using their local library: Set up some sort of VPN or other proxy in advance.

My local library has assorted filtering in place. Last I checked, though, it was just port 80, so I was able to run a Web proxy on my remote server on another port in order to get past it.

(A VPN is a good idea for any use of public Wifi in an event.)

I have my SCAD files on github. It seems wrong to me to have a build result (the .STL file) under version control though.

That's mine. It's a physical implementation of a 5-symbol, 2-state Turing machine which was shown to be universal by Wolfram. If it were perfectly reliable (it isn't) and had an infinite tape (it doesn't) then it would be universal. Going to the extremes of low symbols and states makes it extremely inefficient in terms of code density, if you can apply that term to a Turing machine. The shortest program I've been able to write for it, doing unary subtraction of 3 and 2 would take about 60 hours and need a tape three times longer than I have.

Thanks for the correction - I doubted if such a relatively simple device could be universal (see comment below), but it's fascinating to learn that it is! :-)

Still, I am not sure how big other physical computers are (do any even exist)? I think it's cool :-)

Is there a compiler for it? :-)

It calculates a cellular automata called Rule 110 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110) which is very difficult to code for. I've seen a paper which shows a method for coding any Turing machine into rule 110, but most of it is beyond my mathematical ability at the moment. So far as I know nothing resembling a normal compiler exists for it.

It's actually much simpler to make a mechanical implementation of rule 110 directly, but Turing machines are more widely recognised.