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Here's more from Business 2.0 I like the "already peaked" bit.

Just a quick note about #s 84-85 -- this isn't as much of an obvious bad idea as it might seem. In most of Asia, the swastika is more closely associated with Buddhists than with Nazis -- the Chinese Buddhists got it from the Indian ones, who used it in accord with a long tradition by which the swastika is an Indo-Aryan symbol for the sun, particularly in the context of religious worship.

So they probably weren't making light of the Holocaust so much as offering products that were received in a slightly different way than intended...

for those of you who can't be bothered to RTFA.

michael, you think we're psychic or what? Try using a link maybe when you talk about SCO's position.

Nobody cares about anything except maybe SCO and the RIAA (at No 82, on the same page).

SCO is in the 81-90 section? Number 83. Seems to be a little low on the list... but then I would've put it at #1.

Unfortunately you can't read the article anymore without paying, but they make a pretty convincing case in the Sept. issue, showing how some models predict an increase in the # of computer-related jobs (they claim the tech sector will soon return, if it hasn't already, as the fastest growing sector in the American economy). Couple this growth with baby boomers retiring, and you get a very tight labor market.

You see, though some of us might not see it everyday (including me), apparently a large percentage of today's programs are baby boomers who are nearing retirement. Starting in a few years there will be large percentages of the programmer population leaving the job pool. In recognition of this, many large companies are already returning to handsome bonuses and good pay.

Having said that, I do suddenly realize that there is a difference in terminology. I shold not talk about the "number of programmers" here, but rather the "number of IT jobs." That is, include project managers, MIS directors, and all kinds of people who are technically oriented, may do some programming or other admin, but are not strictly speaking programmers. So also keep that in mind with this article--how broadly do they use the term "programmer?"

If you're interested, parallel article from business 2.0, from a month or so ago.

Would you bid on a piece of Google?

No

Tech bubbles...seen one, seen them all...can you say 'about to burst?' Buy Google and watch it tank within 6 months...

What's interesting is it sounds like napster is coming back this thursday...

CNN article here

Also check out napsters web site. They have a number of amusing animations here.

Quite the surprise. I'm interested in what they have to offer and how well it works out for all.

Companies could possibly use something like this under certain circumstances (consulting firms that already "hotel" employees) to avoid having people lug around laptops -- give 'em a PDA with a CF card and set them loose. The home "hotel" could have plain old dummy terminals that would just require the user to plug in the CF card to start rolling.

This is server-based instead of putting everything (including the OS) on CF, but it's along similar lines.

- Greg

Systems Analyst - approx 60% growth

DBA - approx 65% growth

Network/System Admin - approx 80% growth

Software engineers - between 85-100%

So hang in there.

This page provides interesting info on who makes how much money on each US$1 download song. (secure site, but apparently you don't have to pay.

I should start a download site myself.

Also, offshoring is actually helping the industry prepare for the potentially devastating effect of the demographics shift. Without offshoring to hedge the job demand that will make 1999 look like a small ripple, a glut in workforce contributes to a shrinking economy and potentially depression-like atmosphere. (Major economists have been predicting one at around the 2020-2030 time frame). Beef up your debugging skills: companies may require them very soon, and in a bad way.

I read this in the September 2003 Issue of Business 2.0 Magazine :

Forget those grim unemployment numbers. Demographic forces are about to put a squeeze on the labor supply that will make it feel like 1999 all over again. - The Coming Job Boom

Business 2.0 magazine is running an interesting article called The Coming Job Boom. Basically, because the baby boomers are getting ready to start retiring, and there just aren't enough workers to replace them, there is impending skills shortage similar that what occured in 1999/2000 just around the corner. According to the article, the article states that this will occur even if the US GDP growth rate is only 3% annually. (Latest reading is 3.1% BTW). Overseas outsourcing, importing workers, and people delaying retirement will not be enough to prevent this crunch. It claims the biggest shortages will be in tech, and has all kinds of data to back up these claims. We should start seeing this around 2005.

This is not the first article I've seen that makes this claim. Its just that this kind of article is not in vogue in the current environment. You have to dig through all kinds of doom and gloom about jobs lost overseas to find them.

There was a recent article on Business2 that talked about jobs going overseas, and how there are not enough skilled IT workers overseas now to fill the coming job-boom that will be caused by all the baby-boomers retiring..... just something to think about.

"Forget those grim unemployment numbers. Demographic forces are about to put a squeeze on the labor supply that will make it feel like 1999 all over again"

sounds like crap, yes, but I couldnt see it. They say since the baby boomers are retiring, taking a huge chunk of (older, smarter) people out of the workforce, workers will be much more valuable. Anyone who knows anything will be able to charge for it. In 2010, at least...

check the article
out for yourself

This article suggests that the threat may be significant in the short term, but in the longer term, when the baby boomers retire that there's not enough high tech workers in India to cover the gap that's going to be created by that event.

I hope that you're able to actually get the article and read it. Sometimes I can get it, and other times, they ask you to subscribe. It's an excellent article, and worth the read if you can get to it. If you have trouble getting to it, try going to CNN Money and going to the link at the bottom of the page. This seems to work for me.

Conductive ink on bendable material including printable, disposable antennas seem to be right around the corner. Here's a pdf from Rochester with all the chemistry that goes into making the substrates. And an article from Business 2.0 on Plastic transistors (Google cache) and how they will change UPS tracking and WalMart's forever.

The most interesting aspect for me is that these sensors (or even on-chip flash) will be powered and read in the presence of an RF field, like how most RFID tags work. We might one day have tons of passive sensors 'waiting' to be read with an active energy source.

or something like that.

Oh wait, eBay wouldn't sell stolen items?

You'll find the summary of this Business 2.0's story on Smart Mobs. And on my blog, you can find two other stories about RFIDs, Bye-Bye Bar Codes? and The Eerie Possibilities of RFID Tags.

You definitely should've mentioned Scandinavia being way ahead of US technologically. Those robot vacuum cleaners are available in all major stores here. Nordea used to be world's largest e-bank for several years in a row (and has been pioneering in real life Internet payment systems). I really haven't used cash money at all during the past 2 years. Cell phone network coverage is 100% here. Public transportation system just works (and applies cool technology, such as smart cards, SMS tickets, natural gas buses, automatic route planning, ultra-high speed electrical trains, freely available bikes, GSM coverage in the subway). Someone already mentioned CPUs in washing machines, but tell you what; we have CPUs even in the kitchen sink. We've had an official citizen's electronic ID (smart card, certificate) for a few years. Theres's tunnel for cross-country skiing enthusiasts.
We're planning to build more nuclear power.

Yes, Americans have bigger houses, cheaper gas, longer distance to closest neighbour and stuff, but that these things can hardly be considered as technological advances.

I completety agree with you on the better quality of life in most parts of Western Europe.

Lets be honest. Apple is for content creators, Tivo is for media consumers. Yeah there is some commonality but...

A little Googling turned up this article in December's Business 2.0 about counterfeiting and terrorism... interesting for the background into several counterfeiting technologies.

I have seen the IT industry compared repeatedly to the railroad industry. For instance, see the Business 2.0 article "Is the Information Revolution Dead?" Why the railroad? I think it is because the railroad did go and quadruple after the stock crash. We could just as easily compare IT to the Telegraph. Why don't we?

Laying the development of the telegraph against the development of the information technology, year by year, Western Unions monopoly entry in 1871 would correlate to 2018 in the information technology industry. From that point on, the telegraph operator had been reduced to a minimum paying, button pushing job. The crest of the operator field, when they were considered owners of high tech knowledge and skill, was probably around 1856 or so, when Western Union began buying up smaller outfits and standardizing the technology. This would correspond to 2003.

If we want to look at the railroad, and predict 400% increase in the "golden period," then I think we also must be prepared to look at the telegraph, and predict stagnation under monopolies such as IBM or Microsoft

The only thing Sun has is Java and IBM's kicking their butt there.

And evidently you've missed out on the shocking revelation that those self-checkout lanes have been something of a disaster, as they facilitate theft (gee, who'd have thought?).

I started thinking, Why is the price $0.99 versus $1.00? Then I expanded on that and started thinking about how Apple come up with their pricing scheme. What is the optimal pricing? Was $0.99 selected by guess and by golly? What is the right price? Does anyone know how the $0.99 price was actually selected? My guess is that it was a ... guess.

That guy that wants to put in a 40 hour week and dosent build / hone there skills dosent belong in this business period.

So here's a married man, with two kids, trips to little league and ballet practice, active in the community, likes to travel, and volunteers at his church. This guy doesn't belong in the business?

And then we have a 21-year-old, fresh out of college, no kids, no relationship, lives on taco bell and mountain dew, works 70 hours a week on code. He does belong in this business?

Are you familiar with the term "drag coefficient" with a slightly revised definition? An alternative definition is: "having a life." The article I just linked to was written in 1999, but it's nice to see the attitude is alive and well in 2003.

Then, though I'm not a specialist, you CAN run some sort of internet service WITHOUT an ISP, right? From what I understood, my airport base station allows me to "PPP dial-in", which means I can connect to my home network through any telephone line, without an ISP. There probably are a lot of modems (all of them?) around that support dial-in and line pickup: you have a (slow) computer-to-computer connection with no ISP involved. Add SSH and crypto, and you have a "fairly secure" connection (unless, of course, the feds decide to wiretap phone connections as well, which is probably what is happening with projects such as Carnivore/TIA...)

OR, you could try moving to Europe, but do it quick before our own Beloved Leaders® figure out how they can use this brand new Cisco hardware.

"On another note", I wonder if all this is really intented to fight terrorists, criminals and druglords... Read this (article says that some narco kingpin in Colombia managed, in 1998, to deploy a wireless computer network that ranged "across the Caribbean and the upper half of South America.", and that could be accessed to with laptops, even in planes and boats) to see what I mean: evildoers (maybe not Al-Qaeda and such, but who knows?) probably use alternate methods for their most important communications. So why do they bother wiretapping ISP's? Wouldn't it be wiser to try and bust these alternate networks (if there still are)?

How many people in IT have heard BS like this time after time year after year...?

Its bad enough I have to hear this bullshit at work, 'forecasts' made by a buzzspeaking fuckstick that never ring true, but *please* don't let this garbage take over Slashdot...It may not be much, but this place is all I have left...*sniff*

Seriously, if you want to read garbage like this pick up a Information Week Red Herring or Business 2.0 then look at the people that are reading them.

Dont want to read it anymore do you?

The forces of evil in Colombia have shown they are at the cutting edge of technology--and has happened in previous occasions.

By David Orenstein, December 2001 Issue

Earlier this fall, 68-year-old Madeleine Schaal volunteered to make medical history by allowing Jacques Marescaux and Michel Gagner to remove her gall bladder. What's so unusual about that? Only that she lay on an operating table in her hometown of Strasbourg, France, while the two doctors performing the surgery were in New York.

For a good picture of how this would apply to the business world, check out this article from Business 2.0 about agent-based supply chain solutions. Pretty interesting stuff if you've got a large, sophisticated network to manage.

WHY DIDN'T ANYONE KNOW ABOUT THEM?
Actually, they started off with quite a bit of industry buzz, having launched at Esther Dyson's PC Forum last year. In the beginning (check the articles) they were getting almost as much press as Boingo, which started about the same time. The difference, however, is that Boingo had Sky Dayton (of Earthlink fame) plus tens of millions of dollars to use for marketing. Joltage, in contrast, was a bunch of smart and experienced, but very underfunded, wireless geeks.

DID THEIR STUFF WORK?
Yeah, it actually worked really well. The free hotspot software could be downloaded from all the usual sites (or their website) and turned any PC with an access point into a part of the network. The back-end system was very slick from both the hotspot and user ends, and seemed to work without a hitch. When people used my hotspot, the next month I got a credit through PayPal.

DID THEY HAVE A PROBLEM WITH LEGAL BANDWIDTH RESALE?
Actually, no. They always insisted (and were pretty serious about) having any participating hotspot use legitimate, re-saleable bandwidth. From the very beginning they had a deal with Covad, and eventually they added support from Atlas, Eureka and other broadband providers who offered Joltage hotspot providers fully Joltage-usable DSL for under $50/month. I think they were talking to the other big guys about getting permission for residential users to use bandwidth for Joltage, but I guess those things take time...and they ran out.

WAS THIS THING DOOMED TO FAILURE?
Anyone's guess, but I don't think so...unless you're of the opinion that any pay-for-WiFi solution will fail. Cometa is launching with the goal of having a hotspot less than a ten minute drive from most people. In contrast, there are over 15,000 existing WLANS in Manhattan alone (as an example). Even a miniscule percentage of those (mostly commercial, and thus usually re-saleable) hotspots participating at no cost to themselves, would have resulted in by far the best WiFi footprint in town.

HOW CAN ANYTHING RELYING ON MOMS AND POPS WORK?
Good question, and that's where they probably fell down. While I think that eventually there will be enough critical mass for a truly organic network, in the near term there just wasn't enough of an overlap between the early adopters with access points, and people with enough entrepreneurial spirit to try to set up a commercial hotspot...even if it was really easy, which the Joltage solution was.

SO, WAS IT ALL MOMS AND POPS?
No, and that ultimately could have been Joltage's salvation...maybe. By the end they were concentrating on supporting WISPS who had a real business incentive to set up hotspots, and some of those were really professional. Check out Urban Hotspots, SpotWIFI, WiFi Spain, and others.

WERE THEY DOTCOM DREAMERS?
Maybe, but at least they had viable track records, a lot of skills, and dedication. Andrew Weinreich, the founder, was the guy behind SixDegrees, and several of the tech staff came out of Scient and other good shops. The board/angels were big names in the industry, but I guess just didn't have the cash to keep it going. One thing's for sure, they ran a lean shop. The CEO didn't take a salary and the whole staff worked almost for free, in the hopes that they would be paid back on a financing. But for a low-budget shop, they treated everyone well. They even went out classily, paying up the last charges they owed me as a provider, and actually refunding me the unused part of my monthly subscriber fee! Good guys.

SO WHAT HAPPENED?
I think this was a combination of (a) a market where no one at all is generating revenues, let alone making money, yet and therefore needs (b) venture capital, which I gather isn't too available these days. Combine this with Joltage's early focus on a grass-roots model of what you might call 'enlightened economic self-interest' in a market which just wasn't ready for it yet, and you end up with a noble but ultimately unsuccessful business. Ah well. I wish all those guys luck; while they were around they ran a really decent company.

as described in this article this is not unlike livephish nearly-instant Concert selling website.

Rafe Needleman discovered an interesting young Swedish company which is
printing really cheap chips. Here are some excerpts of his article,
"Coming Soon: Printed Computers."

The company, Cypak , has technology to mount
a very small microprocessor, which it created, on paper (or inside a credit
card), as well as a technique to print sensors, switches, and very short-range
antennae on the same paper, using special conductive inks.

Here is one possible application designed for drug trials.

Drug trials need data about how and when subjects consume the drugs
being tested. In this application, a pill pack registers when individual pills
are popped out of their plastic bubbles; it then can beep and ask the
user a question like, "Are you feeling better today? Press Yes or No."
(The answer buttons are on the pack itself.) When the patient visits the doctor,
the package is placed on a Cypak reader and the data is downloaded to the
physician's computer.

Certus, a drug-testing company, has just begun testing Cypak's
technology. Compared with logging and "compliance" products that use more
traditional computer parts and sensors, the Cypak technology is less expensive.
The chips embedded in the paper drug packages cost only a buck or two, and the
scanners that read the data from the used packages are inexpensive as well --
less than $10, Cypak CEO Jakob Ehrensvärd says. Also, the data is more reliable
than the logs that patients might keep.

Rafe Needleman is quite optimistic about Cypak's future.

It's clear that more and more items, like shipping boxes, eventually
will be able to monitor themselves, and that an increasing number of devices
will support some kind of authentication feature. Cypak-like technology will
play a part in this.

Cypak's technology currently costs a dollar or more per unit. That's
pretty cheap for a computer, but still too expensive for everyday products.
Still, there are solid industry-specific applications for this technology --
enough, most likely, to make a success out of Cypak.

More information about Cypaq's intelligent pharmaceutical packaging can be
found at their Electronic
Compliance Packaging webpage.

In its prospectus, Buy.com unveils history's most elegant business model: "We sell a substantial portion of our products at very low prices. As a result, we have extremely low and sometimes negative gross margins on our product sales."

In its prospectus, Buy.com unveils history's most elegant business model: "We sell a substantial portion of our products at very low prices. As a result, we have extremely low and sometimes negative gross margins on our product sales."

Business 2.0 had a feature on RFID tags just under a year ago. The feature talks about how companies are planning on using the tags primarily as a means of better inventory tracking internally, and how other devices like laundry machines will be able to make use of the tags in order to determine, for instance, what types of fabric are being inserted. Most of the tags planned for use in commodity items are "passive tags" which don't broadcast their identity.

A sidebar talks about how Walmart plans on being an early adopter.

Privacy concerns? Pish. Do you REALLY think that people out there care enough about whether or not your clothes are a dacron/polyester blend to go around scanning you? I'm totally for the idea of allowing products to answer a "What are you?" question from devices like store checkouts, laundry machines, etc. Saves me the time from "asking" and "answering" the question myself.

Business 2.0 had a feature on RFID tags just under a year ago. The feature talks about how companies are planning on using the tags primarily as a means of better inventory tracking internally, and how other devices like laundry machines will be able to make use of the tags in order to determine, for instance, what types of fabric are being inserted. Most of the tags planned for use in commodity items are "passive tags" which don't broadcast their identity.

A sidebar talks about how Walmart plans on being an early adopter.

Privacy concerns? Pish. Do you REALLY think that people out there care enough about whether or not your clothes are a dacron/polyester blend to go around scanning you? I'm totally for the idea of allowing products to answer a "What are you?" question from devices like store checkouts, laundry machines, etc. Saves me the time from "asking" and "answering" the question myself.

I totally agree -- what's missing in virtual worlds right now is the ability for players to travel between them. Obviously, Stormtroopers shouldn't be invading the Sims Online, but there should be a virtual "border crossing" where you can step into the guise of a new character, appropriate to the realm you're traveling to, even exchanging coin of one realm for coin of another if both realms can agree on an exchange rate. For megaMMORPGs like EverQuest, this is something they want to avoid, since lock-in is an important part of their business strategy.

Avoid? They are very happy to charge you $50 to change to another server. In fact, it's a revenue stream that's made them a million dollars.

Ideally, individual users should be able to design their own virtual worlds and host them in the Metaverse

This is what Neverwinter Nights is doing. You can gate between worlds. However, no revenue is involved.

Actually there's a good discussion of this here.

It seems that Microsoft is quite encouraging of the Mono effort:

However the motives for this seem unclear... probably with all the bad press that MS has recieved lately they are frightened of appearing ani-competitive.

I guess that the big risk for Mono is that it exists in the legal grey area between the ECMA C# and the proprietary .NET. In this twilight area they are very much in Microsoft's shadow and at their legal whim.

Before anyone stars foaming at the mouth about use of the Dow name (and even the look of their corporate page, which I didn't see the specific mention of) take a look at the following links:

http://www.business2.com/articles/web/0,1653,9452, 00.html

http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/92-1292.ZS .html

http://www.chillingeffects.org/protest/

http://overlawyered.com/topics/silicon.html

Oh, but no! Now he's hocking fancy watches in an attempt to sell ... cars!

Here.

So, given the demographic that seems to like "texting", isn't this like lotteries ie. a tax on stupid people? It seems to me to be only interesting to people for which email is some sort of "novelty".

Non Sequitur \Non seq"ui*tur\ [L., it does not follow]
n 1: a reply that has no relevance to what preceded it

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"HD is a retail shop, not a technology shop. ...As far as the head retailers were concerned, IT was nothing more than a 'cost center.'"

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why Home Depot will never be as big as Wal-Mart. Home Depot thinks of IT as a hole that the company is constantly pouring money into; Wal-Mart relentlessly uses IT to further its goals of getting the lowest cost from suppliers. (The definitive article on Wal-Mart and technology.)

Home Depot will never be a leader in the industry if it continues to view IT as an expense rather than an investment. Your post was an excellent example of how retailers tend to forget that technology, when used properly, can not only form the core of the business, but strengthen existing product lines. Home Depot's executive staff most likely looks at Wal-Mart and ask "How do they do that?" The answer lies in Wal-Mart's aggressive stance on technology adoption.

In fact, Wal-Mart and Home Depot are even compared here, where Wal-Mart's CIO is asked whether or not it will make a difference if competitors use RFID tags. (RFID tags are Wal-Mart's next big frontier.) "The challenge is to keep innovating faster than the competition can copy us," he says.

If what you're saying really is true of Home Depot, expect Wal-Mart to keep swallowing Home Depot's business. Wal-Mart has never labeled itself as "just a retail shop," as you label Home Depot. Home Depot doesn't have the competitive advantage, nor does it sound like they know where to spend to get that advantage. I expect that Wal-mart will remain a leader for some time to come in the retail space. This quote sums up what you're seeing nicely:

"'I think Wal-Mart views technology in a different light than most retailers,' says Peter Abell, retail research director at AMR Research. 'It's not only an integral part of the company, but it's where the leaders of the company can come from.'"

This is the direction in which Home Depot must go in order to become truly successful at lowering costs and increasing productivity. Unfortunately for Home Depot, Wal-Mart is already there, and getting further and further ahead...

The new homeland security department will require a massive global network. But transoceanic fiber is easily cut and the $800 million TDRS replenishment program with three satellites doesn't have the bandwidth. Intercepted SIGINT data is reportedly transmitted to Earth on a 24 GHz downlink using narrow-beam antennas. But the frequency swaths allocated for links are less than consumers can get on cable television. More bandwidth is needed.

One might speculate that a secret optical/IR satellite network downlinked in Hawaii might be developed. The European Space Agency, not to be outdone, says they're thinking of building miniaturised optical systems that fit onto a microchip. These optical networks might use optical CDMA which encodes each pulse,across a segment of wavelengths.

Wal-Mart considers anyone who works 28 hours per week a full time employee

There are over 250,000 uninsured workers employed by Wal-Mart, one of the largest groups without health care in the United States.

Acording to this, there are 1.28 million Walmart employees.

Anyone who is full-time at WalMart can signup for health coverage, so those 250,000 must be part-time workers. Hmm, a retailer with only 20% of their workforce made up of part-time workers? That certainly doesn't sound too bad to me.

Yup, here is a good recent article from Business 2.0 on how terrorists use counterfeit $$$ to aid their cause. It is titled, "Forging Terror How rapid advances in scanning, printing, and other technologies have made counterfeiting a potent new weapon of holy war."